Scuttlebutt (the underlying protocol of Manyverse) is the best decentralized social network I've found so far. It takes a much more radical approach than that of federation ala Mastadon, which is just centralization in miniature.
Under the hood, scuttlebutt uses multiple independent blockchains, each tied to a single user. The upside of this is that it makes for a great eventually consistent gossip protocol; the downside is that the entire chain needs to be propagated for any of it to make sense, making it a very storage-intensive protocol.
Private messaging is implemented in a really interesting way using cryptographic envelopes that are publicly gossiped, but only decryptable by the recipient — whose address is also encrypted and therefore hidden.
Personally, I'm looking forward to when they introduce a good decentralized solution for moderation. This would help keep the size of the chain smaller, and make the information you see more usable.
The Scuttlebutt Protocol Guide [0] is a really easy and interesting read, I highly recommend it.
This makes me a bit nervous for the participants though.
If I send you a private message, the message is encrypted along that private channel - but it's also stored permanently on the blockchain unless I'm mistaken.
For something like WhatsApp or Signal any possible future technology is not a concern - as long as our encrypted channel is secure right now that's good enough for what we need (TLS is similarly fine if it's fine right now). With this design, private conversations will be held encrypted forever in the chain, waiting for a day when the encryption is either broken or vulnerable to brute force (e.g. by a future quantum processor).
I realise this sounds incredibly paranoid, but with Google's Sycamore and whatever else is being cooked up in other labs, we know the tech is coming eventually. The only question mark is really over the time horizon of getting there.
We assume that a functionally useful implementation of Shor's algorithm for breaking RSA cryptography is beyond reach in the near term, but that's only an assumption, and ignores the possibility that an orders-of-magnitude-better classical or quantum algorithm for factorisation remains undiscovered.
I think Urbit solves some of the issues that remain unsolved in Scuttlebutt. When you have non-zero cost NFTs as IDs on the network you make spam a non-issue and moderation 'easy'.
Avoiding blockchain in the actual system design also gets rid of the storage-intensive protocol issue, it's my favorite approach of the attempts to pull off these decentralized systems. It's also the only one I thing could truly work at scale as a new underlying system that applications can be built on top of from those I've seen.
The ability to update code across the network and the built in incentives for infrastructure nodes (stars) are really interesting. I also think the functional OS design is pretty cool.
I'm a big Mastodon supporter, and I like the idea of SSB but I just couldn't manage the storage/bandwidth/latency costs on my phone. I tried out Manyverse for a few weeks a few years back when my friends were using it but it took XX minutes to sync every time I opened up the app, and posts I saw were always days old and out of date. A very annoying user experience for a mobile application and eventually I just uninstalled it. (It actually reminded me of using Google Keep, another app that regularly locks me out of my notes to do "housekeeping" every few days—at least Manyverse has a good excuse!)
>Under the hood, scuttlebutt uses multiple independent blockchains, each tied to a single user.
Now wondering why the landing page for Manyverse prominently says: "No token. No ICO. No blockchain."
It makes the downside you mention "making it a very storage-intensive protocol" more interesting, and confusing for someone trying to understand the tech stack behind it.
... what if you could "follow" a moderation source, the same way you choose to follow user, or a group of users? (Disclaimer: I do not know much about how scuttlebutt in particular handles any of this.) This would have the curious effect of separating the moderation from the platform; several moderators with varying opinions could make their own decisions, and the sum of the opinions you as a user have subscribed to determines the relative "trust" for a piece of content. Maybe you could choose moderators that align with your personal biases, or seek out those that more aggressively combat something you find annoying or offensive? But you could also switch those out on a whim, if your trust for that particular admin changed over time. Like, you aren't stuck with their decisions, you're just leaning on them to help you make yours.
Zeronet maintain the site content by each users as shared folder, hence audience only need to sync the current state, not the entire history. Sounds more efficient than SSB
It seems like the storage-intensive nature of the network would limit growth -- at some point it would get too big and slow. Interesting to have this built in, it would favour many smaller networks; decentralized by design.
A naive semi-unrelated question - why don't cell phones support LoraWAN (or similar mesh protocols)? This sort of thing could be ubiquitous in that landscape.
Because LoraWAN was designed for low power, intermittent/sporadic communication from battery/solar operated things spread out over a wide area. It's bandwidth is limited to 50kbits/sec per channel so its design is for sending small messages. Perfect use case would be something like a farm where you want to monitor dozens of small things such as the temperature in the barn, water level in a stock tank, monitor an irrigation system, monitor soil conditions, etc.
So in theory one could create a web app client over this, and allow people to host their own client instances (locally, on their laptop) or to provide semi-centralised nodes.
Why? Because this would overcome the limitations of Scuttlebutt for storage and syncing on mobile devices... yet the underlying data is decentralised and individuals could always avoid the website and access their data directly.
But really why? Well the UK is busy legislating the "Online Safety Bill" https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-online-safe... and I run large community websites with user generated content. The proposals place a large burden and liability on me as a UK entity involved in facilitating people talking... it's designed to address Facebook and Twitter, etc but it does not have a threshold and the Gov argument is that it should apply to every piece of user generated content that isn't a review on a product.
I have no intention of accepting the liability involved (the paperwork is fine, the liability is not fine). Instead I am planning to solve this with tech and am looking at options - which I'll select from if the bill passes in it's current form.
Specifically I'm looking to decentralise and distribute, to encrypt and avoid any central ownership or authority... to disempower myself but to enable the community. But I don't want to do this in a way that enables someone else to exert control over the communities, I'm proudest most that I wasn't a dictator so have no intention of creating one in my absence.
The thought of a decentralised and unstoppable backend is very attractive.
While it seems cool, I just think that it is kind of self-defeating?
Sure I can see my friends posts after a while, but at the same time if you really live off-grid you will probably not have a connection for a while and in these times there is really no use case for the app anyway.
I just think I am most likely to check the stuff I want to check whenever I have a connection. But perhaps I am wrong.
This is great, however I'm curious, how do they handle the storage size that grows overtime? and how long does it take (depending on the growth) for the app to be unusable because of the size? At some point I think it will be like crypto where you have to download hundreds of gigabytes to get all the data right.
I found this article[1] which provided this insight into the relationship between the two.
> Now, in 2021, there is a growing underground project called Scuttlebutt that is tackling the decentralized web from a different perspective. Unlike Diaspora and Mastodon, Scuttlebutt is not a product for end-users — rather, it’s a protocol (like HTTP or RSS). Decentralized social network products, like Manyverse and Planetary, are being built for end-users on top of the Scuttlebutt protocol.
If the last part of that comment is dig implying that SSB is buggy, then providing some additional details about bugs we should be aware of would be illuminating.
Also I'd be very concerned about who developed it and why, and what the EULA truly is.
If everything is decentralized, there are no records if you get threatened, extorted, or harassed on a platform, and harmful content isn't saved anywhere notable.
At then end of the day, no platform can guarantee security but they all do cost money to develop and operate and nothing comes truly for free... this we all know... There is some motive for the platform being developed, which is unclear at this point to me.
I'd rather deal conservatively and cautiously with non P2P platforms at this point just to be fully honest.
My hesitation is also the proposition: if everything for a community is stored on my phone, does that mean one person could post something illegal and now I have illegal material on my phone even if I never clicked a link to it? That's scary.
related / unrelated, plugging my project that is not a ssb replacement but takes the best bits of it and turns into fully anon distributed forum called moderator. @moderatorium on twitter in case interested, take a look.
[+] [-] jonstaab|4 years ago|reply
Under the hood, scuttlebutt uses multiple independent blockchains, each tied to a single user. The upside of this is that it makes for a great eventually consistent gossip protocol; the downside is that the entire chain needs to be propagated for any of it to make sense, making it a very storage-intensive protocol.
Private messaging is implemented in a really interesting way using cryptographic envelopes that are publicly gossiped, but only decryptable by the recipient — whose address is also encrypted and therefore hidden.
Personally, I'm looking forward to when they introduce a good decentralized solution for moderation. This would help keep the size of the chain smaller, and make the information you see more usable.
The Scuttlebutt Protocol Guide [0] is a really easy and interesting read, I highly recommend it.
[0] https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/
Edit: clarified what Scuttlebutt is.
[+] [-] headmelted|4 years ago|reply
If I send you a private message, the message is encrypted along that private channel - but it's also stored permanently on the blockchain unless I'm mistaken.
For something like WhatsApp or Signal any possible future technology is not a concern - as long as our encrypted channel is secure right now that's good enough for what we need (TLS is similarly fine if it's fine right now). With this design, private conversations will be held encrypted forever in the chain, waiting for a day when the encryption is either broken or vulnerable to brute force (e.g. by a future quantum processor).
I realise this sounds incredibly paranoid, but with Google's Sycamore and whatever else is being cooked up in other labs, we know the tech is coming eventually. The only question mark is really over the time horizon of getting there.
We assume that a functionally useful implementation of Shor's algorithm for breaking RSA cryptography is beyond reach in the near term, but that's only an assumption, and ignores the possibility that an orders-of-magnitude-better classical or quantum algorithm for factorisation remains undiscovered.
[+] [-] Naac|4 years ago|reply
More clients are listed here: https://scuttlebutt.nz/get-started/
[+] [-] gonehome|4 years ago|reply
Avoiding blockchain in the actual system design also gets rid of the storage-intensive protocol issue, it's my favorite approach of the attempts to pull off these decentralized systems. It's also the only one I thing could truly work at scale as a new underlying system that applications can be built on top of from those I've seen.
The ability to update code across the network and the built in incentives for infrastructure nodes (stars) are really interesting. I also think the functional OS design is pretty cool.
[+] [-] nightpool|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strict9|4 years ago|reply
Now wondering why the landing page for Manyverse prominently says: "No token. No ICO. No blockchain."
It makes the downside you mention "making it a very storage-intensive protocol" more interesting, and confusing for someone trying to understand the tech stack behind it.
[+] [-] zeta0134|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subpixel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pabs3|4 years ago|reply
https://librelounge.org/episodes/episode-14-secure-scuttlebu...
[+] [-] aabbcc1241|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btbuildem|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dleslie|4 years ago|reply
Is there some form of filtering available? Ie, only show posts from friends and friends of friends?
It appears to have blocks and mutes.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jamescampbell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notanzaiiswear|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anarchogeek|4 years ago|reply
For ios another open source one is https://planetary.social/ which i wrote.
[+] [-] GekkePrutser|4 years ago|reply
I would expect for the privacy conscious community that F-Droid would be a big plus?
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
Manyverse – A social network off the grid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18065567 - Sept 2018 (117 comments)
[+] [-] wrycoder|4 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713830 - Jan 2021 (166 comments)
[+] [-] joshka|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterTea|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buro9|4 years ago|reply
So in theory one could create a web app client over this, and allow people to host their own client instances (locally, on their laptop) or to provide semi-centralised nodes.
Why? Because this would overcome the limitations of Scuttlebutt for storage and syncing on mobile devices... yet the underlying data is decentralised and individuals could always avoid the website and access their data directly.
But really why? Well the UK is busy legislating the "Online Safety Bill" https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-online-safe... and I run large community websites with user generated content. The proposals place a large burden and liability on me as a UK entity involved in facilitating people talking... it's designed to address Facebook and Twitter, etc but it does not have a threshold and the Gov argument is that it should apply to every piece of user generated content that isn't a review on a product.
I have no intention of accepting the liability involved (the paperwork is fine, the liability is not fine). Instead I am planning to solve this with tech and am looking at options - which I'll select from if the bill passes in it's current form.
Specifically I'm looking to decentralise and distribute, to encrypt and avoid any central ownership or authority... to disempower myself but to enable the community. But I don't want to do this in a way that enables someone else to exert control over the communities, I'm proudest most that I wasn't a dictator so have no intention of creating one in my absence.
The thought of a decentralised and unstoppable backend is very attractive.
[+] [-] amelius|4 years ago|reply
I know that is ridiculous, but this could become the interpretation of the new law.
[+] [-] sergiomattei|4 years ago|reply
Obligatory joke aside, very cool project! Eager to try it out now.
[+] [-] mrtnpwn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staticelf|4 years ago|reply
Sure I can see my friends posts after a while, but at the same time if you really live off-grid you will probably not have a connection for a while and in these times there is really no use case for the app anyway.
I just think I am most likely to check the stuff I want to check whenever I have a connection. But perhaps I am wrong.
[+] [-] robertwt7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bovermyer|4 years ago|reply
I just wish it was easier to discover SSB users.
[+] [-] iszomer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] null4bl3|4 years ago|reply
Reviews says it's just scuttlebug
[+] [-] choff|4 years ago|reply
> Now, in 2021, there is a growing underground project called Scuttlebutt that is tackling the decentralized web from a different perspective. Unlike Diaspora and Mastodon, Scuttlebutt is not a product for end-users — rather, it’s a protocol (like HTTP or RSS). Decentralized social network products, like Manyverse and Planetary, are being built for end-users on top of the Scuttlebutt protocol.
[1] https://thenewstack.io/scuttlebutt-decentralize-and-escape-t...
[+] [-] Jtsummers|4 years ago|reply
Also, "scuttlebug", a not-so-subtle insult or odd typo?
[+] [-] 1MachineElf|4 years ago|reply
If the last part of that comment is dig implying that SSB is buggy, then providing some additional details about bugs we should be aware of would be illuminating.
[+] [-] anonymous532|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sykseh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metalliqaz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] winternett|4 years ago|reply
If everything is decentralized, there are no records if you get threatened, extorted, or harassed on a platform, and harmful content isn't saved anywhere notable.
At then end of the day, no platform can guarantee security but they all do cost money to develop and operate and nothing comes truly for free... this we all know... There is some motive for the platform being developed, which is unclear at this point to me.
I'd rather deal conservatively and cautiously with non P2P platforms at this point just to be fully honest.
[+] [-] janandonly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchandna|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afro88|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staltz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linuxandrew|4 years ago|reply
The DHT sounds nice, in theory, but I heard in practice it doesn't work well which is a shame.
[+] [-] moderatorium|4 years ago|reply
live prototype at http://sd7ezzynq5jclyltgiwnvabtk4m6nccdrmzfth72raxisoiplrtnr...
[+] [-] mderazon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|4 years ago|reply