Hey everybutty!

There's now a magazine dedicated to meshes and decentralized, by goTenna. https://www.inthemesh.com
They contacted me to write an article for them specifically about Scuttlebutt, and it's now published at the same time they're launching the blog.

https://www.inthemesh.com/archive/secure-scuttlebutt-facebook-alternative/

I actually co-authored it with them, so not 100% of the language is my style, but it was anyway approved by me before publishing.

Also take a look at the other articles, they're all original and very decent!

It made it to the frontpage of HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877603

Oops! Had I known I would have tried to polish it more :D But just because I fear the comments. D:

Ah, this is why my pub is doubling in size right now. Also so much toxicity in that thread. Yikes.

Oh gosh I hate hackernews comments. They are so deeply technical, critical, and insistently skeptic.

Part of me just hopes that it's Zuckerberg on the other side, writing on HN as a "power user of the internet". https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/4/17200574/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-power-user-of-the-internet-statement

Someone with a pub should drop off some new invite codes on the HN article, it appears there are quite a few people unable to join.

I HAVE OPINIONS

Thanks for putting the work into publishing this article @andrestaltz!

I linked to the article and hn comments on Decent: http://decent.evbogue.com/#%xIBxU7URgUVfXkGUqGSmMvz0G9P2sfm1Voh3e/dv4us=.sha256

Also on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8dhxt5/scuttlebutt_a_decentralized_alternative_to/

Legitimate things I've seen come up a few times in these discussions:

• confusion about pubs, and joining
  "the network" (Are channels on pubs? Why can't I see any content?)
• confusion about exactly what is encrypted
• annoyance at seeing lots of "following" messages (Why am I seeing who a pub follows etc?)
• people want to be able to post things that can only be read by their friends (do I really have control over my data if anyone spidering the network can read this? Isn't this still data mineable?)
• concern about moderation in a "free-for-all" decentralised network? (who has the power to take things down?)
• implementation of ssb in other languages is difficult because of its assumptions based on javascript's json implementation
• standard growth assumptions, assuming we want more randoms on the network (it's just another app on the pile trying to get my attention, go away!)

I actually think there is a lot of valuable info in these discussions. It's nice to get some candid feedback from some random users on Patchwork for the first time. Sure it isn't all necessarily constructive, but I think it is important to hear people's raw experiences.

This stuff is making me rather keen for cutting pubs out of the default ssb story. Can't wait until invites and ooo are widely deployed and we have some kind of direct peer syncing (web-rtc style)! And of course private groups should allow people to "only post to my friends".

As for data mining, I think that as public "free-for-all" pubs go away as alternatives are available, it will be a lot harder to get into a network in the first place to start spidering. Already we have no idea how many scuttle-islands there are out there! I've been starting to see issues on github from people that are outside of my 2-hops and also outside of pub 3-hops.

Fully agree @mmckegg !

Good job digging out the gems out of the pile of dirty comments. About public pubs, I'm a bit internally conflicted about it because on one hand I helped make that happen with open-invites easy-ssb-pub, but on the other hand it helped bring momentum to the scuttleverse, and also, if all the social circles would have been closed and invite-only, I myself was one day a total stranger to you SSB folks. ;)

Going forwards, I also think we need direct peer syncing, but even better, we need to have multiple options: LAN syncing, pubs, web-rtc, DHT, Bluetooth, WiFi P2P, sneakernet. We need all of these, not one of these as the default.

About the data mining and spidering, we should make SSB be so that whoever is doing that will actually be doing it to their friends or friends of their friends, not to strangers. Then the consequences of such actions are isolated to the social dynamics of those social circles. SSB already kind of solved this from day one by approaching the Sybil problem with humans, not technology.

Oh, I just had an idea about trying to clamp down on data mining.

Pubs could enforce gossiping only with peers that are n hops from someone they already follow

Right now (afaik), pubs will gossip with anyone that knows their public key. This currently allows anyone that knows a pub's address and key to start spidering the network from that point. They can request the pubs feed, which gives them a list of everyone the pub follows. Then they can request those feeds, and so on. Then they learn about other pubs, and get more feeds etc etc.

However, if pubs checked to make sure that the remote peer was actually a friend or a foaf, then this would make spidering impossible! You'd have to actually get people to follow you first! ooo could still be available to everyone, but getHistoryStream should only be available to people on the pubs hops graph.

#scuttlebot #data-mining

• people want to be able to post things that can only be read by their friends (do I really have control over my data if anyone spidering the network can read this? Isn't this still data mineable?)

[...]
As for data mining, I think that as public "free-for-all" pubs go away as alternatives are available, it will be a lot harder to get into a network in the first place to start spidering.

I wouldn't count on this too much, and not on limiting gossip either. If you want something private, make it private. That means either ensuring there's a technical way to tell everyone you publish to to never-ever send this to a peer/pub outside the "in-group" or actually encrypting it. Personally, I'd prefer both. Kind of "what happens in pub.vegas, stays on pub.vegas."

My idea: why not have a "dynamic" list of "Friends" in the client. So if I post something and share it only with "Friends", patchwork could post it as a private post to everyone who's friends with me at the moment.
That would also mean that new friends don't retroactively get access to all my previous stuff. Like in, you know, real life :P

• implementation of ssb in other languages is difficult because of its assumptions based on javascript's json implementation

After reading this discussion with Vendan (who's ssb identity I don't know) I tend to agree. I was toying with a python implementation, just to get a bit acquainted with the ssb protocol, but this reads to me like it'd be a bit of a nightmare to emulate JS/node/ssb logic in how to encode the json, with character encodings and all that.
Is there any ongoing discussion on this? It seems like a relatively simple change, but a very backwards-incompatible one...?

• standard growth assumptions, assuming we want more randoms on the network (it's just another app on the pile trying to get my attention, go away!)

Somewhat related: the name. It came up in a the main thread on reddit (reddit being reddit after all) and also with friends. It's definitely off-putting for many "normies". All the butt-jokes make me chuckle day in day out, but I don't see a non-technical parent being okay with their kids signing up for something that has butt in the name and that sounds completely strange to them.
So, if we do want more "randoms" or "normies" here, the name might need to change.
Or, the other way around: If ssb fails to draw in some good people just because of the name, wouldn't that just be a shame?

I saw the point being made that the name doesn't matter, because what you really use it patchwork/patchbay/patchfoo or whatever comes next.
That's not really true though, is it? Because each of these applications is clearly and visibly just a window into a larger network, as evidenced by the fact that they largely show the same content.
So the users definitely have an idea of using a client software to connect to a network, and that network clearly is called scuttlebutt (emphasis by Any Brain Ever)

@Daan Yep friend-only posts would be great for privacy and non-mineability %gq5lOL6...