#manyverse #private-groups

Also the last release won't auto-roll-out, see here for why ssb:message/sha256/-3vgti8zxxx-OxAdMdedz1UaccOc91yhVlQUXt--W7I=

Private groups - final blogpost

Hi! I'm writing this blogpost to communicate what happened with the Private groups grant we were working on. In here I'll try to summarize work we did since the last private groups update (don't forget the user experience research that was done too) and until approximately summer last year (sorry for the late update!).

We researched and wrote down the ssb group exclusion spec. It's been very well thought through and is well written, I can recommend at least skimming it if you're into this kind of stuff. Notable things include

• Key rotation on member exclusion: when excluding (removing) a member of a group, we don't just politely ask them to leave. Under the hood we create a new group with a new encryption key that we invite everyone to except for the excluded member.
• New metafeeds on key rotation: when doing this member exclusion key rotation, everyone in the group starts posting on new feeds (see ssb-meta-feeds-group-spec for meta feed details). This means that on top of the e2e encryption of the group, the excluded member won't even see the new activity in the group, unlike how things work in the traditional ssb-box encryption where everything is posted to the same feed.
• Efficient conflict resolution: instead of spinning up a blockchain (lol) in case of conflicting states, we assume some minimal level of trust and use the tried-and-true highly efficient Array.sort() (spec).

We implemented this spec into the ssb-tribes2 module. We also did a bunch of work to make it more resilient to crashes by being able to recover from the middle of an exclusion that was aborted.

We also developed ssb-tribes2-demo to demonstrate the ssb-tribes2 module in action. It's a simple group chat app where you can invite and kick people, message each other with end to end encryption and without any servers or internet involved.

One thing we're releasing now is a small patch release (no new features nor big bug fixes) of Manyverse to get to use some newer versions of code modules released during the private groups development. Automatic updates should be rolling out over the next few days. NOTE though that Manyverse won't actually gain Private groups support, unfortunately (Manyverse also won't receive more updates in general, as we've announced before). That was the original plan but due to time and budget constraints that was unfortunately not possible. Hopefully these specs and modules can live on and inspire other efforts.

Repost of https://www.manyver.se/blog/2024-07-30

Ok now there's just a link on https://www.manyver.se/download pointing to this release for linux

reverted the website now so you shouldn't be prompted to update now. i'll get the special patch version linked later

feels really unnecessary this release but it's a requirement for the last nlnet money (2 months worth of pay) so i don't feel i have much choice 🤷🙃

i might actually revert the website to point to the old version for most platforms, but then add a link specifically if anyone really wants to try this patch on desktop linux

Trying to release a small patch for #manyverse (shouldn't have any noticeable changes so don't expect much) for https://www.manyver.se/blog/2024-07-30 but having problems building on non-linux-desktop platforms. So you might get "please update" notifications but not actually be able to update on other platforms. Will hopefully solve this within a week.

@SoapDog (Macbook Air M1) i feel like i shouldn't be that surprised you're making SOAP