If you don't want to store people's data, then an SSB "room" server is the option, and in fact is the best type of server currently serving the SSB network. More info here https://www.manyver.se/faq/admin-room

(I develop Manyverse) Onboarding in SSB is invite-driven and thus is at odds with safety. If you want to "find people" easily, and easily join the network, then this means that any harasser can also do the same. Improving Onboarding while not sacrificing Sustainability and Safety is my top priority and there are several protocol advancements being worked on, more information here: https://gitlab.com/staltz/manyverse/-/wikis/Starchart/

None of the docs I found said that.

And we could get on to the network and join pubs. Only there was nothing in there. We should also have been able to invite each other and follow each other's posts, as we were both using devices on the same wifi, but that just silently failed.

A week or so later the iphone app rolled out an update with a patch note saying something along the lines of "whoops, new signups went to the test servers instead of prod by mistake" which _may_ explain some of it. But going back in to the app after the fix was no better.

Are you talking about Planetary social?

Probably, yes. I don't remember which client I tried, but that's showing as a previously installed app that's no longer on my phone.

What makes you think it is dead when there are active users every day, development is active, and there's a developer conference this week (https://p2p-basel.org/)?

Simple,

1. it hasn’t grown past the early adopter phase 2. There is no product-market fit.

The evidence I have is the litany of dead accounts that follow my account. Luckily, via mastodon I’ve been able to reconnect with those people.

As someone else has mentioned mastodon is doing quite well. And from experience Web 1.0 blogging is a breath of fresh air.

The Nile is not just a river in Egypt.

That's a very limiting definition of 'death' and it may as well have applied for "Linux Desktop", yet Linux as a Desktop choice is increasingly popular, just not at a growth rate that would satisfy Silicon Valley: https://www.justingarrison.com/blog/year-of-linux-desktop/

As for 1: you don't have metrics for that. As for 2: you don't have metrics for that.

I wish you all the success with your grants and crowdfunding. We disagree with the feasibility of ssb as a platform, but either one of us trying to sway each other from their position may prove to be a foolish errand. Fair winds.

Manyverse is cross-platform and it's the main desktop app nowadays: https://manyver.se

The Scuttlebutt.nz website hasn't been kept up-to-date. SSB's development is also decentralized, so this means that not everything moves forward in unison, so depending on who you ask, Scuttlebutt.nz is not the official frontpage.

Oh. It’s linked on Wikipedia as an official front page, and on the github also. Is there an official frontpage?

… oh I get it, it’s decentralised, there is no official front page?

Anyway yeah Manyverse seems to “work”, in the sense “is up to date, I can run it if I ignore the OS X insecure errors, and I can even join a server”.

But the one server where I could get an invite has 0 posts and 0 people apparently so, I need to keep digging I guess

Okay.

Then I guess this really isn’t for me.

Hey, André! Good seeing you here. I love your work!

I’ve been one of your supporters (via Patreon) for several years now (I literally have your name somewhere in my monthly budget — haha), and I will continue to support you, even though it’s not a large amount of $.

I sometimes wish I could work on open-source projects I love full-time, but instead I get to live vicariously through awesome folks like yourself.

I hope all is well with you. Keep up the great work!

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616361

Manyverse creator here. We're working on the desktop app and it's almost ready. I use it on a regular basis on my own desktop. Check a screenshot and progress report at the bottom of this blog post: https://www.manyver.se/blog/2021-09-update

Hi, I'm the creator of Manyverse. This part definitely needs to be clarified/improved on the UX side, and we know what should be done (we had a UX project dedicated to this: https://www.manyver.se/ux-research/ ) and we'll work on it soonish (still this year according to our roadmap). SSB is an invite-based system, and this is very important for community safety, this is what makes SSB really stand apart as a nice social network.

If you, or anyone reading this, wants to join our community, send me a DM on Twitter @andrestaltz with a short comment on who you are and what you're interested in, and I'll invite you if you seem trustworthy and friendly.

Hi, I'm the creator of Manyverse. We definitely want to be on F-Droid, the reason it's not there at the moment is merely technical. Manyverse is a beast to compile on F-Droid servers, requires compiling Node.js (Mobile) from scratch, compiling several Rust dependencies, C++ dependencies, and it's a React Native project (which comes with its own headaches). Some while ago the build broke and I've been pouring hours into it trying to bring the build back, but it's killing me. Sorry for the inconvenience

Hi! I'm the creator of Manyverse.

That's right, it's using a ton of space. We are currently working on a new protocol extension for SSB targeted at solving exactly this. Here's a presentation from some months ago, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKr208wpr6Y , although our designs have changed a bit during implementation. See also https://github.com/ssb-ngi-pointer/ssb-meta-feeds-spec

We're building this under a grant from the EU Commission, NGI Pointer, read more about it here https://www.manyver.se/blog/2020-10-update

We're almost finished with a proof of concept of meta feeds for partial replication, and we're working on compiling statistics on how much will it reduce the total payload sizes during replication. For that purpose we built a network simulator to simulate replication at scale: https://github.com/ssb-ngi-pointer/netsim/

> Similar can be said from everything like Scuttlebutt to GNU Jami; any service that operates on a P2P basis will likely reveal your IP, and tie your identity to it (and your IP address history). In some cases, as with Jami, this would be limited to friends you add; in others, as with Scuttlebutt and IPFS, it could be revealed to anyone.

Regarding Scuttlebutt (SSB), this isn't quite true. While IPFS requires a DHT, SSB's primary mode of updating content is via servers such as pubs and rooms, the DHT in SSB is optional and not the most common mode of updating content. In SSB you can and should choose the servers which you're connecting to, so in that sense it's closer to the federated model.

It's not entirely fair that the article equates "P2P" to "DHT", there are many ways you can do P2P connections, a DHT is only used for discovery. IP leakage is a problem in all these models (centralized, P2P, federated, etc): some computer somewhere will see your IP address, and you have to trust them not to do bad stuff with it.

For a comprehensive overview of privacy in DHTs and P2P, watch this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCCkwU4JPcY

https://SafeNetwork.tech is thoroughly p2p and doesn't reveal IP addresses because it's designed from the ground up to be decentralised, anonymous and censorship resistant.