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Comment by TimJRobinson | Hacker News Reader

Huge fan of Scuttlebutt and think it could (should) be the future of the social internet. I recently quit my job to write about and work on decentralized tech full time with scuttlebutt being my primary focus. I've written about why I think it's so important here: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/03/what-is-scuttlebutt/

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> Decentralized social networks have been tried before, the two most well known are Diaspora and Mastadon. With these services there [is still moderation]... Scuttlebutt is how I believe the social web should function in the future.

Even the Hackernews community which lean towards decentralization more so than the general public would still argue there is value in moderation.

Decentralized doesn't mean unmoderated. Since it is decentralized there is no "global feed" and there is a lot of great discussion about moderation tools and processes on secure-scuttlebutt. Particularly, check the section of follow-graph: https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#follow-gr...

I'm the author of one of the clients (https://patchfox.org). All clients support blocking people, both visibly with a public message, or privately with an encrypted message only readable by you (which causes your client to block that feed). In Patchfox, I've added other forms of moderation which boils down to self-moderation and selective listening. You can mute or blur feeds, keywords, and channels. Even though this is client-side only, it provides some tools to keep a safe space around how you interact with the larger world. It doesn't affect replication and doesn't carry on into other clients (as I'm still trying to find the best patterns and practices for this).

In the end I'm seeing lots of comment here by people who probably don't actually use SSB. It is a quite fun and lovable place.

Moderation feeds can be published into decentralized networks just like the content messages themselves. Then readers can choose their set of preferred moderators (author/item killfile-stream publishers) to apply clientside.

For sure, any network without any moderation is going to quickly fall into chaos. I'm working on a post on decentralized personalized moderation at the moment which should be out in the next day or two :)

I think this right here is a killer app for decentralized social networks and is something I've been thinking about a lot. I'm looking forward to your post!

It's possible (and important) that moderation can be implemented in a decentralized community. Aether[0] has a really interesting take on it where it is essentially democratic.

[0] https://getaether.net/

> there is value in moderation

Of course. Everything in moderation, including moderation.

Without an identity provider scheme that doesn't allow creating unlimited free identities, the spam, scam, and troll problem gets out of hand.

China has a strong identity provider scheme. They tie everyone's phone to their government issued citizen ID.

It was a good read, thank you!

I also really appreciated your other post[0]. This is what allowed me to understand that SSB is not really a social network but more a p2p protocol to exchange messages where applications can be built on.

[0] https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/03/a-decentralized-plat...

What other decentralized tech did you find promising (e.g. Dat, AP Fediverse, Solid, IPFS)?

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