What the hell is Scuttlebutt?

I've been spending a lot of time around the edges of Scuttlebutt, where we interface with the filesystem / network / human, and I've started to wonder where (and how!) we draw our boundaires. I've been working on a plugin that uses Dat for feed replication and it's been coming along very nicely, but I'm starting to wonder whether I'm working on Scuttlebutt or something else.

This is mostly just the ship of Theseus all over again, but I feel like pulling on this thread is bringing me somewhere interesting. We could use Dat for our database and replication, build on the ActivityStreams vocab for message semantics, or switch away from our custom JSON signature scheme, but I'm not clear on how much backward-compatibility we need before we've wandered into new territory.

Put another way: how do we decide as a community when and how things are deprecated? Small changes (like Markdown newlines) break backward-compatibility with what the author intended, which should be avoided, but I'm concerned that we don't have a way to deprecate interfaces that are exposed to peers (like createHistoryStream()). I feel confident that we'll be able to resolve these things as a community, but I'm feeling some ambiguity and would love to explore how we draw the boundaries around the moving target that is Scuttlebutt.

❤

@miles

Cool! I'm working on something similar with #offchain-content, we should chat about this more sometime. Being able to delete one of your own messages depends on content being detached from the feed, so I'm thoroughly convinced that this is the future of Scuttlebutt.

DHT like things (such as dat) are more efficient at actually distributing the content

I think there are probably use-cases where Scuttlebutt is more efficient (especially with EBT), but I don't see any reason these things couldn't be built into Dat/etc instead. I'm guess I'm sort of bummed at the lack of overlap between Dat and Scuttlebutt and ActivityStreams and all of the cool things our friends are building, especially given the social and ideological intersections we share. It feels funky to work in parallel with these other projects on solving the same problems, so I'm excited at the idea of cooperating rather than competing.

Seems like there's a few threads in here that you're exploring @Christian Bundy.

Is the core thing you want to draw out attention to the question you emboldened?

Put another way: how do we decide as a community when and how things are deprecated?

Or is it :

I’m feeling some ambiguity and would love to explore how we draw the boundaries

In which case what boundaries are you feeling pain from? Generally I think boundaries are useful things to clarify what something is, and isn't help you include / exclude things for attention, to clarify values, or to communicate what generates happiness/ hurt. Maybe other things... not sure?