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Secure Scuttlebutt
- dang 4y agoRelated: Ask HN: Anyone got experience using Scuttlebutt? Thoughts? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29974051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29974051 - Jan 2022 (4 comments) Scuttlebutt Protocol Guide - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29672518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29672518 - Dec 2021 (35 comments) Scuttlebutt: Decentralised, off-grid, mesh network and self-hosted social media - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28612591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28612591 - Sept 2021 (3 comments) Scuttlebutt – A decentralized secure gossip platform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713830 - Jan 2021 (164 comments) What Is Scuttlebutt? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22915460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22915460 - April 2020 (40 comments) Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877603 - April 2018 (342 comments) Patchwork – Decentralized messaging and sharing app built on Secure Scuttlebutt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16273096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16273096 - Jan 2018 (64 comments) An off-grid social network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14050049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14050049 - April 2017 (366 comments)
- college_physics 4y agoImmutability and social media as we have come to know them seems like a strange combination
- leansensei 4y agoAmen. It's a strange combination indeed, and a reason why I took down the SSB "pub" I was self-hosting on NetBSD on an OrangePi Zero for some friends, back in 2020. I don't want to store other people's dataz even if encrypted, and I certainly don't want to have everything I shared being available for eternity, or to have to switch identities periodically.
- staltz 4y agoIf you don't want to store people's data, then an SSB "room" server is the option, and in fact is the best type of server currently serving the SSB network. More info here https://www.manyver.se/faq/admin-room https://www.manyver.se/faq/admin-room
- Fnoord 4y agoOnce you share something on the internet, its potentially there forever. You can only make it more difficult to be found. If its controversial, the chance of it getting copied (e.g. screenshotted) is bigger. There's a name for it too: Streissand effect. That's why Snapchat provides a false sense of security. On a rooted smartphone the privacy feature of self destruct does not work, and there's always the analog hole. There's extensions for platforms like Reddit which show supposedly moderated/deleted content.
- yadoomerta 4y agoIn snapchat, you're sending messages to friends, or at the very least individuals, who you trust have not rooted their phone to log messages. Anything put to the public internet is there forever because antisocial corporations and the few individuals who do not respect privacy can operate at scale. Asking a normal person nicely to delete something almost always works though, especially if not deleting it is a hassle
- pessimizer 4y agoThis is a series of assertions, which I assume are backed by your own intuition, but they are neither arguments nor observations.
- yadoomerta 4y agoMaybe we just have a very different threat model? Snapchat style messages completely solves: - someone you trust now later becomes untrustworthy and would use old messages against you - messages are stored on your phone and can be found by someone else later neither of these can happen if deleting messages is not an expected and normal part of the protocol it does not solve the problem of sending messages to someone who already wants to hurt you (ie. the public internet)
- Ambolia 4y agoAnd that brought us to the world of a thousand broken links, threads becoming dead graveyards after a few months, and people archiving threads using screenshots. The current internet is terrible at archiving anything.
- college_physics 4y agothere is a big space between archiving anything and archiving everything. I am not negative to the idea at all, there is probably interesting use cases where keeping (for audit or attribution or whatever other objective) such decentralized logs is useful. But some of these needs might be served eg. using git, whereas others might beyond the reach of users because (while its 2023) it is still a hassle to self-host
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoI would prefer a world where people only shared things they were confident would not be embarrassing or hurtful later. It wouldn't be as popular of course.... just wholesome and friendly.
- tarasglek 4y agoI tried it few weeks ago. Worst p2p experience of my life. Was super unclear how to bootstrap myself to start following something. Feels like it was run by an in-crowd, with no strong interest in new users. Keybase has similar goals, but was super easy to get started in.
- midenginedcoupe 4y agoSeconded. The onboarding is so terrible we just gave up after failing in every possible direction. Nothing worked. It's such a shame as I really like the underlying ideas. But the implementation is hopeless and the way it's presented on their website is downright icky. Honestly, the video "explanation" of a love story with Scuttlebutt weirded me out - it was more like some weeb's fantasy of what a love story would be like rather than any kind of useful intro into how you'd use it.
- staltz 4y ago(I develop Manyverse) Onboarding in SSB is invite-driven and thus is at odds with safety. If you want to "find people" easily, and easily join the network, then this means that any harasser can also do the same. Improving Onboarding while not sacrificing Sustainability and Safety is my top priority and there are several protocol advancements being worked on, more information here: https://gitlab.com/staltz/manyverse/-/wikis/Starchart/ https://gitlab.com/staltz/manyverse/-/wikis/Starchart/
- midenginedcoupe 4y agoNone of the docs I found said that. And we could get on to the network and join pubs. Only there was nothing in there. We should also have been able to invite each other and follow each other's posts, as we were both using devices on the same wifi, but that just silently failed. A week or so later the iphone app rolled out an update with a patch note saying something along the lines of "whoops, new signups went to the test servers instead of prod by mistake" which _may_ explain some of it. But going back in to the app after the fix was no better.
- pmlnr 4y ago"Don’t record your social life on an append-only social network" https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/append-only-social.html https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/append-only-social.html The distribution idea is glorious, but we'd all be better off with an application like it built on top of Syncthing ( https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/ ), ala DecSync ( https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync )
- hobofan 4y agoThe points in that article are completely irrelevant and inconsequential. You can "delete" things in an append-only ledger, in the sense that you can update the state with e.g. a tombstone marker. On a higher level you can't delete things anyways, because as soon as you has shared them with a third party the control is out of your hands anyways. Just because current social networks try to hold up that facade doesn't make it a reality. Sure you could make tombstoning past messages and making their contents inaccessible a more central feature, but there is nothing inherently wrong with append-only social networks.
- dividedbyzero 4y ago> On a higher level you can't delete things anyways, because as soon as you has shared them with a third party the control is out of your hands anyways Most things are readily forgotten once removed. No one cares enough about someone like me to keep a public archive of everything I've ever posted anywhere.
- tazjin 4y agoThe archive exists, it's just not public.
- dividedbyzero 4y agoThat's of little consequence if what I'm worried about is prospective employers googling my party pictures.
- gadders 4y agoDidn't Bram Cohen or someone write a similar thing to this in the early 2000's?
- gadders 4y agoMy bad - it was Justin Frankel at Nullsoft (Winamp): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE
- unpopularopp 4y agoThis have been on my mind recently about secure decentralized systems... but how do the devs cope with what they are doing would be most likely used for criminal stuff? And I'm not talking about pirated movies here. Feels like there is an idealistic view on secure tools ("we help people to rise up against regimes!", "say no to megacorps!") but in reality a huge chunk of use case would be straight up criminal. Make no mistake I'm not arguing against encryption or security, but still I'm thinking about this recently that how open source a lot of time ends up being used for very bad things and how might this can be mitigated. Or maybe we should just accept this as a necessary "side effect"?
- drexlspivey 4y agoHow do telecommunications engineers cope with the fact that some times people use phones for crimes?
- jefftk 4y agoWhen you make a general purpose tool, sometimes people use it for harmful things, but the overall effect of telephones is clearly positive. On the other hand, when you make a decentralized encrypted tool in a space where other options already exist that handle the most common non-criminal use cases your balance of how much you are facilitating harmful vs beneficial use is pretty different. This doesn't mean that you should never create secure distributed tools, but it does mean that the trade-offs around them look pretty different from something like traditional phones.
- capableweb 4y agoYou are raising a valid point, which does affect people who do work on encryption, security and protocols in general. You have to figure out if you think it's worth it or not. In the distant past, I was working on technology that aimed to avoid any sort of government control or inspection, and we frequently had in mind that what we were building could be used for bad just as much as it could be used for good. Ultimately, we decided it was worth it, after weighing the good against the bad.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
- shp0ngle 4y agoThe recommended SSB browser has its github page set as “archived” since 2021. And the message is “other clients should take it from here”. https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork However it’s still the first and recommended one at the website. https://scuttlebutt.nz/get-started/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/get-started/ I don’t think I have time for this.
- shp0ngle 4y agoI really cannot even find an actively developed SSB browser? (do I need a browser? I don’t know) I don’t think this is for me. I guess I’ll go back to trying to decipher Urbit. I kid, I kid. (I still have GNUnet to decipher.)
- staltz 4y agoManyverse is cross-platform and it's the main desktop app nowadays: https://manyver.se https://manyver.se The Scuttlebutt.nz website hasn't been kept up-to-date. SSB's development is also decentralized, so this means that not everything moves forward in unison, so depending on who you ask, Scuttlebutt.nz is not the official frontpage.
- shp0ngle 4y agoOh. It’s linked on Wikipedia as an official front page, and on the github also. Is there an official frontpage? … oh I get it, it’s decentralised, there is no official front page? Anyway yeah Manyverse seems to “work”, in the sense “is up to date, I can run it if I ignore the OS X insecure errors, and I can even join a server”. But the one server where I could get an invite has 0 posts and 0 people apparently so, I need to keep digging I guess
- staltz 4y agoIt's called "invite" because people invite you, not because you can search for one on the web.
- 4y ago
- domh 4y agoI was bullish on SSB and it was definitely a cool experiment (completely decentralized; doesnt even need a server, p2p social networks!) but at the end of the day, if those "benefits" are not explainable to the layman (or not even benefits) then it's never gunna succeed. Most of us are online all the time, and don't need a fully offline-first social network. I'm now much more excited about mastadon, though I dont really use any public social networks myself. Social networks amongst my friends have been replaced with group chats via Signal and Whatsapp.
- rtkwe 4y agoThat's the big issue with basically all decentralized services, they usually have some additional headache from the decentralized architecture but the actual benefits over a centralized service aren't relevant to even the average technical user. Mastodon didn't really take off until the moderation and social environment at Twitter got so twisted post Musk the benefit of being not Twitter was nearly enough to get people to switch. Even then the day to day of using Twitter may not have changed for most people, it hasn't that much for me but I have a pretty curated follow list.
- twobitshifter 4y agoWhat is the scuttlebutt logo meant to be?
- aliqot 4y agoi think it is a sea snail or hermit crab
- gpto 4y ago[dead]
- icepat 4y agoThis sounds vaguely like a marketing pitch -- what's your affiliation with this project?
- gpto 4y agoSorry to not write like a sms addict. I'm old school. And yes I found in SSB a efficient tool that meet my wish in social media. And I'm a bit upset when I see closed mind critics. SSB lives with no money or so few. But I see so much people happily trade their life for no brain needed tools that I find it disappointing.
- itslennysfault 4y agoThis inspired Nostr which seems to be all the rage lately https://nostr.com https://nostr.com Nostr is self-signed (and optionally encrypted) "notes" that are passed around using "dumb relays" it's a pretty cool concept, and it has attracted a lot of active devs/projects.
- celtoid 4y agoNostr will be a widely adopted protocol within the next few years. A social network with a built in payment system will be very useful in places like Africa, South America, etc. Americans will most likely miss the boat, per usual.
- lucideer 4y agoFirst time hearing of Nostr - looks really nice. From the protocol README section "The problem with SSB (Secure Scuttlebutt)" - it lists a few small things but is mostly complimentary of SSB. One of the big issues I always had with SSB is efficiency/scaling/message size/db size. Is this something Nostr addresses or considers, or is it likely to suffer from similar scaling issues with heavy use?
- kdragon 4y agoNostr partially addresses this in a few ways: * Media itself is not stored, only links to media. * Relays are free to limit usage, charge a fee or require proof of work. * There are many kinds of messages with different storage standards i.e ephemeral messages are not stored at all.
- lucideer 4y agoNot storing media sounds odd (prone to linkrot), but I guess this feature is likely optional? I'm not an expert but the SSB scaling issues seem related to the architecture being tied to the sigchain, & general feed immutability. This makes it very difficult for pubs to, for example, accept/process subsets of posts or do anything out-of-order. It also makes it impossible for clients to limit local database storage, especially mobile clients where that might be at a premium. Even just the existence of ephemeral notes seems to indicate there's no such architectural limitation so that sounds really hopeful.
- vageli 4y agoI really loved ssb and even ran my own instance at one point but found the reference implementation hard to replicate based on the documentation at the time and the network itself seemed somewhat unscaleable. As I recall, your client keeps a full record of posts and so after following a modest number of people my local storage grew to several gigabytes. When I was running the server, it needed regular restarting to keep things operational.