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Warning: A bit of a ramble about my experience trying to use SSB for my "application". I really enjoy SSB, conceptually. In reality I've had a fair amount of t

Warning: A bit of a ramble about my experience trying to use SSB for my "application". I really enjoy SSB, conceptually. In reality I've had a fair amount of trouble getting started writing an application in it. Notably, I have difficulty knowing what patterns are good or bad in SSB. As far as I can tell SSB utilizes effectively a commit ledger for user data. This is fine, but some of the specifics of my application mean that I feel the need to create many sub-identities so that revisions to a piece of content don't bloat the parent identity when syncing to mobile/etc. Strangely, I've got a fair bit of experience in these types of designs - as I've written my own distributed storage for the application in question in many different forms (various ledgers, CRDTs, etc). Yet my issue is that I'm unsure what is considered "bad form" for the SSB crowd. I don't want to write an application for SSB but written in some form of SSB anti-pattern. Combine this with SSB not having well established[1] implementations in my language of choice (Rust), and all around as much as I want to use SSB as the foundation for my app the protocol was just a bit of a heavy burden currently. I care what the SSB community thinks because I don't want to just "use" the SSB protocol, I want my application to join the SSB hubs/networks and share data. I've looked a lot into this, but I still struggle to conceive exactly how my application can fit into the SSB ecosystem, if at all. This isn't a complaint post, just sharing some personal thoughts and my confusing history with SSB. Love the project, and I especially love the design of gossip, person to person based applications in this day and age. [1]: Rust does have a handful of SSB libs, but I think I'd be looking for a full, batteries included library. Everything I've seen is quite low level SSB.

moojd 6y ago
I've been tinkering with SSB recently as well and I'm also finding it difficult to figure out how to interface with the wider SSB network in the 'correct' way. The communication protocol is well documented and easy to implement if you have libsodium available. Building applications on it should be straight forward considering it's just an eventually consistent event store. I am having a few issues though. The 'api' that patchwork and other parts of the network use on top of the communication protocol seems to not be documented at all outside of the 'post' message. I'm not sure if it's not documented or if I just haven't discovered it yet. For example, I'm having to dive in to the code to see how a 'vote' message is formatted. I'm not sure how all of the various clients are staying compatible. None of the message formats seem to versioned in anyway either. I'm also not sure what are the 'correct' ways to introduce my own message types. Should I use a vendor prefix in the type or something? Is it bad form to pollute the network with your own message types that other clients can't understand? I've just started diving in to all this so maybe I just haven't gotten deep enough yet. I wrote a little toy SSB implementation last weekend to learn the protocol. I've really enjoyed playing around with it so far but I'm still not sure if it's the right fit for the applications I want to build yet.

moojd 6y ago

I've been tinkering with SSB recently as well and I'm also finding it difficult to figure out how to interface with the wider SSB network in the 'correct' way. The communication protocol is well documented and easy to implement if you have libsodium available. Building applications on it should be straight forward considering it's just an eventually consistent event store. I am having a few issues though. The 'api' that patchwork and other parts of the network use on top of the communication protocol seems to not be documented at all outside of the 'post' message. I'm not sure if it's not documented or if I just haven't discovered it yet. For example, I'm having to dive in to the code to see how a 'vote' message is formatted. I'm not sure how all of the various clients are staying compatible. None of the message formats seem to versioned in anyway either. I'm also not sure what are the 'correct' ways to introduce my own message types. Should I use a vendor prefix in the type or something? Is it bad form to pollute the network with your own message types that other clients can't understand? I've just started diving in to all this so maybe I just haven't gotten deep enough yet. I wrote a little toy SSB implementation last weekend to learn the protocol. I've really enjoyed playing around with it so far but I'm still not sure if it's the right fit for the applications I want to build yet.