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I've been on SSB for some 3 years (with some breaks when I had enough of npm). Once you're onboarded it works like a charm: exchange of data between peers works

I've been on SSB for some 3 years (with some breaks when I had enough of npm). Once you're onboarded it works like a charm: exchange of data between peers works swiftly and efficiently, to the extend that you can even use it for realtime chat the way IRC works. The community is colourful and friendly, and the signal to noise ratio is high. I've learned a lot about fermentation and growing mushrooms and living off-grid while reading posts on SSB. My biggest frustration has been that all usable clients are written in nodejs. I recently took a seven months break to cool off from rage over npm (and yarn, for that matter), but now I'm back again. Onboarding can be tricky because there are no central servers — it's 100% p2p — but I guess it's easier these days than it was in the beginning. And if you know somebody who is already onboard it shouldn't pose a problem at all. A better site to start with is probably https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/

z0mbie42 7y ago
Thank you! The lack of multi-device support isn't too much cumbersome? Also, do you not fear, due to the gossip protocol, that your private messages may be stored forever by peers and one day, your private key leaks, and all your conversations are publicly exposed?
- kseistrup 7y ago
  It would be sweet if we had multi-device support, but it doesn't bother me too much: All my IDs are mutually following each other, and I have my “hops” set to 3, so I see virtually the same timeline on each device. What can be frustrating, though, is that notifications and private messages to a given ID are only visible from the device with that ID. I am not overly concerned about leaks of my private key, although the risk is certainly there. One think many people have to get used to, though, is that the log is append-only: once you've published a message and is no way to delete or undo the message — is it there for “all eternity”. The positive side is that you're more conscious about what you post and why, because there is no way of taking it back.
- dduane 7y ago
  Not as much as I fear this from Facebook
- eb3c90 7y ago
  One of my wishes is that it would support a hardware token like the yubikey for storing the private key, to make leaks less likely (although it might not be super performant).

z0mbie42 7y ago

Thank you! The lack of multi-device support isn't too much cumbersome? Also, do you not fear, due to the gossip protocol, that your private messages may be stored forever by peers and one day, your private key leaks, and all your conversations are publicly exposed?

kseistrup 7y ago
It would be sweet if we had multi-device support, but it doesn't bother me too much: All my IDs are mutually following each other, and I have my “hops” set to 3, so I see virtually the same timeline on each device. What can be frustrating, though, is that notifications and private messages to a given ID are only visible from the device with that ID. I am not overly concerned about leaks of my private key, although the risk is certainly there. One think many people have to get used to, though, is that the log is append-only: once you've published a message and is no way to delete or undo the message — is it there for “all eternity”. The positive side is that you're more conscious about what you post and why, because there is no way of taking it back.
dduane 7y ago
Not as much as I fear this from Facebook
eb3c90 7y ago
One of my wishes is that it would support a hardware token like the yubikey for storing the private key, to make leaks less likely (although it might not be super performant).