Nobody knows our internal struggles and that's part of what makes them harder.

Patchwork just works...

Let's see how this works:

Connect with rabble on VeilidChat!
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Fingerprint:
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I'm going to make it this year as well. I'm looking forward to reconnecting with folks.

I see a picture which is grey and has a wall inset with a little sculpture of a person wearing a grey dress.

wow, what a trial.. i'm glad you're heading home!

I'm rabble@nos.social on nostr or npub1wmr34t36fy03m8hvgl96zl3znndyzyaqhwmwdtshwmtkg03fetaqhjg240 on nostr. We've got nos.social which is essentially a port / rewrite of planetary.social but on nostr. There's tons about the nostr tech i like, but I miss the solarpunk community here.

So they're banning it because some folks are using telegram to do minimal amounts of piracy of articles from mainstream publications? Not because it's a major app for commercializing child pornography or organizing hate groups online?

I'm surprised and not at the same time. Telegram's been refusing to do content moderation for years, i'm just kind of surprised it's a copyright issue which has caused the problem.

Turns out the commons is incredibly valuable. In fact if all open source was privately held and paid for then the entire tech industry wouldn't function. It'd be too expensive to do anything. ;-(

An apron is a nice alternative to the standard tshirt for events.

There are p2p basel aprons!?

I really enjoy the Ensprial gatherings. Much less about any particular conversation or topic, more about how it's connecting and inspiring community. It was fun to hang out with @Mix Android, @mikey, and many others who I don't see often enough.

My friends, lefty jewish communists academics and lawyers, have a lake house they inherited in one of the small towns the libertarians tried to take over. It was an unmitigated disaster and eventually the town came together to kick the free state folks out.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/10/us/croydon-free-state-politics.html

My sister had a play restaurant for her 7th or 8th birthday. We converted the whole house in to restaurant tables, setup places, she showed them their table, gave the patrons a menu, took their order, and went to help cook in the kitchen She LOVED it.

That storm was crazy.

Sorry i missed this, i was off out of town on a trip. I'll try and make it to ArtHack next week.

Oh, fun! I'd like to play too! How about tinyssb hacking at ArtHack? It'd be cool to have direct syncing over tinyssb between our houses.

Welcome the the #scuttleverse

I thought it was a really nice sunny day today.... until i tried to sit outside in a cafe and had to face the brunt of the wind blowing away any warmth in my body or the coffee.

A couple days ago the high temp was 1.7c higher than the lowest temperature of the day. Which was really impressive in a way.

It doesn't look like it supports anything but ActivityPub yet, the rest is aspirational. I'm interested none the less.

A room is a tunnel server that doesn't store any scuttlebutt messages. You need to join the room and then you can directly connect to anybody else who's online. A pub is a scuttlebutt server that runs at a known ip address, can be permissioned or open. A pub is kind of older than rooms and a pub stores messages in a store and forward so you don't have to be online as one of your peers.

SSB uses a gossip protocol, so anytime you connect, you share all messages from mutual contacts. That's why it works completely offline.

love the flag

I love fireworks even if they scare pets.

Wow.... Elon Musk is doing his best to kill Twitter.

The Close to the machine book is amazing.

In this case Damus complied with Apple rules but the appstore reviewers decided against Damus anyway. The idea that you could trigger a donation, not a payment for content, from content was what apple objected to. This doesn't make sense because there is no way to buy content in the app. But somehow thought some user might get an end-run around rules. So apple banned the app from including the link to 'zap' (ie send) satoshis from content posts but allowed it from the profile page.

This is similar to how Manyverse was prevented from acknowledging users who donated to support it with a badge.

Congratulations!

One of my favorite things to do is layover tourism. Find a route that has a long layover some place amazing. I’ve gone snorkeling on a layover, I’ve gone to a safari and seen lions on a layover, I’ve gone and had lunch with a friend in London while flying from Uruguay to South Africa.

Today I’ve got a short layover in Fiji on my way to #dwebcamp in California. Enough time to catch the sunset and eat dinner under palm trees.

Video

And there's a version of the scuttlebutt app planetary.social for nostr at nos.social which uses the scuttlebutt friends of friends algorithm.

I think the nostr early adopter community is very different from scuttlebutt but the tech is very similar.

welcome @kojira

welcome @weep why don't you introduce yourself using the #newpeople hashtag.

Welcome @misoccoli why don't you introduce yourself using the #newpeople hashtag.

welcome @Pagoi. why don't you introduce yourself using the #newpeople hashtag.

It hasn't but in part because we've moved on to working on nos.social which runs nostr instead of secure scuttlebutt.

We'd happily accept PR's to fix this... github.com/planetary-social/planetary-ios but we're focusing on our new app using nostr.

I'm so sorry to hear about the theft. I hope that your work on addressing it and making amends was enough to help restore trust.

That reminds me to look at the TVNZ app again... i've been able to get a bunch of stuff on Neon, also an NZ only streaming service, which has a bunch of locally produced programming. Netflix, and a lot of other services, just sort of pretends New Zealand is a state of Australia. ;-(

I was curious when I looked up my profile on nostr.band how many followers I’ve got here vs twitter and on the fediverse.

https://nostr.band/npub1wmr34t36fy03m8hvgl96zl3znndyzyaqhwmwdtshwmtkg03fetaqhjg240

Twitter - 17 years - 18.5k followers
Mastodon - 6 years - 2.6k followers
Scuttlebutt - 5 years - 1.1k followers
Nostr - 5 months - 3.1k followers
BlueSky - 2 months - 329 followers
Tumblr - 15 years - 15 followers (7,000 posts)

Now, of course, the number of followers doesn’t correlate to engagement or who’s actually seeing my posts. And the line between the Fediverse and Nostr is blurry because of gateways. I follow nostr folks on my mastodon account and fediverse folks in Nostr.

At the moment I see lots of engagement of my posts on the fediverse, nostr, and bluesky. I don’t see much on Scuttlebutt or Twitter any more. Having lots of followers isn't really good sign of a network, it's just a kind of crued

I really like the visual communications style of the images.

TL;DR: LLM AI has the potential to revolutionize democratic governance in online communities by improving communication, promoting inclusivity, enabling participatory decision-making, and providing valuable insights that could be applied to broader societal contexts.

1. LLM AI can enhance democratic governance in online communities by facilitating better communication, understanding, and inclusivity.
2. AI-driven moderation tools can help maintain a safe and healthy digital environment by addressing harmful behavior and disinformation.
3. LLM AI can enable more direct and participatory democracy by analyzing data and identifying pressing issues, allowing community members to engage in decision-making processes.
4. Experimenting with AI-driven democratic governance online can provide valuable insights that may be applicable to broader societal contexts.
5. Integrating LLM AI into democratic processes can help create a more resilient, inclusive, and adaptable society, akin to the thriving democracy in Emrys' novel, A Half Built Garden.

In the world of Ruthanna Emrys' novel, "A Half-Built Garden," the concept of the Dandelion Network introduces a decentralized, self-organizing structure that emphasizes the importance of diverse social interactions for a healthy, well-functioning democracy. Drawing inspiration from this idea, we can envision how large language models (LLM) AI can be utilized to experiment with democratic governance in our online communities, and potentially, in the broader society.

The advent of advanced LLM AI technologies opens up new possibilities for enhancing and refining our democratic processes, particularly in the online sphere. By integrating AI into the governance of online communities, we can create systems that are more responsive, adaptive, and inclusive, catering to a variety of needs and perspectives.

One way LLM AI can contribute to this vision is by facilitating better communication and understanding among community members. AI can act as a mediator, translating complex concepts and ideas into accessible language or even breaking language barriers altogether. This improved communication fosters a more inclusive environment, where diverse perspectives can be shared and acknowledged.

Additionally, AI-driven moderation tools can be developed to maintain a safe and healthy online community. By identifying and addressing harmful behavior and disinformation, AI can help create a digital space where constructive conversations and debates can flourish without being hindered by toxic or misleading elements.

LLM AI can also be instrumental in creating mechanisms for more direct and participatory democracy within online communities. By analyzing data and identifying trends, AI can help surface the most pressing issues and concerns among community members, enabling them to participate in decision-making processes more effectively. This can lead to a more responsive and adaptable governance model that truly reflects the will of the people.

As we experiment with LLM AI-driven democratic governance in online communities, we can gather valuable insights and lessons that may be applicable to broader societal contexts. The potential for AI to help us reimagine our democratic processes is immense, and as we explore this new frontier, we can strive to create a society that is more resilient, inclusive, and adaptable – much like the thriving garden in Emrys' novel.

I'm far from the only person to think of this, Henry Farrel on Cooked Timber says much the same thing. But I doubt he used ChatGPT to do most of the writing like I did with this piece. ;-D

Nostr relays do replication between them, but not all of them. Some handle it simply by connecting to other relays as a client and storing messages, a kind of dumb protocol. But most nostr relays running at scale are using a specific relay software caled strfry which has a protocol for syncing taken from the quadrable, which is "a sparse binary merkle tree with compact partial-tree proofs." The actual sync protocol is described here: https://github.com/hoytech/quadrable#syncing

Regarding the offline use, nos.social, works just fine offline. Probably due to our scuttlebutt roots, but @Matt Lorentz, did it that way because internet connections are flaky and in app caching makes sense. There is nothing in nostr which would prevent you from having a local relay embedded in your app to allow for completely offline and mesh networking. While I like the idea of entirely on device local / offline apps, it doesn't work well on mobile devices. Using the cloud, especially if it is servers you can control, just works better.

That's an amazing trail!

i'll ask him.

Jack Dorsey's written an essay on the need for new open source social media projects. I think it's worth reading if you're considering the future of the space.

It ends with him saying he's going to start providing grants and investment (depending on what folks want) in to projects in the space. I think it'd be cool if we could get some funding for the ssb reboot, plus related projects like earthstar, p2panda, etc... I'm happy to inquire if folks want.

Isn't it possible to make a system that can't fork logs? It would open up so much like easily being able to use multiple apps.

They survived the winter with snow, frost, and being covered in leaves?

Incredible view from that cafe!

I like the starfish name...

I was sorry that i was out of town because otherwise i'd absolutely have been in wellington to protest her presence... it turned out that after the auckland rally she immediately left Aotearoa New Zealand. In Australia they weren't able to overwhelm the trans-phobes so it ended up being a rally protected by neo-nazis... Posie Parker isn't even a TERF because she's not a feminist, much less radical.

This shows that we can deny public space for hate.

So the two parts are mostly that the company is allowed to prioritize the workers, society, and environment equally or more than shareholder value. This is good, because otherwise it's illegal for a board of directors to choose anything over shareholder value. You end up with all sorts of bend over backwards ways of saying, well, long term if we don't kill the planet, we'll be more valuable. Or treating society well will come back to benefit our brand, and therefore we can do it for shareholder value and not just because it's the right thing to do.

The second part is we're required to produce a report on our impact and how well we're doing at enacting our public benefit. Technically that report just needs to be filed with the state and shared with employees and shareholders. But most publish it publicly.

The other side of public benefit corporations are b-corp certification, which is like being organic or fair trade certified. To do that an outside organization does an audit and checks to see if the company meets a rigorous set of requirements. It's a somewhat expensive and time consuming process, so we're not going to do it just now, but i hope we'll be able to in the future.

@trav So tumblr is interesting, because i felt like it was long gong. But my teenage kids now use tumblr every day and love it. No platform has been able to come back like that, but there's a first time for everything.

Of course it's public: https://github.com/planetary-social/oasis

Why not go to one of the social centers for a meeting? Perhaps Tarnac in France or Forte Prenestino in Rome?

You're moving to Scotland! That's huge. Edinburgh's nice. And when Scotland leaves the UK for the EU, you'll get to go along with the move!

So scuttlebutt started out as the name of the protocol, then there was a second version, secure scuttlebutt, does that mean @andrestaltz is making super secure scuttlebutt? SSSB?

Yeah, it's really impressive... finally due to the good work of @boreq on #scuttlego. I strongly encourage folks looking at building ssb apps to look at scuttlego as a core. It's good.

@Garth, we're about to release the updated planetary using scuttlego to testflight. I'd love if you gave it a try.

I'm not sure if this fits what you're looking for @bobhaugen but last year i saw that the federation of intentional communities was looking for tech people to work on their website and apps.

There's also the platform cooperatives movement and in general worker coops. Scuttlebutt's got roots in enspiral which a network for social change and new models of economic cooperation. Originally enspiral was based in New Zealand but now the network is as active in Europe as it is in New Zealand and Australia.

I've seen a lot of BS companies but towns really sticks out. They just raised $25 million in VC funding.

"Towns [is] for online communities to build better hometowns on the internet by allowing members to self-moderate and govern private spaces powered by a fully decentralized, end-to-end encrypted, and user-owned group chat protocol."

But when you look at the code, and read the docs, it's just matrix! They added crypto currency pixie dust, user accounts can be verified with an NFT, they've made a smart contract to list who's in what room, and a kind of voting DAO to make decisions for the town server. But it doesn't make any sense.

Everything is actually just on the matrix server. So whoever runs that, has all the same power as a fediverse server. They can honor the DAO's decisions and let in who the NFTs say should be members. But it's just postgres, so if the admin didn't want to follow the crypto stuff, they can just ignore it.

You shouldn't be getting unknown message when you try and post. Can you go report this as an issue via the help and support functionality on the sidebar which opens when you tap on your profile image in the upper left hand corner of the app.

The most magical thing was the way the little kids reacted to the cello! Pure joy.

You should talk to @boreq as he has to implement ebt to get it working in scuttlego and wrote some docs. More docs would be greatly appreciated.

So i understand how patchwork requires you to do the permission to install unsigned app because ssbc has no paid account with apple. But Manyverse does, because its needed for the ios version. So why isn't the mac manyverse desktop app just signed and approved and distributed optionally through the appstore? My guess is that it's a devops task nobody's taken on, but it'd be nice.

I see the images now too!

...brought the community together rooted in both running code and shared values. Lastly @Dominic creating scuttlebutt and secure scuttlebutt in the first place.

The ending of active development of both Manyverse and Planetary, marks an end of an era. Both apps, like patchwork, continue to work. They’re open source, so anybody can step up a fork or make PR’s and contribute. When it comes to planetary, if we do get contributions, we’re happy to push out updated releases. We’re not shutting the app down or locking the repo like happened with patchwork. We’ll continue to run the associated cloud services as long as we’re able and they don’t become security or safety issues.

The communities using ssb can continue for a long time. Either waiting for new devs who want to take up the mantle or on the apps as they are. Scuttlebutt has always been an experiment, and is about more than a specific protocol or set of libraries. I’m sure that the communal effort to create a social media commons will continue. The future is one we’ll build together. We see increasing connections and collaboration between projects, like the way p2basel was not just a purely scuttlebutt event.

I look forward to talking to, collaborating with, and learning from all of you for years to come. I want to thank everybody who's been a part of making scuttlebutt what it is. In particular @andrestaltz for making manyverse, @mixmix for both the software contributions and also being the connector that

The primary benefits that we saw in #nostr were these:

• There is no strong enforcement of message order with the signed log, clients just sign individual messages which are casually sorted via timestamp. This means some messages might not be kept around, but it makes syncing a bit harder and creating and consuming feeds much easier. Using relay servers and casual ordering means that Nostr users see updates faster than is possible with ssb.
• The cloud hosting of your content is intentional vs the way scuttlebutt has an uneasy relationship with pubs. With Nostr users choose where their data is hosted and that gives them more agency and control.
• Delete, edit, and ephemeral messages are easy because we’re not trying to validate the entire log. All of our user research showed that users want the autonomy of control over their data, and central to that is delete and edit. Even when they know their delete requests might not be honored everywhere.
• It’s easier to build on nostr, there’s more development happening, and a willingness to write specs. We’ve seen wave after wave of enthusiastic ssb dev’s give up because our protocol is too hard to work with.

I’ve always thought, and occasionally said, that if something better came along, we’d switch planetary over to it. I thought that p2panda and earthstar would be it, but although super interesting, both evolved in ways that weren’t a great fit for the kind of social app that planetary, manyverse, and patchwork provide users.

I then thought that @paul and @arcalinea would come up with a good successor protocol out of the bluesky project. The at_protocol is interesting, but the entire bluesky project is moving slow and I think the press and abundance of attention focused on it has made their job much harder.

Which brings us to Nostr… We made an evaluation to see if we can make an app and protocol which fits our mission, vision, and values.

Nostr

Anybody who joins Nostr will quickly see that its early adopter community has a very different set of values and social norms from Scuttlebutt’s. It’s full of bitcoin bros (or as they like to call themselves, “maximalists”). But the thing is, I was never building tools just for solarpunk anarchists. I was building tools where a multitude of communities could each establish their own self-governing commons. By definition those tools will include many communities which are not mine, or where I wouldn’t feel welcome.

Nostr, with it’s open relays, is functionally very similar to scuttlebutt with its open pubs and rooms. Neither have the web of social trust that makes the intimate scuttleverse work. But in work to make scuttlebutt more open, accessible, and pluralistic, I’ve setup a ton of public rooms and pubs. These have helped people join the network and find community.

While nostr is not a purely pull model like ssb, there can be protections of users, for example the nostr model does let you push content to a user, but only if they read from a relay the pusher is publishing to. And many nostr clients display a global view, of all content they can find. This has lead to a bunch of spam on nostr, but i think if scuttlebutt had gotten attention we’d be seeing more spam on any open pub or room.

If we can make a way for users of nos.social to create their own communities, governed as a commons, that meets our vision, mission, and values, then that’s the actual point. And i think we can do that by introducing a bunch more solutions that come from many projects including ssb. Relays are nodes which can provide a more federated governance model than what we see in SSB, but also provides for user autonomy to have multiple personas than is possible in the fediverse.
I think there’s a reason why many of the post ssb signed log gossipy social media protocols have gone from purely peer to peer to a hub and spoke model of content hosting. We’ve got easy cheap cloud computing, we should use it instead of making our phones work overtime.

Scuttlebutt Community

What does this mean for planetary and the scuttlebutt community? We’re focusing on another protocol. We’ll keep planetary as a scuttlebutt app, supporting the existing rooms and pubs. We’re releasing a big update with #scuttlego this week. It wraps up the projects we started 6 months ago to make planetary as a scuttlebutt app work better. For example, I can now send people to rabble.nz and from that they can see something about me and #scuttlego me on any ssb app.

With this shift, we’re going to wind down funding of scuttlebutt. The funding of many ssb projects and several scuttlebutt gatherings is something we did to build out the larger ecosystem. And a lot of good came out of that. But I’m running a mission driven public benefit corporation with limited resources.

Some of the scuttlebutt projects we funded:

• Scuttlecamp 2018 - travel, staffing, venue, etc..
• dweb camp 2019 - paid for travel for butts to attend
• dweb camp 2022 - paid for travel for butts to attend
• p2basel 2023 - paid for travel for butts to attend
• @Christian Bundy - Provided salary for undirected development on open source ecosystem
• @cryptix - Provided salary for development of go-ssb in to a second full ssb implementation to compliment js ssb.
• @boreq - Funded the development on both go-ssb and also the creation of a new ssb sdk in scuttlego.
• @mixmix & @chereseeriepa - Funded building a ssb pub using ssb-db2 with a graphql interface and a updated version of the web viewer with formalization of PublicWebHosting spec.
• Funding through Open Collective of many ssb projects including patchfox, manyverse, ssb maintenance, peach cloud, and others.

Here's my #strategy2023 post. I’ve been working on Scuttlebutt and Planetary for the last 4 years. In that time I’ve met a ton of interesting people, joined a community, contributed back to that community, launched a company and built a scuttlebutt app, planetary.social.

Before i get in to strategy and plans, I wanted to share again the mission, vision, and values around which we’ve built planetary.

🧭 Mission

To make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind.

Planetary is a place where communities can exist and grow through self organization and self ownership, in an environment that promotes creativity, playfulness, and a healthy commons.

🔭 Vision

We do this through building tech tools for a radically better world of social liberation and connection. Tech that treats humans as people not commodities and optimizes for health not engagement. We defend choice in who and what content you are connected to, with open source programming that allows you to contribute to the app design and your own algorithms, and transparency. A digital space governed by a commons, liberated from state and private ownership, because the digital space belongs to all of us.

⚖️ Values

• Sustainability
• Plurality
• Culture of accountability
• Autonomy
• Humanity
• Self Organization
• Self Ownership
• Decentralization
• Localism
• Agency and Trust

The mission of our company isn’t to build the best scuttlebutt app. We’ve got broader goals, and we need to periodically look the work we’re doing to make sure we’re doing our best to advance the mission, vision, and values.

In our research on what social media needed as part of Planetary, a bunch of things around ssb really work: its mutual aid model of content hosting is great, the follow graph is really effective at diffusing flamewars and abuse. The offline-first nature of SSB is also really nifty, but I increasingly wonder if that is holding SSB back.

In particular the core implementations scuttlebutt were clunky and it was hard to run them on phones. The way phones are walled off from the rest of the internet is also a big problem. So we first took the go-ssb code which wasn’t fully working, and continued developing it. Then more recently decided it needed a radical restructuring so we made scuttlego. The new planetary builds with scuttlego work really well, it feels snappy the way patchwork does.

Another core thing i wanted to tackle is how to find your people. How to discover individuals and communities that you want to talk to. At the moment, scuttlebutt is both a social space and technology. The social space is tightly interconnected and if you’ve got values which align with the solarpunk vibe, then it works great. But if you’re wanting to talk about different things, with different kinds of people, then it doesn’t feel like it’s for you.

To fix that i did many experiments including topical pubs, automatically connecting planetary users to a service pub, and most recently a web viewer paired with rooms. You can see it live at https://planetary.name. These community servers help people connect, discover their people, have visibility on to the larger web, and create a potential boundary around which a commons governance model can be built. It’s a bit of a hack, overloading features on top of scuttlebutt which is supposed to be a flat network, but needs this extra layer. Other protocols like at_protocol, chatternet, nostr, and farcaster do a better job of explicitly using multiple servers to be delegated hosts of content and be a place for shared moderation to happen.

Even with our work of room+pub+viewer that we’ve launched, there is a lot of stuff in scuttlebutt which makes it hard for me to recommend it to friends. It’s slow, the model is confusing, but most importantly, there is no delete and it is basically impossible to use the same identity on multiple devices. There are more technical stumbling blocks that we haven’t found a way to address. There are a bunch of other things which are preventing scuttlebutt from realizing it’s potential. It was designed first and foremost as a tool to run on computers not phones. When we try and move to the mobile environment, we get the advantages of always being with people, integrated camera, and the ability to do local mesh syncing via hotspot pubs or directly. This is all held back by fundamental design features in scuttlebutt like needing a whole log, not being able to see information about a user without finding and parsing all their about messages, and the coming but not yet ready private groups are major stumbling blocks.

For developers implementing an app on ssb is hard because of several things. First the custom RPC layer is ssb only, the libraries tend to use custom databases and a model of pull streams that aren’t well known, and there’s a lot to figure out.

Secure Scuttlebutt has a lot holding it back and we should learn from it without feeling obligated to provide backwards compatibility. This is the same conclusion that Andre has made as he looks to go to ssb2. It’s also the decision that lead to the development of earthstar, p2panda, moderator, chatternet, nostr, farcaster, and the at_protocol. So many people have looked at ssb and decided there’s something very interesting there, but also limitations.

The work on metafeeds, new feed formats, fusion identities, edits, delete, and private groups is all important but the progress is very slow because of the legacy use and implementations that we carry. The signing of the entire log makes everything harder and for what I want to build doesn't provide much value. The offline first stuff is cool, but rarely used and also makes everything harder.

Pivoting away from scuttlebutt

The big 2023 news for me is that we’re taking code and ideas from planetary and pivoting off of SSB. The planetary app isn’t going away, in fact we’re about to push a major update using scuttlego which is improves the performance and experience. But we’re focusing new work on a new app, derived from planetary called nos.social. At the start of the year @Matt Lorentz wrote up a comparison between Scuttlebutt and Nostr.

I didn't realize that managemyhealth.co.nz was a national thing. I somehow thought it was some service just my GP used.

I do like how integrated the medical system is here in comparison to the US. So much simpler and easier to navigate.

Cool, sorry if i rambled on. Yeah i think it's a good idea to have list of behavior that apps and app developers agree to in order to be listed as acknowledge / promoted ssb apps. I also think we should ask a similar thing of pubs / room admins.

I wasn't aware that EBT now honors blocks, that's fantastic, it's been a nagging stress that we weren't doing the right thing there. @boreq recently implemented EBT in scuttlego and that hadn't come up.

I think this an interesting thread. I believe that scuttlebutt as a protocol does already function as a commons. If perhaps not a well governed one. What i think would be more interesting is to look at how users of scuttlebutt could create multiple commons. When it comes to scuttlebutt as a protocol's commons, remember a commons isn't an utopian autonomous zone without money, commerce, or even elements of private property. A commons is an economic resource, in this case our digital social / public sphere, which isn't owned by either a sovereign state or a private organization. We want one which is well run and meets the needs of the members.

This is similar to the common misconception that free and open source software can't be sold or used commercially. Odd as it may seem, it's not anti-capitalist. People feel that google's use of open source code in the training of machine learning algorithms is unfair, but to me the only problem is that they haven't released the models under an open license compatible with the code used in the first place.

I think @elavoie has a good idea that we should be looking at the code and how it works. Right now users think they have much more privacy and protection than they do.

@Geoffrey i couldn't find a thread just about the code of conduct, so i'll give some feedback here. First off, thanks for writing it, putting out a proposal, and asking for feedback. My response here is perhaps to bombastic, so please don't take it as a personal attack to you or your work. It's more venting my frustration about how this community can make lofty and righteous claims and demands of others without looking at their own work and seeing if it is consistent with their stated values.

The code of conduct thing seems like a well intentioned but misguided. There are some good ideas in here and some terrible ones. Making explicit expected behavior of people within ssb is good, but this feels like it's written for a particular kind of centralized service and threat model.

In terms of a couple specifics, I don't think that we should say that as our decentralized humane peer to peer solar punk community it's important that we strictly follow the law... not sure what law... but i know there are lots of people on scuttlebutt who's very existence and relationships are illegal, sometimes punishable by death. Should we follow Uganda's law that states if you know of a queer person you must report them to the police? If i'm queer and post on scuttlebutt in uganda am i violating the scuttlebutt code of conduct? What about if a straight person with ssb goes there, there are so many queer people on ssb, it's likely they have evidence of their illegal sexuality and gender, and under Ugandan law, there is a sick kind of mandatory reporting. What's lawful is far from what most of us would consider moral. Almost all social change comes from committing unlawful acts.

As a less extreme example, in 2020 I made many posts about participating in black lives matter protests in Portland. These protests were illegal. The city imposed a curfew, declared most of our gatherings to be a riot, sometimes hours before we even gathered, banning protests, and there were literally government agents driving around in unmarked white vans kidnapping people off the street, holding them in secret locations, and questioning them. I posted pictures from those protests, documenting why i was committing unlawful acts on scuttlebutt.

So if we shouldn't follow the law of every country with transphobic and homophobic laws, or 'freedom loving country' like the United States... which laws are we supposed to follow?

In Germany every scuttlebutt user is required by law to register with the state government a data broker to handle GDPR requests. When you cross state lines in germany, with your phone, which is holding other people's personal data, under their GDPR laws, you're supposed to register a public name, address, and contact information for people to make GDPR requests to remove data from your phone.

User control over data sounds great, but in a system like scuttlebutt it works exactly the opposite way. We control what we say, but the protocol itself can't work with user control over data. In fact, it doesn't even do the simplest thing like respect users blocks. If i'm blocked by @elavoie and i connect to @Geoffrey and ask for @elavoie's feed, the patchwork standard js version of scuttlebutt that Geoffrey is running will happily ignore @elavoie's request to block me. The system as it's currently designed doesn't uphold the stated values of scuttlebutt, much less the proposed code of conduct. I think there's a desire to fix this, but we need to be careful what we ask for.

I didn't notice this when you posted it but i do plan to take a look when i have a bit of time. Thanks. I agree that it's an issue.

Thanks so much for everybody who organized this, i'm sorry i couldn't make it. I've been wondering about Martijn De Vos's TrustChain for a long time. It's one of those ssb adjacent protocols that seems interesting but i don't hear much about. Now i get to listen to a talk about it. Tons of new projects and ideas...

Well it's happened... twitter is down.... you can read tweets but can't post.... honestly i'm surprised it took so long for something to fail like this.

What one are you working on?

Looks like NZ Labour Party is going to try and drop most of the things that made the vulnerable leading up to the election at the end of the year. Given the polling, this seems like a prudent strategy. Especially as it happens with the new PM so there’s no need to defend old policies.

Here is what’s changing

devastating for rural Nigerians

Did anybody else know there was a serious plan to install a gay Prussian prince as king of the United States in the 1780’s before the US constitution was written? This would have made history class much more interesting if they’d talked bout this. This was apparently something the federalists considered as a real option.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_scheme

I'm so sorry to hear that. A really hard year. When i have negative things piling up on me like that my mom always reminds me that we don't really know what's happening until later. What feels great might not turn out to be great, what feels terrible might not turn out that way. So we just need to breath, take things in perspective, and take the next step forward.

@epk I'm not sure what the link is because it appears that it's from somebody who's blocked me.

There's a ton of interesting work in local first and privacy preserving ML. The best stuff is by this group called open mined who have both courses and code to use. Apple also does lots of interesting work where you can do the ML on device. I think the solution for ssb isn't to avoid ML, but rather do it in the right way.

@Kiama Scuttlebutt isn't but ahau which is built on scuttlebutt is an autonomous maori created an run network. Ahau doesn't use the same root network keys as most scuttlebutt apps so the data doesn't sync between them.

That sounds so intense, i'm glad it ended ok. And i bet your kids never open a door on the traffic side of the car again!

@epk, the code for the hubs was written by @mixmix and @chereseeriepa and you can see it all here:

• updated version of go-ssb-room: https://github.com/planetary-social/go-ssb-room
• scuttlebutt pub using db2 and serving graphql: https://github.com/planetary-social/planetary-graphql
• frontend viewer which provides a social hub ui front end the room + pub: https://github.com/planetary-social/rooms-frontend

There was no spec for what scuttlebutt content should or should not be displayed on the web, so we wrote a spec. In case you're wondering, here's the code where we implement the spec. We also added support to ssb-about-self for PublicWebHosting.

I will say this, i'm excited about the private groups work that @andrestaltz is coordinating because trusting PublicWebHosting and that everybody accessing the network is a risky assumption.

It would be cool if we migrated planetary-graphql to be part of the general ssbc family of libraries, with a new name. I think a lot of scuttlebutt apps could be built quickly using ssb-db2 and a graphql interface.

As @Matt Lorentz says, the name hub is a place holder, we're not sure what the right name... because this is room + pub + opt in viewer + name server. The vision is quite distinct from what Andre was thinking when he made rooms. The pub part is set to only replicate room members and nobody else.

I'm going, looking forward to it!

That's a good idea. I've posted it as an issue so we can put it in the backlog of things to do.

come to ArtHack that @mikey organizes every thursday evening.

Toilets in Aotearoa New Zealand

I moved to Aotearoa New Zealand a year ago, and one thing which has really blown my mind is the public toilets. This is a country with amazing toilets. Seriously... they're works of art, sculpture, an ode to people's humanity and needs. Some sing to you, or play music, others are playful, or serious... many feel like they are sculpture worth seeking out as a destination.

They're amazing. I want to make a website which highlights the toilets as people take pictures of them and encourages people to go on tours of them!

Anybody know of a site that combines maps / geographic exploration with photo galleries? Seems like this should be a known design pattern.

im0qDk4ny1pT8-dLFB8sdTIizFDj2MMJZ681z3nQWfA.webp

welcome to the #scuttleverse! Post something with #new-people to introduce yourself.

I agree that we need to set better expectations... and better syncing... it's a work in progress.

@cblgh you're coming to visit wellington! I'd love to catch up... also i've got a guest room if you need a place to stay that's walkable in central wellington.

I'm not sure if it's still an issue, but for a while manyverse wasn't syncing with legacy replication and ssb-pub didn't work with the newer ebt replication that manyverse and other ssb apps have adopted. This might be what you're seeing. Patchwork supports both legacy and ebt so it can act as a bridge.

world

Married oligarchs can't either!

Reflecting on 2022 and #appreciation2022

What a year it's been. This year marked a return to being able to have a fully funded team building planetary. We've been able to make an app which felt like it had promise to something now which feels pretty good. I want to thank @Matt Lorentz who's taken the lead in so much of the planetary development. @Sebastian Heit who's driven the design work with such care. @Martín Dutra who's dug through the code fixing thousands of bugs and most recently rewrote the frontend in swiftui. @boreq upgraded our #go-ssb and then took on the monumental task of making a new implementation of secure scuttlebutt, #scuttlego. On the product side, we've had great support from @Linda, @amandabee, and @Daniel Onren Latorre all of whom have helped make sense scuttlebutt to non-technical users. And also to Shaina who manages the logistics at planetary and was critical to getting a lot of butts to california for the dweb camp. Recently we've started working some with @mixmix, @chereseeriepa, and @ZACH ALSO! and it's been great. Especially because for me it gives me a chance to work with people who are also based in Aotearoa New Zealand. Lastly, I want to apologize to @nichoth. I'm thankful for your contributions and I should have done better in our working together.

I appreciate the larger community we've got here amongst users and creators of scuttlebutt. I admire and appreciate @andrestaltz for all the tremendous work in building manyverse. @nonlinear for taking the time to talk and work out design across the scuttlebutt ecosystem. @Luandro Pàtwy for all of your amazing projects. I appreciate @cel for all of their work especially the DID stuff, and @keks & @cryptix for giving us go-ssb and @decentral1se for taking up the go mantel. To @glyph and @notplants for sheparding forward so many projects like peachcloud. To @elavoie for exploring new cooperative economic models and doing the unfun work of sustaining the orgs. To @KawaiiPunk for being a wonderful freaky person, to @Aljoscha for quietly building out new ways of doing the lowest level work, and @cft for taking the scuttlebutt tech seriously and researching it. Lastly @Dominic for creating a project that has thrived beyond his own leadership, that's huge.

Reflecting

This has been a big year for me. I was able to go back to working on planetary full time, with a team of people. We've spent the year fixing things, we upgraded to the latest version of go-ssb and then built a restructured go scuttlebutt implementation in scuttlego. We fixed a thousand bugs.... ok only 300, but it felt like 1000. We added support for EBT, rooms, and a tons of other innovations from manyverse and the broader community. And we recently created a new service which doesn't have a name but which works as a kind of rooms + viewer + light groups. I wish we'd gotten so much more done, there's so much interesting to explore. But in order to do fun interesting things we've got to make sure we've got a solid foundation. Scuttlego should help others build new ssb apps, and the new viewer and ssb graphql end point should make making web ssb apps a lot easier.

I've heard giving kids a floppy disk is a fun way to create a physical version of the save icon!

So i think buttwoo and by extension metafeeds will give us what we need. It's implemented but not rolled out in the ssb-js stack but not yet in the go stack. I think if we built a bridge which used those then it'll be worth doing.

Welcome to the #scuttleverse! Find some rooms / pubs and people.

Podcast - Walter Isaacson: History of Social Media

A couple months ago before Elon Musk took over twitter I was interviewed for Walter Isaacson's Trailblazers podcast to talk about social media. It's always hard to tell how much of these interviews will be used. Sometimes you talk for hours and then they only use a soundbite. For example they sent a film crew to my house for a full day of interviews for what became part of Rise of the Billionaires but i'm not sure if i was in it at all... Or all of our experience with the Forbes article, some folks spent a lot of time talking to the journalist without seeming to have much effect on the arc of the story.

This time I think the story arc and message of Social media: keeping up with communities:
Host Walter Isaacson and guests discuss the evolution of social media and the challenges on the horizon. is really good. It tracks the origins of social media in the 70's and how it was noncommercial and community run through the emergence of startups which became huge companies, and how the struggle to reclaim the commons. I like how indymedia got a mention as well. They don't mention scuttlebutt by name, but talk a fair amount at the end about planetary and how it's part of an open ecosystem based on free software and open protocols.

I feel incredibly humbled and lucky to be able to have this kind of platform. I hope that I'm using it that empowers a larger community of people working together to build a better world together. It's a tricky balance using my own story and the connection to twitter because it can become more about ego and fame, but it's also leverage I can use to help the larger effort. I like the framing that we're struggling to create a community built and controlled commons that existed in the past but was enclosed by private companies and controlled by a few billionaires.

Here's another minimal ssb-server using ssb-db2 implementation: https://github.com/planetary-social/planetary-graphql/blob/main/src/ssb-server.js

We also have it serving graphql, but you don't need that part.

That's so frustrating. I just submitted an updated version of Planetary for the AppStore, i'm curious about the encryption thing. As far as I know we haven't submitted or been asked to submit something.

It's not reassuring that they released this PDF in a form that only adobe's own pdf reader can open!

I'm curious what the answers are, because the questions don't make much sense to me through google translate.

Ok, i've gone in and blocked them from the planetary pubs.

I love having a real keyboard as well, i'm looking forward to us having fusion identities so we can link devices as a single identity.

That alpaca looks like it's living far away from it's native Andean Altiplano.

You can get your keys in the settings of most apps. In the case of Planetary, the profile secret keys are stored in apple's keychain and if you use icloud or backup your phone to your device, it'll migrate with you to your new phone.

A go game on top of scuttlebutt wouldn't be that hard to build, there is the naming clash that #gossb is already a project, implementing scuttlebutt in go. ;-D

Charter of rights for the fediverse?

@blaine has written up a proposed charter of rights for the fediverse. Even though the #scuttleverse isn't federated or part of the #fediverse, it is closely aligned. In particular there's various services like pubs, rooms, viewers, and scuttlebutt apps where it's important to have a clear agreement about the collective project and obligations to our users.

Thoughts? @blaine is looking for feedback and suggestions on how to improve the charter.

Anybody interested in building a ssb <-> #fediverse #activitypub #gateway? it's been talked about for years. I'd love to see it happen. I've created a hackmd doc to help collect notes and look at options.

@zoo [planetary], we're planning on adding ssb uri support to planetary. I tried loading the qr code on my phone and it opened planetary but didn't take me to the right spot. So, there's more to do.

@Francis this is how Planetary works actually. You can see the binding code here: https://github.com/planetary-social/planetary-ios/tree/main/Source/GoBot

Basically we take the SSB message data and parse it, store one copy in a log go-ssb uses for replication and another in sql we use for the user facing app. There are some indexes for stuff in the go-ssb internal db, but we don't use it much.

Scuttlego will take it a step further and just store a key value store and leave it up to the app to decide the database.

Another option is the really slick graphql server that @chereseeriepa and @mixmix built on top of db2.

The way to steal bikes is driving a utility van and wearing a work uniform like you're a maintenance subcontractor. Turns out that if you've got the right look and are carrying a ladder, you can get in to all sorts of places.

Getting ready to host a birthday party tonight for several friends... honestly it's in one of those, how much cleaning there is to do type phases... it'll be fun later.

@andrestaltz📱 I strongly agree that we need to support Tor. I tried a few times to hack it in to planetary and then decided to take a break until Arti was released, tor rewrittten in rust. That happened in Steptember! What isn't ready is onion service support in Arti.

I agree rooms are a big step forward. But that reminds me to look at the ansible scripts and builds of go-ssb-rooms docker images so they do minimal ip address logging. Not having the data by default is good.

That's crazy you're still having flowers and 70° days.

@Chad Sarles aren't cybercafes just cafes with outlets and wifi? ;-D

Is Web3 bullshit? a talk from the Web Summit today by Molly White is the amazing creator of the Web3IsGoingGreat.

This is why i was thinking cross posting would make more sense once we have metafeeds. That way i could have a feed of 'microblogging' which you could follow, more posts, shorter, etc... and then my primary ssb feed with longer more discursive content.

Just flooding ssb with activity pub feeds would not be great.

It's not clear to me why you're proposing this. What's the point?

BIPF is a weird custom format, but it's not very complicated. Asking how hard it is to do buttwoo and other proposed formats in other languages is a good idea.

But why make a nearly identical but incompatible legacy feed encoding? We've already got to support the classic / legacy format as it is, why make a new one which is the same, but different?

In planetary in the 'dangerous and advanced settings' you can add a scuttlebutt key back and restore your account. Just make sure you synced fully before you so ANYTHING otherwise you'll fork your log.

We could build gateways. Yes. I think it's a good idea. It'd need to be something that users choose, like, this service will hold my ssb keys and also be oauth'd in to my activitypub server. It'll work better when scuttlebutt gets metafeeds because then just one of your ssb feeds can be your toots.

I think @arcalinea was working on one before she switched to doing bluesky. I'm not sure how far she got.

You find people through the network, pubs, or rooms.

I just created a test community with the join code of: ynsyxalywuhymtq2myvpqkc3aoyrexxvcqqf2v3vhzrmji4ckd5sliqd

@robinst interesting. several other people have also said they don't see timestamps for posts... this confuses me. When i use planetary i see the timestamps in the replies and for the message. Can you post a screenshot where it's not displaying the timestamps?

welcome

Yeah, it's a pain, metafeeds and fusion identities will fix it.

i see you, so it works.

We were advertising for one but we didn't find a good fit. More to the point, we haven't made it a priority because right now the experience with the iOS version isn't right. We need the engagement loop of a user joining, finding people they're interested in connecting with, being able to sync and get regular updates, and get their friends to join and find them.

The new stuff we're working on with with a web viewer for rooms should help with the engagement part. Then if it works, and things seem to be going well, we'll build the android version.

We'd always accept investment / donations of funds or time to build one sooner.

Should we stop using #github wiki's for secure scuttlebutt information?

It seems that sometime over the last year github has changed their policies and now block all search engines from the site through their robots.txt file. Apparently this has been going on for a while but I only noticed over the last few months as it got harder and harder to find things. Today i was reminded by it when i tried to find the page documenting open secure scuttlebutt rooms. I'm sure folks will be ok with public pubs being harder to find.

There's a service which scrapes github wiki pages and reposts them. It used to be that i could use github's own search engine to find wiki pages, but that seems to have change. Now i can't find things in code, wiki's, or other parts of a project. There's probably a spam problem github is trying to address, but i don't like how they're doing it.

Or we need to move documentation off of github wiki's and on to something we can edit and update in a collaborative way. What about a viewer pointing to a CDRT driven ssb updated wiki? I like how easy it is to update the ssbc wiki's.

Thoughts? I'm curious what @SoapDog things. Seems like we should move to pages or something self hosted.

We've seen a big spike in installs and usage for Planetary in the last week. We don't know all the usage because we only see users who have authorized logging to posthog. But apple's analytics show we had a big spike of over 600 downloads on the 28th of October and now we're looking at around 40 installs a day vs 10 previously.

The real issue will be, do these folks kicking the tires of scuttlebutt find people and community and stick around.

Weclome @Matt Johnson

@moid we're in the process of filing the public benefit conversion paperwork right now. It got delayed because we wanted to make sure we had enough money in the bank to make it worth it and because at the same time we're changing the company name from the original verse communications to planetary. And that involves refilling paperwork with a whole ton of government offices. We hadn't done it before because it was a bunch of work and we didn't have somebody to run the process.

Well now we know, a ton of people were laid off today, on Nov 5th. It's a slowly slowly then all at once thing it seems.

welcome back

Elon Musk Is the Lord of Twitter. We Are the Peasants

Time Magazine article by By Evan Greer

Worth checking out... here are some choice quotes:

In the kingdoms of Silicon Valley, we humble users have little choice but to seek out the most benevolent monarch we can find, start farming in the shadow of their castle, and hope for the best....

If we want a modern town square we can leave to our children and our children’s children, we need to build online spaces that can’t be owned or controlled by a single person, with tools to address harm, harassment, and injustice that give individuals and communities power over our own online experience....

People from marginalized communities face another major obstacle to online free speech: ubiquitous harassment, threats of violence, and hate filled content that leads to toxic online spaces where many people do not feel safe enough to express themselves. We’re often led to believe that the only solution to this is to demand that digital overlords use their near absolute power more responsibly, and do a better job policing harmful and harassing posts. In the short term, pushing for better, more transparent, and more evenly enforced content moderation is a valid harm reduction strategy....

No one knows what Lord Musk will do with Twitter tomorrow, or the next day. It’s time we start fighting for a future where our digital homes don’t tremble precariously on virtual land, controlled by mercurial billionaires.

It doesn't mention scuttlebutt but clearly it's a rally cry for what we're all building. I'm a big fan of Evan and the work of Fight for the Future. We're lucky they've got a platform like Time to talk about where we all need to be going.

@dbVhS3qTN That desk setup is amazing! So many plants.

Is social media a hive mind?

It's an interesting idea.

To understand how collective behavior can occur among selfish individuals, we might do well to start by looking at animal groups. Animal groups have a profound capability to accomplish collective action. Even if they’re unrelated and in competition. Schools of fish dazzle and evade predators. Flocks of birds navigate vast distances. Zebras trade off guard duty so they can take time off to eat.

The success of animal groups might seem to bode well for our potential to work on collective concerns. If they can do it, surely we can as well.

...we’ve learned how remarkably sensitive emergent behavior can be to the structure and nature of interactions between individuals. Changes to the network size or structure, altering how information is shared, or adding feedback tends to degrade collective behavior into failed states.

I think about this a lot when we talk about what we're doing with scuttlebutt. The structure of our connections matters a lot in terms of making an emergent healthy whole.

I know some folks want ssb to a fully flat network, but i think we need more formal nodes, private groups do it, room severs bring together a community as well. Pubs are a broken first version. Maybe there's something with federated + autonomy... kind of how matrix works both federated and direct peer to peer... A protocol that's self certifying, filtered by your peers, and lacks any singleton of control. Obviously twitter's got a lot of control, but just removing that isn't in and of itself a fix.

@Laura You can see the time when view the full view of messages. We used to show the timestamp more places but we felt like it put the focus on the wrong thing. One issue with twitter is that it was too focused on immediacy and didn't engage with older content. Scuttlebutt can surface and help you engage in content that's got a longer life than just the last few minutes.

I've been finding these last few days stressful as well. Last week i pushed a release without all the secrets set correctly and the zendesk support part of planetary didn't work nor did optional analytics logging to posthog. I also discovered that some of the planetary hosted pubs are offline. And we're seeing a ton of new users who are getting confused about how scuttlebutt works.

The appstore problem is frustrating. Because every time an app is submitted it might get caught by a reviewer who is has a different interpretation of the appstore rules. I wonder if the ability to report content to a room and then have a room maintained banned content list would meet apple's needs instead of a single universal way of removing content.

He claims this isn't true. Honestly it feels like we should take everything we hear about Musk and Twitter with a grain of salt. Not to say bad things won't happen, but there's a media circus and lots of spurious stories going around.

@elavoie i'm totally down with contributing back to the community assuming we can find a way that works for the company and community.

@Nico que asco hermano.

I'm excited to see these fixes get added back upstream to go-ssb. Thanks for doing this work.

Perhaps ask for one from dall-e? it's apparently good at making logos. :-D

Does #perihelion have a logo?

Welcome @Chief36!

I am excited to see the implosion of Meta. It's so bad, it's painful to watch, but it's also good for the world.

@andrestaltz yeah I didn't mean to imply that it was frivolous, more that it was a small change and i'd not gotten back to following up on it and i should have. Apologies.

There are a lot of points here, thanks for engaging and all of your work @andrestaltz. I feel like you're cherry picking. The major points that people brought up where they didn't want scuttlebutt to have an ICO or use a cryptocurrency. That was an idea we thought might make sense, but we adjusted. There was also concern that Planetary's code wasn't open source so that if it could be bought, it could be corrupted. The code is open source, the project management is open and transparent.

Folks have asked why we didn't hire scuttlebutt developers, but we did, we've paid scuttlebutt devs to do open source work including: @Christian Bundy, @cryptix, @nichoth, @mixmix, @chereseeriepa, and now @SoapDog to do documentation. I'm sure I could have done a better job as a manager, but that's a bunch of money which has gone in to the community. We definitely had roadmaps and goals, just like any software project including ones on ssb, but there was never a time when anybody was pushed to release or contribute something they thought wasn't also in the broader interests of ssb.

The one point @elavoie brings up is why doesn't planetary provide revenue or shares to the community. There's no community organization to give to. @Dominic proposed creating a new zealand scuttlebutt society at the scuttlecamp, but it was brought up without anybody knowing it was coming beforehand. When we asked to review documents, just that hurdle stopped the effort unfortunately. I believe there's a French society incorporated, but it's not being used, is it even for the NGI grants? Does it still exist? There's no clear decision making structure or transparency i've seen. It's not my job to organize the rest of the community in to some sustainable structure. Without that providing some shares is a moot point, you can't assign stock to a github org.

I do see the point, of you don't want people on your niche social network. Planetary supports multiple network keys. So does patchfox, ahau, and patchwork. As far as I know Manyverse is the only one which doesn't. We wanted to build on a larger community, contribute to it, so we used the primary network key for production releases. We've lost people in part because of how hard it is to use and stay connected and find your people on scuttlebutt. A couple of the people you quoted @andrestaltz are no longer active here at all, but checking, are active on Instagram. So despite their fears, in the end they chose a much more controlled corporate environment.

The last bit about pubs / rooms / hosting. Yes we want to make it easy to use to connect to people. We've experimented with a bunch of things, just as other ssb developers have done. Using a DHT is something @Dominic fundamentally opposed as both a breach of privacy and violation of the offline first nature of SSB, yet nobody said @andrestaltz was subverting scuttlebutt when he experimented with dht based peer-invites.

I think rooms are interesting, I like how they provide better connectivity and also an identity service. When manyverse dropped support for legacy replication and pub's the only way to maintain compatibility was to add support for EBT and rooms. We've been paying @mixmix to work on fixing some of these bugs in EBT/legacy on code we don't even really use in Planetary.

My thoughts on rooms are this, we need ways for to connect, for presenting an identity, so you can say, i'm rabble.nz on scuttlebutt. I want a page which i can control or a friend can control which can be used as a bridge for people to connect to me in the scuttleverse. I think i should be able to tell the room i'm using, that they can display some of my content, either just my profile, or info about my following, or even posts. Being able to see information about a user is a valuable way of telling if you want to start following them. That's why we built an optional extension for rooms for this. It doesn't display content if the user hasn't given permission either directly to the room or via setting publicWebHosting to true. I hope many people run rooms with a paired graphql/viewer and that server only hosts some of the content from those room members. This is of course all opt in. Choose your room, choose to set an alias, choose to allow some of your content to presented to the web.

This is all stuff that we've seen is needed in our user research. It's stuff that came up as an issue in the manyverse ux research, it's stuff that @nonlinear has found is an issue as well. It's fine that manyverse doesn't suggest pubs or rooms, i think it adds an unnecessary barrier to participation. In fact we see tons of non-planetary users joining the planetary hosted pubs, so clearly there's a need. We also see a lot of manyverse users relying on the one hermies.club room sever, it doesn't host content, but it does have ip addresses logged and acts as a single point of connection as we saw when it went down a while back.

Personally i think it's better to provide users with an updated list of open servers ( pubs / rooms ) that users can choose from rather than having them choose what google returns or follow the link to the wiki like patchwork does.

@epk I've seen your posts but we haven't interacted much. What happened with the viewer was a my mistake. In this commit, I switched from our forked ssb-db2 to the primary one. I forgot that my PR for ssb-db2 to add support for checking PublicWebHosting hadn't gotten merged because of some back and forth on code style. The ssb-db2 code only got the ability to index / filter based on PublicWebHosting when @mixmix got his PR for the same thing merged on Sept 21st.

It was a bug, a mistake, and the viewer was taken offline within a few minutes when it was pointed out. We also realized there wasn't any spec or documentation on PublicWebHosting except in code and ssb messages, so we wrote a spec.

This kind of gets to my point. Nobody documented PublicWebHosting as a spec, ssb-db2 didn't support respecting it, we added support for that, and wrote the docs. Yes there was an accidental reversion, but it was fixed as soon as anybody discovered it. We're people, we're here, you can talk to us. Somehow in one paragraph you referrer to me several times, each time as if i'm a different person in a giant mega corp. If i honestly didn't respect norms would i have written the first implementation to respect it? Would i have made the PR, would i have worked on the documentation?

At some point somebody's going to write a bot that ignores publicWebHosting and intentionally makes everything visible to google. It won't be Planetary, which is an open source, public benefit company working to advance an digital commons. It'll be somebody, like the NSFW WARNING gay furry porn spammer NSFW WARNING who's setting about messages for tons of other users to gay furry porn avatars, or NSFW WARNING the pro-islamic state scuttlebutt users NSFW WARNING. Neither of those are using planetary, they're blocked from all planetary pubs. In the case of the Islamic State account, we went farther and I believe, its the only content along with @powersource that's blocked so it's impossible to even view the feeds on the planetary app. If you want bad behavior, look at these folks, (not powersource), and realize they don't care. If we can't build systems that prevent these kinds of abuse, then that is will what will kill scuttlebutt. It's a LOT of what has driven away tons of users and developers over the years.

About Me

I don't expect you to look up my background, but before you jump to assumptions about who I am, let me tell you a big. I build my own house off the grid out of recycled paper. I have been involved in anarchist social movements since the early 1990's, and I've started a number of worker coops. I'm a big believer in democracy, engagement, and rough consensus. If you want to know my background, and the work I've done, look at all the interviews I've done about projects with various academics on google scholar.



Things like:


• Activism, acceleration, and the humanist aporia: Indymedia intensified in the age of neoliberalism
• [The wiki way: Prefiguring change, practicing democracy](https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8hHTDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA327&dq=evan+henshaw-plath&ots=X7NmlsZp4d&sig=Vk8tOaHemG-aULRMqNoj2VJCIlA0
• Reconstructing the Internet: How Social Justice Activists Contest Technical Design in Cyberspace: Geeks and Global Justice
• Disarticulate the state! Maximizing democracy in “new” autonomous movements in the Americas
• To one I wrote myself, From Indymedia to Tahrir Square: The Revolutionary Origins of Status Updates on Twitter

There are a couple hundred others.

Planetary is a company. Today most of the world exists within the capitalist system. I'm choosing to work within that system to try and effect change. Is it the most effective way of changing the world? How the hell should I know! I'm just one person trying to do my part. Working within this system is a tricky game, it's got upsides that maybe I'll be successful and make money, probably it'll fail. What I know for sure is that I'm not particularly interested in purity.

The world is messy.
Humanity is messy.
Culture is messy.
Technology is messy.
Social change is messy.

Nobody's perfect. No project is perfect. There is no one right way to do things. What I do know for sure is that I'm perfectly ok if you're a better anarchist than me.

About Planetary and Scuttlebutt

I think it's important to exist and be part of a larger community. Planetary hasn't forked scuttlebutt because we think it's better to be part of an open ecosystem. We've done a bunch of supporting people directly and indirectly. Lately folks have asked we be more explicit and we started regular donations to OC. It's not how our accountants want us to do things, but it does provide better transparency to the community.

Planetary links to other scuttlebutt apps from our website, we mention them in our App Store description, and I mention the other apps when talking the media. No other scuttlebutt project or app mentions planetary. I'd like to say I don't care, but it bothers me. On top of that, there's a general antagonism towards me and Planetary. It makes me feel like this is a community which doesn't want my contributions and I should go to look at switching planetary to use p2panda, nostr, or at protocol. We're not looking to change protocols. We've made a lot of contributions of open source scuttlebutt code. In the end, I care more about having an impact and changing the world than the particulars of what tools we need to do it.

If this community can't accept someone who's been doing solar punk, anarchist, and cooperative organizing for decades, then how will it accept contributions from the breath of society with people who have all sorts of other backgrounds, histories, and values? Where is the pluralism and inclusivity? I'm not building something for a few folks who want an edgy subculture. I want to build tools for radical transformation of society.

Planetary and the scuttlebutt community

It's been a while since I talked about how Planetary works. It's totally reasonable folks want to know, and understand the role of companies in the SSB ecosystem. I feel like Planetary gets more than it's fair share of ill will from the community.

There are a bunch of companies in the scuttlebutt ecosystem, some are not on the ssb mainnet, but contribute back to the code base like Ahau. A bunch are cryptocurrency projects which are using the code and protocol and not even contributing back code. Nobody seems to care about them.

I'm not sure why planetary seems to draw so much ire, honestly I find it frustrating.

Who is behind Planetary?

It should take you about a minute to find out who the planetary investors are but if you don't want to use google, look at crunchbase. For the last year most of planetary's funding has come through development contracts with Hard Yaka. Basically I do work for them and take that money to fund planetary. Hard Yaka's been amazingly generous in supporting Planetary, it's how we flew people to dweb camp, and pay salaries and expenses to build planetary. They've not pushed planetary to do one thing or another, it's been hands off no strings attached money. That said, I like them, I am glad for their support, and we may use tech or do business with one of the 175 other companies they've also funded. If it makes sense for Planetary, we'll definitely consider working with them over competitors who didn't provide us support.

In the United States there are only two legal classes of organization. A corporation, and the government. I know this isn't the case in other countries, but everything is a corporation in the US. Non-Profits (NGOs) are legally corporations without owners, clubs are corporations with specific rules, trusts are corporations, foundations are corporations, even political parties and campaigns are corporations with a different tax status. Even organized crime is considered an unincorporated corporation. In America, legally, corporations are it.

So, planetary is a corporation. We're incorporated in Delaware, which is where most US corporations are based. We're becoming a public benefit corporation, meaning we are legally allowed to make decisions for the good of workers, the environment, and society instead of just maximizing shareholder value. There are also other requirements, like stating our public benefit, and creating reports about it. Oddly Delaware public benefit corporations don't need to publish their bi-annual reports publicly, but most do. A public benefit corporation is still a corporation, because in America, everything is a corporation.

Planetary Shares

Planetary's got a couple classes of shares, there's investors, employees, and super voting founders shares. My shares are the ones which have 20x voting rights. Meaning as long as the company has funds to operate, and I want to keep doing it, nobody can vote me out. This is the same structure that Snapchat and Meta have.

What did the investors hope to get out of putting money in to Planetary? Well because they're investing as corporations, who are legally obliged to try and make as much money as possible, their stated reason is officially to make a bunch of money. I think they are hoping to make money, that's how they keep going, but they know that it's incredibly unlikely that Planetary becomes successful. I think mostly they invested because they don't like what Facebook has done to the world and wanted to be able to say they're doing something about it.

Before I arranged dev contracts from Hard Yaka, planetary had very little money, it was in debt actually. The investors said to shut it down, they didn't think it was worth anything, and were perfectly happy to write it off as a loss. Now when I write them, they're pleased to see that the company exists, and offer encouraging words, but that's about it. At this point, if I shut it down, they wouldn't even expect a phone call, an email would be enough to inform them that the company failed and I lost their money.

If planetary becomes successful, then they'd be very interested in getting their cut of the company, but it's not something they expect to happen.

If planetary runs out of money, and I want to keep paying people, then no amount of share holder agreements will protect my control over the company. That's the real leverage. Super voting shares, board seats, and all of that only matters if you've got the financial strength to survive independently.

How does planetary work as a company?

We are a very flat organization. We rotate the jobs of running meetings, and cooperatively set our priorities in sprint planning. There are times that I as a team member do push hard for things I think are important, but other people do as well. As a company, we're obligated to follow US employment law, that means when somebody isn't working out to the team, we can't talk about it publicly or vote somebody to be let go. As the executive of the corporation, we're obliged to follow US employment law.

When it comes to control of a company like planetary, the point is that we shouldn't be building a system that relies on the trust and good will of individuals who hold power. Planetary is open source because we think that having access and rights to the code is important. I'm not a huge fan of the GPL, and less of Richard Stallman, but I have been using and contributing to free software my entire adult life.

I think that people's individual values, culture, identity, and morals do matter. But in many ways institutions also matter, they shape our behavior and we acculturate to them. If you're living in a a squatted social center you're shaped by different forces than if you are an executive at a multinational corporation or working a minimum wage retail job. The problem with a few people controlling social media platforms isn't the people in control are bad people, the problem is that it's a kind of power that shouldn't be held by a few people.

Personally I'm inspired by organizations that are emergent, where people can have ownership of their projects and take initiative. I like the company we keep about converting companies to coops, and books / projects like better work together. I'm also a fan of platform coops and building a post-capitalist commons. Part of why I moved to New Zealand was to be closer to enspiral which is how I found out about scuttlebutt and is a group of people rethinking the future of work and business and social change. I haven't engaged as much as I'd like because moving to a new country, raising kids as a single parent, and running a company take a lot of time and energy.

The youtube link is for an interview with the filmmaker which is interesting. But if you want to watch the documentary on youtube, and as a torrent.

I've been using decentralized for years, but in many ways it's both very technical and a definition in opposition to centralized. Peer to Peer describes a positive thing not in opposition to something else. Its got warm fuzzies as @andrestaltz says.

One interesting way in which everything loops back on itself, the Web 2.0 conference was for several years called the Peer to Peer Conference.

Decentralized vs Peer to Peer?

A discussion has come up on the @Planetary team where we've been talking about planetary and scuttlebutt and people get confused. The term decentralized doesn't resonate or have meaning for most people. When we say, it's a peer to peer social media app, people get it, they think of bittorrent and know what that means. It also brings up nostalgic feelings about past where things were more human scale. It resonates because so many people on scuttlebutt say it feels like the old internet.

The only people that get decentralized think it's a cryptocurrency thing. So, maybe we should call scuttlebutt a #peer2peer protocol?

On an aside, i was at a party and talking about what i do, explaining decentralized social media, etc... and the guy said, "like scuttlebutt" and i was yea, exactly... anyway apparently he used to work with @Dominic and was on his boat a couple of weeks ago... small world.

I like the bitter favors like lime. I also brewed some yerba mate kombucha which was good.

We use posthog for @Planetary! We like it's open source, we've been using it to track engagement in the app, i'm sure there's more we could do with it. At some point we'd like to move to be self hosted, or if there was some 'managed self-hosting' where we 'control' the server so we can say that we're not giving data to third parties, that'd be enough.

I was looking at the A6400, but decided to go with an ZV-E10 because of it's direct USB-C streaming out while charging. I'm MOSTLY using it for a really nice webcam, and only secondarily using it for photography.

I've thought about this a lot. I think it's structural. We make friends when we have ways to casually bump in to people on a regular basis. The way we structure our houses, single family homes, at least in NZ, or apartments without common space, is inherently isolating. Then we have decided that the child rearing responsibility is split between one or two parents and paid professionals. This is a huge burden on the parent(s), in part because of the work, lack of easy help, but also because we've divided up our social world between child friendly and non-child friendly.

Work often provides a path towards friendship and social connection, but it's hard for those of us who work from home. The last month i've been going more often to a community focused coworking space, which feels like a bougie version of a european social center. I like it but i haven't made tons of friends through it just yet. Perhaps i need to go to more of the evening events.

Years ago i was talking about this with a friend who'd moved to a new city and was feeling isolated. He'd heard from a mutual friend, just go to the gay bar and meet folks. The problem is, he's straight, there wasn't a lefty nerdy intellectual geek space where you're supposed to be social.

The changes we need to make in order to facilitate social connection aren't huge. A hostel is ostensibly just a cheaper hotel, but because of the lack of private spaces, hostels create much more intentional social space. There's a notice board, sofas and comfy chairs, tables, a shared kitchen, tv, games, etc... Some have bars and regular parties. In my travels I came across this hotel chain which is like an upscale hostel / bar / coworking / social center. Basically providing that space for social connection to digital nomads.

I guess my point is that it's not our fault. Or rather, it's not the fault of lack of effort or desire. Rather that we need to find / create / spend time in places that facilitate social connection. What if child care centers were paired with coworking spaces, so parents could go back and forth between connecting with their kids, other parents and work?

Interestingly enough, wealth and class are part of the problem. Kids who grow up in communities with smaller houses, more shared spaces, trailer parks they're called in the US, actually have more adult figures and a stronger sense of community. On a wealthier scale, co-housing is intended to create the same thing. Unfortunately in New Zealand the finance / building codes / structural system makes co-housing difficult to create at any scale.

As part of working on go-ssb @boreq / @boreq (mac) wrote up some docs / notes on muxrpc. It'll migrate in to the new docs that @SoapDog is doing, but that might be useful to you.

Welcome @JustinM. At the moment the app takes a bit to sync, you've already followed people, and now just need to open it a few times, let it sync, and boom... social, you control.

@Dave [ macOS ] Great question. There's a bunch of posts by @boreq outlying the development of #scuttlego and talking about the what and why. In particular you might find the one on the planetary tech stack useful for context.

The go-ssb code is being used in a number of places at the moment and it's structured in such a way that made it hard to work with. We decided to take the pieces of go-ssb and build something with a completely different internal structure, that met the needs of planetary first, then to be used as embedded sdk for ssb apps second. We're totally open to some future merging of the projects. It was just a lot easier to develop it this way. The two code bases have the same license. For example, go-ssb does it's own indexes / db similar to ssb-db / ssb-db2, but scuttlego puts things in a key-value store and then leaves the way the data is used as an exercise to the app developer building on top of it. So to replicate go-ssb functionality, you'd need to add that.

@Dave [ macOS ] I think we can figure that out. Apple assumes that all data intensive tasks are over http, but we can use that to check the state of a phone's connection, if it's in low data mode, over cellular, etc... With that we can add a setting to say, don't sync over cellphone network, etc... We're still working on rolling out the direct mesh stuff, so that's also needed.

In particular one of the reasons we're developing scuttlego is that it gives us much better control over ssb connections, who to connect to, what feeds to request, how many connections to keep open, etc...

It's interesting. @Matt Lorentz just figured out how to have @Planetary spin up and sync in the background when the phone is plugged in and not being used.

The need to have peers online goes up as we look at phasing out pubs.

Jillian York has put together a good set of links about arguments against using real names. This shouldn't be to controversial here, but i thought folks like to take a look.

@LaPingvino & @decentral1se (manyverse) It's totally a loaded term.

Perhaps: Committee for the dissemination of the good word about scuttlebutt? Or the Scuttlebutt Public Information Committee...

Ok, honestly, i don't care... It could be "Go away, scuttlebutt's full" for all i care. I'm open to suggestions.

I think this is a great idea. Perhaps CCC might be a hard time to focus on ssb stuff because there's so much else going on. Planetary is able to help with expenses to make this happen.

So I just jumped in and made a new open collective for this: https://opencollective.com/scuttlebutt-propaganda

I hope folks don't mind me using the name propaganda, feels fun to play with the name. I've invited @mixmix, @SoapDog (Macbook Air M1), and @Luandro Pàtwy to be admin's on it with me. Who else wants to help?

I'm not sure how to add it to the scuttlebutt consortium.

I'd love to have us do some work supporting groups like Mídia India, your work getting folks online @Luandro Pàtwy, learning from Digital Democracy, writing up docs, getting an outline written for how to get support for ssb talks, etc... @SoapDog (Macbook Air M1) it'd be great to have your help coordinating workshops on speaking, and help us cultivate new speakers. Plus of course, speaking yourself.

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?

Welcome @Techpriest_Baunach_Main! You seem quite technical to have managed setting up your own room server. Looking at your posts you're quite interested in emerging and alternative social media protocols.

I'm curious how you found scuttlebutt, and what you're looking for. You tried both manyverse and planetary which is great. You've said planetary is nice, but you're using manyverse. It's important that we have many apps in the ecosystem, and many things like rooms, metafeeds, and the upcoming private groups are being innovated first in manyverse. One thing which i've heard multiple people say is that planetary is really nice, but they try it and go back to manyverse. What is it that planetary doesn't do for you that manyverse does? This isn't a competition. More i'd love to understand what makes the app compelling for you.

One thing i noticed is on your twitter profile you put up links to your ssb uri's but not your alias registered on your room. With planetary we've been working under the assumption we should encourage people to use room aliases as a way of more easily connecting people to their ssb account rather than the identity or ssb uri. why did you end up using the uri?

We at planetary have setup a bunch of topical pub's and are going to transition them to rooms as our room support gets better. Would it make sense to set one up for catholics? Or christians in general or people interested in spirituality more broadly?

I was thinking about this and if something like tailscale would be a way to easily let ssb clients connect to rooms without exposing personal data or being able to be blocked.

@rathantara by SPN you mean like Safing?

I think for ssb we have a few requirements, it needs to punch through NAT's, it needs to work in js, it needs to work in mobile apps, and when running mobile it needs to be light on battery / processor use.

First, off, thanks @andrestaltz for linking the previous post, I've been traveling a lot an forgot we'd already had a thread.

I like crut's idea, but do think overloading message types is maybe a mistake.

I'm curious your take @mixmix because you use gatherings as the crut example in the readme.

Gatherings 2.0

At the #dweb-camp there was a discussion about how gatherings are cool but they way they overload about messages sucks. So we talked about making a new gatherings schema to replace the legacy one from patchwork. We've got a gathering message type which we post with a gathering, let's put the content in there!

One option is to just move the fields from current gatherings over. Nobody has to stop supporting the current gathering format, but it's be good for new implementations to support the new thing and to have us migrate in that direction.

I think it'd be good to add some location to gatherings. There's a TON we could add, just look at https://schema.org/Event. Perhaps we could pick a subset of that to support and then of course everybody can choose what else of that to implement. I looked at activityStreams but their events stuff doesn't seem to provide much of a direct model for us. I would say that #geojson would be an interesting message type, being able to attach a location or geographic shape to other messages, not just events.

I know @SoapDog was interested for patchfox. I took a stab at adding gatherings to planetary before dweb-camp but didn't get it done. Manyverse has gatherings, so changing the schema would require some work there, but it shouldn't be tons because it's just a change to the message schema and db2 indexes / queries.

Perhaps we could have a call and sketch out a #schema for updated #gatherings. Could be as lightweight as the ssb-web-viewer-spec that @mixmix recently posted.

Shall we arrange a call?

What's the difference between how ssb-http-auth and ucan auth are implimented? Should we try and converge in to using the more widely adopted ucan?

The dirt one is interesting... honestly i think these are just analysts from investment firms trying to get a sense of what kind of person Mudge is and if his allegations are going to be material to the twitter stock price and company. It's a regular thing that they reach out for off the record comments from people who know executives to understand what kind of person they are.

@notplants If you don't want to block poeple, then more power to you. I wish ssb nodes did a better job of not relaying feeds from the blocker to the blockee.

Recently we banned a few accounts which were pro-islamic state: @Rs5J4+H... @kDLVwmq... @TQ5/IVI...

You're welcome to use your resources to support and share this content but it's not something I want do. They're a group which engages in religious fundamentalism, summary execution of queer people, slavery, and generally nightmareness authoritarianism.

Then there are these asshats who are using poorly thought out features in some scuttlebutt apps to assign gay furry porn to other people's profiles.

@RDZIOyx...

I wish block was stronger, something where all the normal ssb libraries we distribute prevent passing messages to the blocked identity.

If you want to host that kind of content, go for it, but at the moment all blocking does is tell other people you've made a judgement and aren't seeing or hosting that person's content. We should also implement more real blocking. But since block in scuttlebutt doesn't work like blocking elsewhere, we shouldn't use the term.

I'm kind of surprised that Lençóis isn't all over instagram as a major destination. It's so surreal and amazing. It feels like one of the major wonders of the natural world, but it's hardly known beyond brazil.

@andrestaltz That sucks the way manyverse was framed, I also asked Michael to change it, to no avail. I go out of my way to only say positive things about manyverse, patchfox, and every other project in the ecosystem. I never said that manyverse was more pro-free speech or less managed than planetary. We've got different ideas about how our apps should work, what services we should provide, and how we'd like them positioned. But I admire your work, and what you're doing, and your goals. I'd never intentionally do anything to undermine that.

Recently we had issues with gay furry porn and ISIS supporters on the planetary pubs. We banned them from our pubs but didn't block planetary users from viewing / following those feeds on their installations of planetary. Manyverse doesn't run any services so you don't need to block them in that way. We've worked hard to add support for rooms both to keep up with manyverse but also to ourselves get out of the business of hosting content that we'd then need to moderate.

@andrestaltz i know you're frustrated with me and planetary. I asked to be able to see an early copy of the article before it was published to be able to provide feedback and was told no. If I had known he was going to portray manyverse as a platform for free speech purists i would have asked him to change it. And I did ask for that to be changed after I saw it. I think having multiple full featured apps in the ecosystem is important and that's why we started linking to patchfox, mayverse, and patchwork from our website starting over 2 years ago. As far as I know, nobody else links back to planetary from their sites. This is frustrating. It'd also be great if folks mentioned planetary as an open source scuttlebutt app when other scuttlebutt folks speak to journalists. There were people in the community who tried to stop planetary from even being linked to from the scuttlebutt sites.

In terms of framing, personally I'm not comfortable with the way my personal story and narrative is used as a hook in stories about my work and scuttlebutt more broadly. But, we also see this in articles about manyverse which focuses on Andre or scuttlebutt which centers Dominic, where they talk about creators as a way of letting folks connect. It's the nature of journalism and storytelling. Innovation and culture come from communities of people not individuals. But so much of our society's framing is around it being a hero's journey, the lone individual who changed the world.

Anyway, I'll continue to do my best to talk about planetary existing within a community of apps, portray the projects in the way they want, and promote our collective project. We're doing this together, it's not a competition. What we have in creating scuttlebutt is a commons, we don't have to all agree or like each other to make something great together. I'm glad the article became about something more than just about me or planetary, i'm sorry not everybody is happy with how they're portrayed. Perhaps this is just a reminder that journalism is a business which reflects the institutional values and constraints of its organizations, culture, and economics. This is why we need to tell our own stories.

Are you in the Lençóis Maranhenses? I've always wanted to visit those in brazil. I got close 8 years ago but my camper broke down and i ended up running out of time.

All of the scuttlebutt space needs better docs and specs. It's a mess and we should fix it.

Planetary uses apple keychain for identity backup, but i think there's general consensus that in ssb we should be moving towards using #darkcrystal. We just need to do it.

I agree with @mixmix that ssb folks aren't the intended audience for this article.

What the hell kind of plant is that? Looks alien to me, wonderful, amazing, but other worldly. Is it always blooming or did you get some special time of the year to be able to see it?

I think in general Michael did a good job at portraying a version of the story. It feels weird to be centered so much in the piece but i get how my backstory and twitter makes it a hook for journalists to bring in readers. I'm really glad that he took the time to talk to a bunch of folks in both the SSB and broader decentralized social media community so that it's not just about me or planetary.

Past articles like the 2017 piece in the Atlantic about @Dominic and the 2018 piece which featured @andrestaltz did a lot to bring in new people and energy in to the scuttlebutt community.

I didn't get to see a copy of this before it published, it's not always how i'd portray it, but that's part of the point, the article is from the perspective of an outsider who's telling a story about us. I like pairing it with @Teq's academic paper on scuttlebutt's participatory governance of a participatory network.

Here's a pdf version of the forbes article shared as a blob for folks who want to read it offline.

What do people think?

I think we dismiss these kinds of organizations because they're often not directly visible or controlable. I've been thinking about this a lot as i was at #burningman last week. Ostensibly there's a non-profit which runs the festival, coordinates selling tickets, hiring a few people, interacting with the state to allow the events to happen. But the vast majority of the money and work is in a network of coordinated but decentralized teams and camps. All the organization does is make the space be legitimate enough to exist. It's quite open, if you want to participate in work or governance of projects, you can. Or you can easily start your own thing. There are 10 principles the network created to define what is or isn't a burningman thing. There were fights about the structure, what could be included, etc... but what they settled on works. This pushing work out the edges values action & autonomy. If one part of the network goes bad, either people can move away from it and let it wither or they can coordinate many other parts to intervine and address it. Potentially kicking orgs or people out for failing to uphold the values.

A network I was very involved in, indymedia, had two documents which coordinated the network as a kind of constitution, mission statement, principles of unity, and membership criteria. These documents grew out of the work, the network came to be and we were looking for a governance model to use. Tons has been written about indymedia and it's model for self managed, participatory media for social change. Reflecting back, we had too much consensus, that's a very heavy process which should only be used in the most fundamental decisions. In all other cases it slows down autonomy and was part of the reason the network stagnated.

I constantly look at the 12 step programs, alcoholics anonymous et al, as a model. There are over 200 different kinds of 12 step fellows, and the core AA one has over 2 million active members. Tremendous amount of work is done. Nobody can speak for AA, there is no hierarchy of groups, no professional staff (there are some support workers who are paid, but they are at service of the local group), all the groups are funded by local donations. The AA network relies particularly strongly on texts and a few fundamental list like documents to describe what is and isn't a 12 step program. Many of these are repeated, read out loud at every meeting. The core documents are simple, they're accessible, they're used to remind folks, what they're doing there, how we work, and what it means to be a member of AA. I think this mantra style communicating and reproducing the culture and political system is very important.

The dweb camp came up with a set of principles which are pretty good. We link to them from the planetary website website.

It'd be interesting to figure out how to document and make the process of creating these networks reproducible. We don't have to get top heavy to get big, we can grow horizontally. We do need big and world spanning to address the issues we face with society and the environment, but top heavy can be very vulnerable to being captured.

Oh yeah, this is a bug, it's not supposed to show any content from folks who don't opt in to PublicWebHosting. Apologies. We're all traveling post #dweb-camp so it might take a moment to get it fixed.

Sure, make a build, just the rebuild step in the release notes clearly so folks know it'll happen.

The transition is a bit rough, i think everybody on the planetary team struggled a bit when we moved to apple silicon. But once you get it sorted it feels good. What i did was setup one terminal app to use the Intel compatibility mode. I run brew on that. Even running through emulation, it's faster than my previous laptop.

I'm amazed at how much water is in that lake. You might be able to pick up a minimal cheap camp stove in your travels. We're sorry to miss you at #dweb-camp

I recognize that person. It's @clamber!

Hey @Jerome it'd be awesome if you or somebody you know could work on french and basque translations of planetary. We need help with both!

Hi! Yes we're out there.

Planetary has a test net with pubs, rooms, and a few ssb apps running on it that you can use for testing. It'd be great if other people also used the same testnet as we'd get more content and apps on it. It'd make a better test environment.

That said, i also recently did some blog testing on the main net as well. Mostly because it doesn't seem that manyverse lets me chose an alt-net and i needed to see how things worked in manyverse.

Camilo was kind of the same way, not at all thrilled about a trip, but it is good for him to get grandparent time.

What's the status on #manyverse support for #blog message types? I thought I remember @andrestaltz using blog messages, but i could be wrong. Patchfox supports posting / reading them, patchbay supports both, patchwork displays them but doesn't let you post them.

Would manyverse folks welcome a PR to add displaying blog post message types?

This is interesting. Feels very similar to how @notplants](@5Pt3dKy2HTJ0mWuS78oIiklIX0gBz6BTfEnXsbvke9c=.ed25519) was thinking of #ssb-nft (nft proposal

The main difference is these local tokens are fungible and the nft's aren't.

There's a note in there about the idea of exchanging between one token and another. If we could trade 10 rabble tokens for one elavoie, we'd just send the tokens both directions. Perhaps there could be a way of saying, this send transaction is only valid after a follow up confirmation on both feeds. That'd provide a kind of escrow.

It's implied that you could exchange between a local token and some external store of value. If it's fiat or some agreement, i'll bring over lunch, then there doesn't need to be confirmation in signed data. But what happens when somebody wants to exchange between local tokens and unified / universal blockchain cryptocurrency with consensus?

Is it some kind of gateway protocol / contract / service?

I've never heard of company painting and drinks as an activity.

They are open to providing similar grants to the ssb community. We've had a few initial conversations.

@Matt Lorentz was not looking so good yesterday but he's back on his laptop and seems a bit better today. So we're hopeful for a speedy recovery. So far nobody else on the team has tested postive.

@boreq, @Matt Lorentz (planetary) and I are working on adding room support to planetary. The basic part is done, we can connect, and sync with manyverse apps which use the room. Alises are neat and we'd like to support them.

Perhaps @cblgh, @andrestaltz, or @cryptix can help.

• We can't find where go-ssb-rooms provides an api for getting a list of what my current alises are for a given room?

• Manyverse seems to write to its log when you register an alias, and when you revoke your own. But what happens when the room admin revokes an alias?

• Shouldn't the room server be the source of authority about which alises are valid?

• We can see the list of aliases in the web interface, but can't find a REST or muxrpc method for getting them.

• Why are some api methods via http and others muxrpc? Seems like there should be some feature parity there.

Sometimes using manyverse i can see the profile and 'feed' for a room, and sometimes it doesn't let me see the profile. I kind of like the idea that a room could use its secret to write to its own log, just like a pub defines it's about message and avatar that way. I could imagine a room which managed a private group for members of that room, it'd not store any message logs for the members, but would be able to write private messages to members inviting them to a group, encrypted for everybody in that room.

There's something weird with the macos builds of manyverse. It seems to thing Manyverse Mobile and Manyverse Desktop are the same app when installed on MacOS. I'm guessing there's a reuse of appid's or something. Apple lets you install iOS apps through the appstore on apple silicon macs. The manyverse mobile on desktop and manyverse desktop seem to use different ssb identities / db's but the OS things they're the same app. It means you can't choose which you want to launch.

Good news is i'm currently running a build of planetary that has both room and ebt support which means it'll sync better with manyverse.

I could still see some additional library on top of scuttle-go which makes many of the common queries easy, which can then be forked or extended when someone needs something more specific. but such a project would not at all be mutually exclusive with a more core utility (scuttle-go) which has no opinions about read models

Right now Planetary has one read model, through sqlite, but i'm sure it's not a good universal solution and i'm not even very convince it's good for planetary itself. I think maybe we need something more like a graph / object db... although now sqlite does let you store and query json.

Anyway, just like the js ssb stack has many libraries you compose, go need several depending on the use case.

In ssb all you really need is your secret, or the mnemonic string which can be used to backup the key. On desktop / web hosted ssb installs using ssb-server it's also useful to keep a backup of conn.json so you know where to connect. I don't know where manyverse stores that, but if you can get it, then it'd be helpful. Not so much a backup, but useful thing to keep in mind when restoring is the seq number of your most recent post. You'll want to make sure you've reconstructed your feed when you restore so that you've got either the same number of messages or up to the seq number, effectively the same thing. Once you've got that restored you know you'll not accidentally fork your feed. I messed up a few times when i didn't have conn.json so i redeemed an invite to connect upon restore. That writes a pub message to your local feed, but since you don't have any of the other content yet, it's like starting all over, your feed won't validate.

The mnemonic backup is a really nice way of doing it, but you might want your connection information for peers or start up the restored instance on a network with a local ssb instance running to directly peer with.

Totally understand. We're currently testing out rooms support for planetary which should help shift away from topical pubs to topical rooms.

Why are folks blocking that pub all of a sudden?

welcome!

Just to make it clear. I think the cooperative ecosystem of scuttlebutt development apps and projects is important. I always talk about it and in particular mention Manyverse because it's central to our shared project. When we launched in the appstore, we went from linking to just scuttlebutt.nz to directly directing people to try Manyverse, Patchfox, and Patchwork.

I always mention that the reason that planetary works on an open scuttlebutt network. We constantly tell users that manyverse is an alternative that they can use. That means they aren't locked in to planetary's decisions in terms of how the app works. I think that we have a cooperative ecosystem of multiple apps which don't share code or are controlled by a single organization is one of the major strengths of scuttlebutt. It's part of what sets us apart from so many decentralized projects and is a reflection of the robustness of our community.

Everybody has their own vision about how scuttlebutt should work, what app they're building, and how to promote it. It would be nice if other projects included links to alternative apps.

Yeah it's not been updated, but i'd love us to merge this in to and make it the default rather than the pretty terrible ./sbot which just reflects badly on the community when we have such a good alternative.

Glad he got in touch with you @andrestaltz as the story about any one ssb app doesn't make sense without talking about the ecosystem and protocol.

He wanted to talk to @Dominic too, but i'm not sure how online / talking to press he's these days.

The journalist also wrote this piece, about chelsea manning. He does a bunch of blockchain coverage, so hopefully he'll get the distinction between what we're doing and cryptocurrency projects.

He's been working on this article for a while, so it feels like it's more like a feature than a short quick piece. It's really good timing leading up to the dweb camp.

it's an iphone 13 in portrait mode.

I'd like a 'don't show replies' request. Apps could choose to not enforce it, but most would.

We should really be promoting more @Christian Bundy's ssb-cli. It's a great way to play with and interact with ssb. I'd forgotten how nice it makes queries and how feature rich it is.

ssb

Friendly command-line interface for Secure Scuttlebutt

Commands:
ssb about (group)
ssb add Append a valid message (async)
ssb address (sync)
ssb auth (async)
ssb backlinks (group)
ssb blobs Retrive, store, and share blobs (group)
ssb conn (group)
ssb connScheduler (group)
ssb createFeedStream (source)
ssb createHistoryStream Output messages from a feed in order (source)
ssb createLogStream Stream of all locally stored messages, in order received (source)
ssb createUserStream (source)
ssb del (async)
ssb dhtInvite (group)
ssb ebt (group)
ssb friends Track what feeds are following or blocking each other (group)
ssb get Retrive a locally stored message (async)
ssb getLatest (async)
ssb getVectorClock (async)
ssb gossip (group)
ssb invite (group)
ssb lan (group)
ssb latest (source)
ssb latestSequence (async)
ssb links (source)
ssb manifest (sync)
ssb messagesByType (source)
ssb multiserver (group)
ssb patchwork (group)
ssb private (group)
ssb progress Show internal progress (sync)
ssb publish Publish a message (async)
ssb query Query ssb database with map-filter-reduce queries (group)
ssb replicate (group)
ssb search Full text search within ssb messages (group)
ssb status Show internal system statuses (sync)
ssb tags (group)
ssb tunnel (group)
ssb version Show version numbers (sync)
ssb whoami Print main identity (sync)

Options:
--help Show help [boolean]
--version Show version number [boolean]

Leading up to the #dweb-camp I've been thinking a lot about what #scuttlebutt is and where we should be going. I'm excited about it. The private groups, new feed encoding formats, p2p wiki's, apps like the the kanban app, editing of posts, and feeds that disappear... I think we have something which can evolve in to a unique commons focused collaborative social media instead of a copy of centralized platforms.

So i thought I'd ask questions of people who use and like scuttlebutt.

• What makes you excited about scuttlebutt?

• Why did you join?

• How did you find out about #dweb-camp

• Why have you stuck around?

• What other communities / social media spaces do you participate in?

I think it's interesting and would love to see something like that. In terms of keybase's core functionality, there's keys.pub and keyoxide which are open source more decentralized focused alternatives which are much newer. Keybase is open source but entirely dependent on centralized and barely supported infrastructure.

Of the two, I think keys.pub is a good fit for the scuttlebutt community. It uses ed25519 as it's core, just like ssb, and it's got an MIT license which works with all of various licenses. On the other hand keyoxide seems to have less documentation and is build on GPG.

Let's figure out how to add this to ssb... i think the rel="me" links can just be added to about messages. But i think we'd want to loop in @cel who did DID-SSB

Any architectural firm will be able to print it. They've got very large form printers for plans. There are also companies that do speciality printing because not every architect has the equipment. My mom's an architect and her old blue print machine used ammonia and smelled terrible. Nowadays, they don't smell so bad.

It takes a paper filter but i've only got the metal one right now.

I think TERF's self identify as 'gender critical' which honestly has different spin but basically feels the same.

There's always more to say and document, but @boreq wrote out some of the background about how we came to work on new packaging of ssb in go. There's some documentation in the code repo itself. In addition, @boreq has submitted a number of PR's contributing to go-ssb fixing bugs. Honestly we were hoping to provide better documentation before sharing, so folks understand where scuttlego comes from, why we built it, and how it relates to the ssb ecosystem. But folks urged us to share sooner and when we started talking to people about it the links got shared, which is fine, but it means that it's lacking the documentation and context we wanted.

@boreq is coming to dweb camp and is putting together a talk ahead of time about scuttlego.

The primary issue is that go-ssb isn't particularly well tested, it's hard to debug and test because it's not got great separation of concerns. A bunch of it is simply that go-ssb is showing some age, it's purpose has shifted over time, and we decided could take the components and restructure them to meet the needs of planetary and also others who want an embeddable ssb less is more sdk. Open source isn't just about reusing the entire code base, but being able to take components and make new things.

We thought about either making scuttlego in to a go-ssb 2.0 but the idea of making all the changes we'd want would be pretty dramatic. The current go-ssb does work well for some things, we spent considerable effort upgrading the current version of planetary to use the current version of go-ssb over the last few months. Planetary for example doesn't use the database or indexes that go-ssb creates, we found a sqlite db works better for the swift front end. So there's a lot of work writing a badger db, and indexes on top of it, which we don't need. This is similar to how Ahau doesn't use flumedb directly, instead converts the data in to something accessible over GraphQL.

Since there are lots of opinions about databases, we felt it was good to separate the db from the core ssb engine. If somebody wants to come along and create a scuttlego-db which provides flume / margaret style kafka style db with indexes and queries, then great! It'd be a wonderful extension to the ecosystem. That should be something which is pretty straightforward to add.

To me this isn't that different than @andrestaltz looking at ssb-db and deciding it didn't meet the needs of Manyverse so rather than doing a bunch of work on ssb-db, he created ssb-db2 which met his needs. He didn't implement everything that was in ssb-db, just the stuff he needed. When we went to make a new pub implementation which uses ssb-db2, we had to add the ability to index for and query based on PublicWebHosting. It wasn't hard, and we happily submitted a PR so that ssb-db2 supported the things we needed for planetary-pub. Now that functionality we needed in planetary-pub is available to everybody using ssb-db2.

Welcome back after a two year break. We've spend as lot of time improving @Planetary. Would love your feedback.

Welcome @Burton glad to have you join us!

So in a full circle way, the work @Christian Bundy did back in 2019 was in part funded by Planetary in order to allow for delete to be able to fulfill things like GDPR requests. I'd forgotten that the hard part of the work was completed. Looks like we didn't do the documentation part unfortunately.

@moid that's an interesting take on hate speech. I setup the pub, and wrote that 'policy' as it were. As a queer person who identifies as non-binary I don't want to create or run a space which hosts the content of people who deny the validity or existence of trans people.

SSB is a pluralistic network. I think we need to change block to ignore or something similar to reflect its role in simply not hosting / replicating with that part of the network.

I’d also be up for having a chat about how to work with #scuttlego, as an alpha tester for non-planetary use-cases!

We're hoping that #scuttlego becomes an embeddable sdk for building lots of ssb apps, not just for planetary. At the moment we're just working on getting the parts of #go-ssb over to scuttlego that we need. The new stuff will probably be around metafeeds, bendybutt2, and private groups. So far we've not done a ton of totally new functionality but mostly trying to get something which supports everything we use in the current go-ssb.

that sucks, i hope you're doing well. Not that my random uninformed medical advice is worth anything, but i've heard that in terms of long covid it's better not to rush back to physical activity.

Hope you're feeling better and have a full recovery.

In @Planetary and a few other ssb apps i think, you can have multiple identities within the same app installation. The database stays the same, but the 'focus' shifts so you're seeing the world from which ever identity (persona) is active. When you do things like like, post, reply, follow, those all use the current identity. This would feel very different in manyverse and other apps which highlight the extended vs direct follow network in the UI.

In some ways this works the same way in twitter or instagram you can have multiple accounts signed in to the same account.

I think there's an important tradeoff to explore between easy of getting connected in to the network, and the way it'll be used for anti-social behavior. I think the sock puppet issue is something we should consider. I wonder how @cblgh's TestNet would handle that.

Glad to hear that you're back. For many years i was in denial about depression. Once I stopped trying to just push through it and got help my life started working a lot better. I use prescribed anti-depressants but i know that there's lots of interesting work around psychedelics coupled with therapy and also microdosing.

I'm glad to hear you're working on your PhD, i think we all benefit a lot from your work and research.

You might want to look at #scuttlego as it's meant to solve a bunch of issues we ran in to building planetary on top of #go-ssb.

https://github.com/planetary-social/scuttlego

I'd love for there to be more and better documentation. We reached out to @SoapDog (Manyverse) but he's busy and Duncan (who wrote the protocol guide) has moved on to other projects. If anybody wants a gig writing and consolidating ssb docs please reach out.

Regarding tangles and planetary. We do use them in our queries. We don't display nested threads, instead we just flatten them out. I kind of like flattened threads, @Matt Lorentz is interested in threaded version, so we'll probably support that at some point.

For now mostly we use them to make sure we get every reply related to a conversation.

We're planning on using tangles when we allow users to post an updated (edited) version of a post. And if we do a p2p wiki like with gatherings but just normal documents, that'd also make it so we could have social editing of documents.

One other thing i was wondering about, what would public groups look like on ssb, like private groups, but not encrypted, but grouped in some clear way with some designation of who's a member, or not?

I've been thinking a lot about p2p wikis and scuttlebutt. We've got gatherings, which work like a wiki page inside of scuttlebutt. Gatherings have the simplest possible algorithm for edits. Simply display the version of the gathering text that any of the people in your network provided.

It would be good to expose history, have a 'roll back' button or something, but honestly, just let each person fully update, works.

I think if we had that, and made a bit of a better interface for linking to messages. And added the ability to see backlinks, who's linking to this message, it would be a p2p wiki built on top of ssb. We're SO close. Once we have that, i think we'd see an explosion of pages on various topics, everybody having their own subset of the network, just like we have with other post types.

Looks like farcaster has a couple posts a minute based on their search engine indexing: https://searchcaster.xyz/search

I agree there are tons of theoretical projects out there, having use is a totally different thing.

There are lots of #queer people on scuttlebutt so I thought it might be interesting to setup an thematic #pub, @queer.family.

Here's an invite code for folks interested: queer.family:8008:@nnAMmrh...~kxCY33m5QNMnLbJ0pkHHUaWdRyANTlS4gaISXN2D3x0=

Yes i know that there are good reasons to look at rooms as a better way of doing things. We're hoping to get room support in @Planetary in time for dweb camp. To connect directly to manyverse apps via rooms we need EBT working as well.

What we really need are #private-groups. I was wondering what a private group with an anchor for users discovering it which is a room or pub.

In case anybody wants to know what we're up to building planetary, our kanban board is open for taking a peak.

Yeah, i'm not sure that middle aged cishet guys in venture capital and crypto are exactly the best early adopter community.

They've got docs on a notion site: https://farcasterxyz.notion.site/farcasterxyz/Farcaster-v2-43b105e4699847518b1d89996c20d564 which are interesting.

The identity system seems to make a single flat space for names with a marketplace for them.

https://farcasterxyz.notion.site/The-Identity-System-b5e320826b33460b845ccc9ada63e904

I prefer piggybacking on the dns system the way rooms works, although it feels like the identity part of rooms and the tunneling connections are really two different things.

One thing which isn't clear to me about farcaster is they talk about a consensus algorithm in their demo system, called a hub. The hub is pretty similar to ADX in many ways. Are they just using the word consensus because it's a blockchain term, or do they really mean that every node in farcaster would have to have the feeds from every other node?

There's also no mention of private messages, or private groups.

They do have a metafeed style system, ability to run it custodial or non-custodial, some kind of key recovery system with identities, no issue with forked feeds the way we do.

Their messages look a LOT like ssb messages. They went with json instead of the CBOR/etc style that we've been exploring. They specify that messages need to be in rfc8785 JSON Canonicalization Scheme, wise if you're going to use json.

I think it'd be useful to have something like that. It'd be optional to be included, similar to publicwebhosting i think.

We could also do it if you wanted to put out there that you post about some hashtags, then you'd want people to discover your feed that way.

Super interesting. I've been thinking about what makes ssb unique, and how we use gatherings as a light weight wiki. One observation is that due to the social graph nature of ssb, we haven't seen abuse of gatherings in the way they have such a simplistic version control.

If we had CDRT's or editable docs within a private group, that problem would go away entirely. I would really like us to have longer form collaborative edited social media docs, more collective than individual.

Does the p2p wiki have a code repo or more docs yet?

What do folks think of Farcaster? It's a decentralized social media protocol 'inspired by secure scuttlebutt' which just raised $30 million dollars from VC's.

It's scuttlebutt like, but where the root identity is an ethereum wallet, but that just signs the creation of an ed25519 key which looks like metafeeds. They don't enforce strict ordering of messages which gets you out of the forked feed problem. A LOT of their protocol doesn't look like it's implemented. The advantage of the root key to signing keys is that you can revoke the signing keys. I like that feature and i think it's doable with ssb and metafeeds.

I've never heard of metalife, but digging around, it really does look like they're building on top of ssb. Here's their pub code, based on and extending go-ssb. I don't really understand it yet, but it's like if somebody built a bunch of crypto currency stuff on top of ssb. There's NFT's and links to wallets, and some other things, but a lot of it does appear to be built on scuttlebutt.

It's curious that they're using the ssb mainnet and not their own network key.

It's funny real estate agents love the market when it works in their favor but when it goes the other direction they become sentimental and manipulative. Pricing of housing in New Zealand is setup to maximize seller profit more than the US in a number of ways.

If the seller wanted a better price than what they'll get now, they should have sold 6 months ago at the peak of the market, but they asked for more than the market would bear then, and definitely want more than the market can support now. The irony is that the agent is upset at your lowball offer, but it benefits the seller. With a low offer they can anchor the range of prices the market can provide. Then can then either wait for a higher offer, which might not come, accept your offer, or not sell.

The agent knows you live next door and wants to use that to extract a price from you beyond what the market will bear, which you actually did by offering above the price beyond what others say should be the current market rate.

Who cares if the seller or the agent like you, or are even happy with the sale. If they don't want it, they don't have to sell you the house.

Sounds like a great adventure. The cycle.travel site is really cool. Looks like a lot of your route will be on cycle paths or otherwise protected from sharing the road with cars.

Are you going to take the train home? Looks like you're spending a good chunk of time at each cit which will be nice.

It reminds me of a bicycle circus caravan my friends used to do back during the anti-globalization movement. Using a caravan of bikes to raise awareness around social and environmental issues. At one point they got arrested for not having a 'bicycle license' which was odd because such a license doesn't exist.

Per %W3nuabf... we've been requested to delete any content from @Powersource (pc). This ssb account is hosted on a planetary company laptop so i'm blocking and deleting their content in order to comply with the request.

Sorry to be no longer able to see what @Powersource (pc) says.

Per %W3nuabf... we've been requested to delete any content from @Powersource (pc). This ssb account is hosted on a planetary company laptop so i'm blocking and deleting their content in order to comply with the request.

Sorry to be no longer able to see what @Powersource (pc) says.

Per %W3nuabf... we've been requested to delete any content from @Powersource (pc). This ssb account is hosted on a planetary company laptop so i'm blocking and deleting their content in order to comply with the request.

Hey @Powersource (pc),

Happy to comply with the request. Might take til tomorrow since it's a holiday weekend in the US. This is the first GDPR request we've gotten. I wasn't aware of the particular need to have a privacy@ email address, our support address is support@planetary.social, but i've added the alias so privacy@planetary.social will also work.

This is just asking the planetary company. Afaik gdpr only lets you ask companies to do stuff.

I did talk to a German lawyer, and at least under German law, GDPR applies to everybody and not just corporations. There are some exceptions for registered NGO's but none for personal, family, or non-commercial use. This is why we did the work to zero out data when you block somebody. I'm not 100% it's working so we'll double check the data is actually deleted. As far as i know, only users who use the go-ssb implementation of scuttlebutt are capable of complying. This brings up a bit of a complicated issue.

take all reasonable steps to inform other controllers, including search engine operators, who process the personal data listed above, that I have requested the erasure of all links, copies or replications.

Because there is no GDPR exception for personal use and you've requested it for all controllers that connect to planetary services, it seems like you're requesting that your data is removed from everybody's ssb client that's connected to a planetary pub. You're more than aware that we have no ability to tell peers that connect to our servers to delete your content.

We can remove your feeds from the pubs we run on digital ocean and our not yet launched web viewer. In order to keep the servers from hosting your data in the future, we'll have to block your identities.

We can also remove it from everybody using planetary installed via the AppStore. Apple required us add the ability to remove feeds from users planetary installations. We call it the BanList and version of planetary which we distribute through the apple appstore uses it to block / delete content. As far as i know, no other ssb app has this kind of functionality, and @andrestaltz was able to argue that Manyverse didn't need it because he doesn't run any cloud services with content.

So, my question is, are you really asking that we remove it from all users who've installed planetary. There isn't any real difference between running the planetary open source scuttlebutt app and the manyverse or patchwork ones? All ssb clients that have connected to planetary pubs are data controllers under GDPR. I don't like deleting data off of people's devices.

Every scuttlebutt instance is a data controller under GDPR. The GDPR laws make no exception for personal/non-commercial controllers. Perhaps we need to create an SSB message to blackhole your own data. This seems like something you should post to your own logs, not send to a company, but laws sometimes don't make a lot of sense. @Dominic was strongly against the idea that third parties like Planetary could post messages to delete content from peers that they didn't post, but that seems like what you're requesting.

On a personal note, I've always appreciated your contributions to the scuttlebutt community and software ecosystem. I'll miss you.

We've been using go-ssb since the start of Planetary. A lot of it is amazing, but it is a code base which shows its age. It wasn't designed to be embedded or run on a mobile device. We recently upgraded to the current release of go-ssb which was a bunch of work, but let us take advantage of an updated system.

In doing that, we felt like we could take the components of go-ssb and restructure it in a way that's easier to use. Part of that is that the code should do one thing well. The various libraries of js ssb do this, lots of smaller libraries linked together. But go-ssb is a bigger more monolithic project. A lot of people have tried to build on go-ssb and it's not so easy.

We're going to call it scuttlego to make it clear it's different but related to go-ssb. It's our hope that this will be a core sdk that people can build scuttlebutt applications. It makes the data available through a key value store, look up the messages by id. That way you could use a graph database, relational, graphql, no-sql, streaming db, etc... There are thousands of good well maintained databases. I don't think we should be building our own databases, because that's a hard problem other people do well. If you want to make a version of scuttlego that has a flumedb/margaret db style store, do it! It's open source because we know our use of the code won't be the same as what other people will want to do with it.

My gut feeling says yes. It’s much much easier to fix some nasty bugs than it is to migrate to a totally new thing. An analogy would be “should I unclog the toilet or should I move to another apartment?”. Moving is surprisingly a huge amount of work, and unclogging toilets sounds nasty but in the end is much simpler.

We spent a bunch of time on go-ssb over the last six months, you can see we submitted a lot of PR's where we found bugs. But in the end we decided that it wasn't structured in the way we wanted. A new house needed to be built and we could reuse the furniture and appliances. This isn't that different than the decision to abandon ssb-db and make ssb-db2.

I'm not sure how it was done, the notebook was amazing.

Whoohoo, what's the first major pet peeve?

For me it's when the app locks up or goes slowly.

Planetary was taking up about 8.5G on my iPhone. That seems large. For example I have a Manyverse acct. with roughly the same size social graph that’s only eating 1.7G. But that could be a migration issue given it was older. I don’t think it ever fully replicated.

Adding the ability to delete old blobs from others automatically, manage storage limits, etc.. are all in our roadmap. It's good manyverse does that. The new go-ssb completely changes how feeds are stored on disk to we'll look at pruning storage and providing more user control once we switch to it.

No, i just updated to 336...

Thanks, this is interesting. I like the Briar features, both backup and remote whip sounds good. I'm curious if the implementation will be a kind of sdk meant to be embedded in other systems.

I've mostly ignored the TBD projects coming out of block (ne square) because they felt very crypto currency focused on bitcoin payment resolution systems. This on the other hand feels like it's much closer to the dweb and some of the issues we're struggling with in scuttlebutt.

#Web5? I'm not sure if its a joke or real, but Jack Dorsey launched a decentralized identify / web app project called web5. There's a presentation which explains it, and there seems to be code. It seems to overlap some with bluesky, i'm not sure how the two projects are related.

A few days ago i was like, bah, i'm tried of this, i canceled my limited $20 per day dollar cost averaging buy and sold my positions. I was hardly enthusiastic but I figured it'd be silly not to take some minor risk. Turns out my timing was good as the price dropped since then.

Crypto would be less disturbing if it weren't for the carbon footprint. Then it'd just be unregulated capitalism doing its damage.

That sounds brutal. @Alanna is a trooper. Parenting is so damned hard.

I'm also considering going to this. I think it'd be good to do some sessions about scuttlebutt's tech / protocol as a commons but also building a commons of community users on top of the protocol.

This shows we could do such interesting things if we had collaborative documents in ssb that weren't a hacked gathering.

What would non-gluten free mate be like?

It's open source, and the branch is on github: https://github.com/planetary-social/planetary-ios/tree/release/1.2.0

We will be sending it to TestFlight beta testers for a few days before we release it to the appstore. If you want, we can add you to the team testers, it's where apple review doesn't need to be done in order to send you the TestFlight builds, we just can't add many people to that. At the moment the new version is both brilliant and buggy. Upgrading by resyncing all of your content from peers sometimes gets stuck. Sometimes the explore tab works great, and sometimes it has some sql errors. The processing of getting this upgrade done and out the door has been super frustrating for the entire team.

We've still not mapped out how to implement a machine learning algorithm for feeds instead of sql, but the plugin system should make it possible.

In addition to the new feed sorting algorithms, i also really like the follow messages to help you find people.

Feels like this is a take of a parent of young kids, where keeping a house clean is a full time job. And probably not worth it.

In my experience, the last 10% of tidying up is actually the most important. Kind of a broken windows theory. If you see a mess, or pile of dishes, you add to it. I find my kitchen stays much cleaner if don't let things pile up. But once i fail to clean part of it, leaving stuff on the counter, or letting the dishes pile up, then it quickly gets worse.

But if i keep on top of it, the kitchen stays clean for long periods of time. But only if there's enough space to keep things off the counter and no kids around. ;-D

Look, if you want your software to include companies, use less restrictive licenses, when you don't want companies to use it then use AGPL/GPL. That's the same logic if you're a company releasing software or a community project.

Choosing a more restrictive license means less contributions. Choosing a more open license means the more people and organizations will contribute.

If a person would take an MIT licensed code and update it, incorporate it in their app, and not release updates back, it's the same to the project and community as if they never touched the code because it was licensed under some GPL type license.

Under a less restrictive licenses, companies will use code and some contribute back. Under a restrictive license, they won't use the code or contribute back. Or if they do, they've got competitive commercial reasons for doing so. Companies don't want to use restrictive licenses, so sometimes they release code under those licenses because they know their competitors can't use it.

As an example, in think p2panda and earthstar are super interesting. But I haven't considered ever touching the code, using it, or contributing to it because of the AGPL license. To use it, there needs to be complete rewrite using the concepts. I actually see now that earthstar relicensed 6 months ago to LGPL, so maybe they do want other people to use their code.

As far as i'm concerned, LGPL is a reasonable compromise for libraries. It's not as good as MIT/BSD, and won't lead to more contributions but it's not as anti-commercial as the other options.

@mixmix there's a design conference going on right now in Wellington, which actually covers a lot of the topics. It's live streamed so you don't need to bike downtown.

This is a super interesting discussion. Important to be having.

What i want is for users of ssb to be able to find their people. To me, planetary growing isn't about a few people with a multitude of followers. Nor is it a few giant pubs with everybody following each other, a twitter like space where everybody can mention everybody else. Instead it's many clumps of people who like to connect and talk and who are connected through social bonds, even if they've never met. Then question then becomes, how do people find each other.

The pubs that planetary runs are a bit of a hack. I'd rather they didn't exist either, but i think sending folks to the wiki page isn't an improvement.

I think solving this issue, of how do we help people find their people, their communities, and get connected with them, is a critical task for ssb to figure out.

Random big pubs aren't the answer. Rooms are interesting, but you lose the offline-ness and gossip nature of ssb in part of how they work. It feels like they do three things.

• They provide a way of a human readable name, piggy backed on dns, to tell people when they want to connect to you on ssb.
• They provide a way of tunneling connections which gets around problems with NAT's and ip addresses changing. * And thirdly they act as a kind of curated community, you can decide who is and isn't allowed in a room.

All three of those are important, but I don't think maybe it makes sense that they're provided by the same app.

I think experimentation is great, but we need to be talking enough to look at solutions which can be implemented in multiple ssb apps. There was, briefly, a wiki page about manyverse interoperability, but it's either been taken offline or moved. Each maintained ssb app should have something like that.

Storytime...

I was showing @bert planetary yesterday and they installed the app. I explained pubs, they said yes, they'd tried ssb before and the copying and pasting of invites form the wiki was beyond them. But they did want to know how to follow @mikey because they're friends. Mikey wasn't sitting with us there at the bar, but it's exactly the kind of thing i think we do want to work over SSB. I'm at a bar, talking to friends, they say, sure, i want to try this new thing to connect to my friends. I tell them the name of the app, they install it, and then we need to easily find our mutual friend.

In this case, if Planetary's mesh networking worked, he could have discovered that I was near by, highlighted it in the app, downloaded my feed, seen that i indeed do follow a person named Mikey, and start following them. We'd need the apps to clearly highlight when people are in local mesh proximity. If we did that then we could use peachcloud and rasberberry pi's to say, alert folks that they're a pub at your friends house, the bar, social center, and then you'd be able to connect to others who also pass through that space.

But instead what happened is he looked at the pubs, saw some posts by the default loaded planetary feeds, and couldn't find Mikey. Even once he followed me, theres nobody named @mikey who he can find until it's downloaded my feed, AND all of the people I follow. A simpler feed or way of saying, these are the people i know, might make that faster.

Both matrix and telegram make links you can generate / share / click on which help load the app and have you connect to a person. They're short, human readable/understandable. The matrix ones don't seem to always work, the telegram ones are more reliable. If i could generate a link like that for Mikey to give to Bert then, that would work well. Maybe Mikey defines where he's discoverable, maybe there's a way that it's only open to people he follows, or who are in a private group he manages, i'm not sure.

These are why peer invites and dht invites are interesting to me.

My ultimate goal is that we find ways to help people manage their ssb connections and community as a commons. Meaning i'm looking for how our tech can get to implement a way for users to be in one or more shared digital spaces which have these characteristics.

1. Commons need to have clearly defined boundaries.
2. Rules should fit local circumstances.
3. Participatory decision-making is vital.
4. Commons must be monitored.
5. Sanctions for those who abuse the commons should be graduated.
6. Conflict resolution should be easily accessible.
7. Commons need the right to organise.
8. Commons work best when nested within larger networks.

The big pubs are a kind of open access free for all which will lead to bad behavior. They break the first rule, which is that there needs to be clearly defined boundaries. Private groups will get us a lot of the way there. but discovering and connecting to people is important.

Has anybody tried using an external keyboard and remarkable tablet? the e-ink and larger form factor seems like it'd be a great setup for outdoor writing. Sure the letters are a bit slow showing up, but if you're writing, or marking up the writing, not editing the text, it should work well.

Happy to say that @Matt Lorentz pushed out an update release of @Planetary with bug fixes and some other nice improvements.

The next release is the big one, where we've upgraded go-ssb to the current release. This will involve a migration to a new database format, which means we remove the local database and resync from peers. This can take a few seconds or hours, but we let users start using the app once their own feed has been resynced.

We're excited about the private groups work but our next step for Planetary is to work on how users find their people. The community pubs are an experiment, but it feels like a scoped community might be more of a private group than just people who follow a common pub.

With telegram i can generate a link which points to a room like page for a user or group. Then they can potentially see a preview on the web or follow a link which loads that same information within the app. Matrix.to has a similar link system. It's great that users can be identified only as a key, but want a name they can share easily.

Planetary supports invites, but not yet dht invites, room invites, or peer invites. So getting those going is on our list. And moving them out of the settings and in to the directory tab where it's easier for users to find things. We also want to be able to paste in specific messages hashes or identities there to look them up. This is a feature of patchwork which is really nice.

Eventually it'd be cool for a privacy preserving way of knowing your identities on other systems and being able to see who's using scuttlebutt. But that's a ways away.

I don't remember this project from when you proposed it 4 years ago, but it's like a non-cryptocurrency DAO it seems. I like the idea and am interested. Did it ever go from proposal to prototype code?

This is great news, i'm so excited.

@paul has published a bluesky spec, called the Authenticated Data eXperiment (ADX)!

I'm pretty excited about this as a project. The spec lays what feels like a set of standards that's rooted in the learning from both ssb and activitypub but provides a kind of middle ground. I think it'll feel pretty familiar to folks here.

Thoughts?

I think having new shirts before dweb and the various northern summer events would great.

It's supposed to remove the messages when you block them, if it doesn't then that's a bug on our end.

I think we could have a feed format for SSB that didn't allow for deleting, we currently do, but i think for most people, using ssb as a kind of human centric social app, delete is essential. That and the ability to have easy end to end encrypted groups, and a solution to the forked feed problem.

Strict message order simply isn't that useful for the ssb apps as they currently exist.

@George i appreciate the reminder. I agree it's important and that we don't have a current team which would reflect the experiences and contributions we need. User testing helps, but team composition is important.

Block (formerly square) open sourced a new database, PranaDB.

Feels like it might be in a similar space to some of the databases we've been using for scuttlebutt apps. It's a kafka db with pull streams and indexes with sql for queries and pull streams for data.

PranaDB is a distributed streaming database, designed from the outset to be horizontally scalable.

Do you like relational databases? Do you like Apache Kafka? PranaDB lives at the intersection of the two.

• Ingest data from Apache Kafka topics
• Define continuously and incrementally updating materialized views over that data.
• Use standard SQL to query that data.
• Define custom processors to process that data
  • Stream data directly into and out of PranaDB

Think:

Like Kafka but where you can query the data in your topics
Like a relational database, but where you can get incrementally updating materialized views, and streaming queries.

It's written in go. I'm not sure about performance or memory footprint. But the idea of a kafka db with pull streams and a query language in sql seems pretty interesting to me.

can we perhaps use loomio or something similar for actual voting?

I think there are two things here. One the protocol has places where it's needlessly complicated. We should be iterating on that and making things simpler. We also can work to have layers, you don't need to know all the muxrpc calls to make a user facing app for example.

The other part is documentation. It's a mess and all over the place. Planetary has set aside budget to pay somebody to work on unifying the documentation of scuttlebutt, and filling out the gaps. I was hoping @SoapDog would be able to do it, because he's a professional writer now, has deep knowledge of ssb, and his patchfox ssb docs are really nice. But he's super busy and wants to focus on writing fiction.

To me it's a third writing, a third organizing whats been written, and a third digging in to how things work in code and talking to people about it. It's a real set of skills different than developing or designing software. I think we need somebody who's got some experience writing technical documentation. If any of you know of somebody?

hey @George we're working on an update release that helps you see the follows of your contacts and other things to help you see what other users are doing and to help you find new people.

I'm curious what you think of #p2panda as it does a bunch of the things you're talking about.

I've been really thinking about this as we're getting ready to make a options for multiple algorithms for the planetary timeline. Manyverse shows one hop out, and pops replies back to the top. Patchwork shows just follows, but you can see one degree out in extended network, and pops replies back to the top. Planetary shows the main tab as direct follows, and structures the extended network with a different format for posts, and does NOT pop replies back to the top.

We're working on an update which will support multiple algorithms for the feed so users can choose and developers can contribute new ones.

One thing we've noticed is planetary gets less engagement in part because we don't show follow / block messages, don't suggest follows, don't show replies/follows/blocks/likes on a users profile page, and don't pop messages back up to the top of the feed when there is a reply. My hypothesis is that these things are important and is one of the reasons why patch* and manyverse keep their users engaged longer.

Just to be clear, we're not about competing with other ssb apps, it's about learning from each other.

I posted something about having a pre or post dweb camp scuttlebutt gathering and how we're offering to help cover travel costs for folks to get there.

I think it’d be great to have a couple day meetup for scuttlebutt folks before or after the #dwebcamp kicks off. That would let us connect, talk about a bunch of social and technical aspects of scuttlebutt, get to know each other in person or reconnect after the long pandemic isolation.

The dweb camp is Wednesday August 24th to August 28th. I was thinking if we had a pre-meeting say from Sunday the 21st til August 23rd we could have Saturday for travel for folks not in California.

What do people think? Just like with the #scuttlecamp of a few years ago, planetary can help with the costs for the venue, food, and organizing. We don’t want it to be a planetary thing, the whole point is that scuttlebutt is a community created project with many apps, implementations, and a healthy diversity of people.

Travel Subsidy

Planetary helped with people’s travel costs to the #scuttlecamp and to the last #dwebcamp before the pandemic. It’d be great to see people again. So we’re offering to help with tickets this time as well. So, if you’ve been actively contributing to scuttlebutt within the last year, either through code, documentation, or organizing projects, please reach out so we can help get you to dweb camp.

We’d also like folks to think about who we should be listening to but who’s not yet got a voice. Scuttlebutt has an inclusive, solarpunk, egalitarian vision for the future. The perspective of people who aren’t straight white cis economically privileged people is important both because their voice is central to the world we want to build and because their experience in social media is shaped by systemic bias. So, if you know folks who should be in the conversation about scuttlebutt and the dweb, please reach out to nominate them.

options

In terms of venue, there are a few options. We can come and meet at my family cabin, #pantilokpom, it’s an off the grid cabin i helped build out of recycled paper (papercrete) with a pond, big barn for meetings, and sauna. It's got starlink and is setup for groups. The downside is that it’s about a 5 hour drive from san francisco, and then 5 hours to the dweb camp location.

We could look into meeting at the dweb camp venue before the official event, that would involve us also helping setup the dweb venue space, which would be a nice collective contribution to the larger community, but would take time away from meeting about scuttlebutt.

Or we could find some other place near the venue in Mendocino (2.5 hours north of san francisco) that we could rent or find somebody to donate as a meeting place.

I also think we should consider how we can have an organized presence at the event, tea space, or some idea of events we'd do, i'm not sure. I'm looking forward to seeing people in person.

In my experience @Luandro Pàtwy northern europe is very expensive for somethings and not for others, Supermarkets are pretty affordable, but restaurants are very expensive. There's backpacker hostels which tend to be more affordable, and the cheap long distance buses instead of the nicer trains.

Welcome back after 2 years!

We could implement it pretty fast in @Planetary, but a spec instead of just the ssb-crut code would be good plus support in other ssb apps.

At the moment we're prioritizing getting planetary experience optimized, finding users to follow / connect to, and upgrading the go-ssb code.

It's open source, so we welcome contributions.

So, does the slow cooked sous vide really make the flavor better? I've heard about it for years but never tried it.

We've blocked them from all planetary pubs as well.

I really like the flavor myself, it's got a complexity which is nice.

✅👍

oh. this is bad. i'll look at it

Welcome @Fem

Matrix has a really nice guide to apps in their ecosystem, including what platforms, operating systems, features, and underlying programming languages are supported. We've got a list of apps, but it'd be nice if we had something like this including information about what's be actively maintained and developed.

Thoughts?

That's our new upgrade of go-ssb where we blow away the database and resync. We don't let you publish anything until we're sure we've got your own log all downloaded from peers so you don't fork yourself. It shouldn't be blocking for that long. Are you on testflight? I thought we hadn't deployed that yet.