Scuttlebutt is encrypted

The messages (text posts, following, etc) are not encrypted (as in private message), they are only signed with your key, which allows for verification if I have the corrosponding key. The reason why you can't find the posts directly in the folder is that they are stored in a leveldb database, in binary form under .ssb/db.

should take up no more than 200mb of space.

Here is a rundown of my .ssb/ folder. I think it's a fair example since I've been here quite a long time.

32K   ./blobs_push
9.5M  ./query
28M   ./links
172M  ./node_modules
195M  ./db
317M  ./fulltext0
1.2G  ./blobs
1.9G  .

The interesting data is inside db. links, query and fulltext0 are database indicies that speed up search and other querys that would otherwise have to go through the whole database. You can delete these but they would be recreated to allow normal operation, I think patch* depends on links and query mostly.

To free up space you can delete the blobs folder (though you could be the last person having a specific blob) as they are requested on demand, i.e. ssb won't fetch that kitten picture a friend shared until you scroll by it. This is a trade-off. Previously we synced all blobs as soon as the gossip sync saw it but this is very data hungry, especially for new people.

A friend of mine also exlained it in different words here: %Ayi7UUb....