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How does it compare to Mastodon or Diaspora?

gwbas1c 7y ago
When I last looked at Diaspora (many years ago,) it came across as an open source social network that you could clone and run yourself, and then there was a network of networks. So, you could run the Diaspora code on your own server and then your server was part of the network. If someone has a better answer than me, please upvote them. It's been years... In this case, one primary difference is that a lot of Scuttlebut logic runs in the client that you install on your computer. You just can't point a browser at someone's server running Scuttlebut Edit: (The difference is kind of like downloading a file in a browser vs downloading a file with a Bittorrent client.)
vicheiJ2 7y ago
Mastodon and Diaspora are federated softwares, which means there is still a server/client model, but many servers (a more well known example of federated decentralization is smtp). ssb (common short for secure-scuttlebutt) is fully decentralized, which means that there is no server/client anymore, everyone is a node (like the initial idea of bitcoin). I'm biased in favor of full decentralization, but here are the main differences I can think of : * federation tends to lead to centralization again, because everyone use the same server (like gmail for smtp) * full decentralization makes it easier to build custom software (you have access to the whole data, without being constrained by an api). But this is not true for ssb, because it's harder than it should to build software on top of it. * it's easier to change software with full decentralization, because you don't have an "account" owned by a given server (think: it's hard to migrate from a mail address to an other) * onboarding is more difficult with full decentralization, because you have no easy entrypoint like a server is
- miohtama 7y ago
  Dose every node need a full copy of data?
TimJRobinson 7y ago
Sorry that the server crashed, it's back up now and that's talked about in the article :)

When I last looked at Diaspora (many years ago,) it came across as an open source social network that you could clone and run yourself, and then there was a network of networks. So, you could run the Diaspora code on your own server and then your server was part of the network. If someone has a better answer than me, please upvote them. It's been years... In this case, one primary difference is that a lot of Scuttlebut logic runs in the client that you install on your computer. You just can't point a browser at someone's server running Scuttlebut Edit: (The difference is kind of like downloading a file in a browser vs downloading a file with a Bittorrent client.)

vicheiJ2 7y ago

Mastodon and Diaspora are federated softwares, which means there is still a server/client model, but many servers (a more well known example of federated decentralization is smtp). ssb (common short for secure-scuttlebutt) is fully decentralized, which means that there is no server/client anymore, everyone is a node (like the initial idea of bitcoin). I'm biased in favor of full decentralization, but here are the main differences I can think of : * federation tends to lead to centralization again, because everyone use the same server (like gmail for smtp) * full decentralization makes it easier to build custom software (you have access to the whole data, without being constrained by an api). But this is not true for ssb, because it's harder than it should to build software on top of it. * it's easier to change software with full decentralization, because you don't have an "account" owned by a given server (think: it's hard to migrate from a mail address to an other) * onboarding is more difficult with full decentralization, because you have no easy entrypoint like a server is

miohtama 7y ago
Dose every node need a full copy of data?

TimJRobinson 7y ago

Sorry that the server crashed, it's back up now and that's talked about in the article :)