A Scuttlebutt Propaganda Collective?

Secure #scuttlebutt is a combination of the technology we build and the people who use it. It's not driven by a central company or crypto currency foundation which throws money around to grow. Instead we've grown organically through people and their communities.

A lot of people have learned about scuttlebutt and started using it because they either heard about it at a conference, read an article about scuttlebutt, or attended an onboarding session. I'd like to grow our community and support that outreach.

Mozilla and other organizations have a fund to pay for travel and lodging for people who go around and talk about the open web and related projects that Mozilla supports. We've had a lot of scuttlebutt talks and on boarding sessions but it's been haphazard and hasn't had support. 

What I'm proposing is a fund set aside funds for two things.

• First, for folks to either travel to conferences to talk about a scuttlebutt related topic. Preferably these folks have some experience with scuttlebutt and what we're doing, and either experience giving talks or connection to community mentors who can help them become better speakers.
• Second, a fund to help support onboarding sessions. I was thinking we could provide a stipend for the organizer of an onboarding session, materials, and some kai (food) for participants.

Out of this work, we could develop some materials for workshops on this tech. It makes sense to have people who are near the communities they reach out to rather than some crew that flies around the world. Local matters.

One option is that this just be a planetary thing, we setup a program, and manage it. But it feels like making it an open collective and making decisions as a community might be a better path.

What do folks think?

Looks like it's going to a second round, which will be messy, but the lead is now 47.94% vs 43.62%. Given Ciro Gomes is on the left and is at 3%, most of his votes will go to Lula, meaning he'll get a majority in the runoff. Even then, the final tally will be close enough that Bolsonaro's folks will be able to contest the results and cause mayhem.

If you've got a newer mac you can use planetary on the desktop as well. We use an updated version of oasis hosted for @Planetary. There's also patchfox as a good option. And as @Nico says, Perihelion.

I think the manyverse / patchwork issue is related to ebt's vs legacy replication. It doesn't really matter fixing that because the current js releases, manyverse, and planetary are all using ebt now. The ssb-pub doesn't really support ebt either, but with the move to rooms, it's not needed. Planetary is working on an updated pub with a graphql interface for a web viewer which supports both ebt and legacy replication, but it's not really intended to be used a pub which people will join.

Anyway, all of the legacy replication issues with patchwork are moot because we're soon going to be using metafeeds and anybody who uses that will need to upgrade to newer code. That transition is going to the real point where folks need to move on. I think the idea is for a bit to cross post to old feed while also creating the metafeed, i think.

It'd be really nice to have something more frequent than the ssb newsletter, the last one came out in February. I'm reminded of this because I came across the this week in matrix newsletter. Clearly this is something which needs to be paid if it is going to come out on a sustainable regular basis. What do folks think? Is anybody interested in doing it? How much do we think we'd need to set aside to make it happen? I could see planetary setting aside extra money in to a OC to help make it happen.

The release of Elon Musk's text messages as he considers buying twitter is kind of amazing read. So rarely do we get to see what these kinds of people say privately.

Tumblr's being forced to abandon the open policy around sexual content because of structural constraints on the way tech works today.

It's worth reading the post by it's current ceo... Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022.

1. It comes down to three things, credit card companies won't process payments for porn. Even if only a portion of the the content is porn. There are specialist companies that do it, but they charge 20% to 30% processing fees instead of 2% to 3%. Crypto just isn't there for real consumer use.

2. Mobile phones drive use, apps have push notifications and a much better experience than mobile web. If you want to be easy to use for most people today, you need mobile apps. The appstores decide who and what can be in their stores. To install otherwise on iOS means a tricky jailbreaking process few users will do, and even side loading via fdroid on android is something only very technical users will do. The appstores say they're doing this to protect users against malware, but the reality is this is a tremendous restriction on free speech.

3. New laws around consent and age verification of people in sexual pictures / video means that it's very difficult to stay legal.

4. In effect if you have sexual content you need to use a completely different stack for everything.

Does this mean that a privacy centric, no hosting, encrypted social network could fill this niche? I'm not sure. In scuttlebutt's case, both manyverse and planetary rely on appstores allowing us to distribute our apps. The hosting doesn't have a cost, because of the way the protocol works... and we don't have payments. If we do make it easier to use, then I expect we'll be seeing more sexual content as users get driven off of other platforms. What does that mean for us?