[bergstromm466]

Completely agree. For anyone who hasn’t come across it, check out the exciting work being done by developers of the Secure Scuttlebutt protocol:

“Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) is a peer-to peer communication protocol, mesh network, and self-hosted social media ecosystem. Each user hosts their own content and the content of the peers they follow, which provides fault tolerance and eventual consistency.[5] Messages are digitally signed and added to an append-only list of messages published by an author.[6] SSB is primarily used for implementing distributed social networks, and utilizes cryptography to assure that content remains unforged as it is propagated through the network.”

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt

Join us! There is a fully functioning client, and bustling Solarpunk community: http://scuttlebutt.nz

[Groxx]

SSB is interesting and the clients (e.g. Patchwork) show a good amount of the promise. I'm watching it and poking occasionally and it has been fun.

And the protocol spec page is fantastic: https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/

... that said, it has some enormous problems around multi-device, rather costly replication (start at the beginning, catch up to now, otherwise you can't verify anything), and it's fairly normal to miss part of a conversation and not have any real way to get it filled in. There are a number of branching concepts with semi-compatible protocols that strike me as a lot more promising, but odds seem pretty good that the community will shift if necessary (which is a good thing).

Worth a shot for anyone to explore if they're curious though, there's even a largely-functional mobile app: https://www.manyver.se/

[ElFitz]

I'm really worried about the total amount of data each user will end up lugging around though.

Also, append only => no deletes, correct?

[bergstromm466]

Yes, no deletes. Since there is no company in the middle, the GDPR rules don't apply to this P2P network, so it isn't an issue legally (in Europe).

This is something that will probably take some puzzling to get to a sustainable mechanism. The strategy I've heard talked about most often is to append metadata that marks it as 'deleted', so when things populate or 'gossip' further, it won't show up in the user interface. Instead it's labeled as 'archived' or 'deleted', or has a link to it's replacement.

[masukomi]

It should be noted that while you can't delete / edit messages you _can_ delete blobs (binary attachments). They'll come back if you load a post that references them, but that's where the majority of size comes from and it is manageable.

Also, how much you download is related to how many people you follow, and text doesn't take up a ton of space.

[ElFitz]

Sure. But where do the blobs "come from" when they "come back". Since it's fully P2P, someone has to keep them around.

As for text not taking up a ton of space. Sure. Except it's text with it's metadata, and possibly text generated by a few hundred people.

A friend and I managed to exchange ~24k messages on Slack over the last 3 years (~4k each / year); using it like some kind of "private twitter" where we would just post anything that might be of interest to the other.

What would it be like if I follow 300 or 1000 people doing the same, over Secure Scuttlebutt?

- At 1 byte per character (from what I've gathered, Unicode characters actually take up 1 to 4 bytes) - 140 characters / message (because Twitter proved it's usually enough) - messages' metadata (50 bytes?) - 4.000 messages / user / year - following 300 people

We'd get... 228MB / year?

That's actually way less than I expected!

[ElFitz]

That's pretty much how event sourcing deals with deletion.

I wasn't even worrying about the legality of it. Simply that you end up lugging those messages around on your devices.

And better be careful about what you post, because there's no taking it back.