Scuttlebutt

I've been playing with scuttlebutt, a secure decentralized social network for a few days, and wanted to share some information on it.

Scuttlebutt isn´t so much a program as an ecosystem, a collection of programs, protocols, servers and people that allow users to share information peer-to-peer.

Patchwork

The simplest way to get started with scuttlebutt is to install patchwork, a graphical client that connects to the scuttlebutt network and displays posts.

If you run patchwork, you will have a node running scuttlebutt, and if anyone in your local network is also running a node, you will see their public posts. However, if no one on your local network is running a node, you won't see anythng.

Identities

When you start up patchwork, it creates an identity for you. An identitiy in scuttlebutt is a key pair. You broadcast your public key to all interested parties. For example, I am known as @RtsOc2h1gqh0fRrjrUTHAkRBu9YyDgsD+EWsfLpykrc=.ed25519

Each identity has an associated feed, and the secret key allows you (and only you) to post to your identity's feed. The feed is a blockchain, meaning you can only append to your feed, not edit or delete anything you post.

Pubs

In order to see anyone else's posts, you need to be able to find their feeds. Right now, the simplest way to see feeds is by connecting to a Pub, or public server. These are regular ssb nodes that have fixed IP addresses, and run software to generate invitations into the network.

There are lists of known Pubs, and I'm running a Pub on our server. Visit a Pub, ask for an invite, and you can paste the invite into the patchwork client to connect your node to that pub and see the public posts of the visitors to that Pub. Click on the "+ Join Pub" button in patchwork to connect, and paste in your invitation code.

Posts, votes, and channels

Once you are set up, you can write a post. Posts can be as long as you want (not limited to 140 characters), and can use Markdown formatting.

Your client will sign your post with your secret key, and append it to your feed. The post will then be propagated to any of your followers (at first, only the pubs you joined).

A special form of message, a "vote", can link to another post, and express approval (or disaproval). Patchwork uses these vote messages to implement likes.

If you want to join a broader conversation, you can post into a #channel. A channel is a topic linked by a # sign. You can browse lists of recent channels, search for channels, and subscribe to channels, which will then make your node pull posts from other users that post to the channels.

Private posts

Since everyone in scuttlebutt has a keypair, and everyone broadcasts their public key, you can send messages encrypted directly to each recipient. No central service knows your secret key, and the way private messages are implemented now, you append your encrypted message to your feed, so no one can even know who the recipient of the private message is. (Your friends will pull your post from your feed and figure out if it is for them).

Other clients

There are more clients available for scuttlebutt. I like patchfoo, because it is very lightweight, and I'm a troglodite. It runs a server on your own computer and you connect to it with your usual browser. The default server binds to the IPv6 localhost address ::1. At least in my version of firefox, you need to include that IPv6 address in square brackets to connect http://[::1]:8027/

git-ssb

The patchfoo git repository lives in git-ssb, which is a plugin for git that uses the scuttlebutt network for the backend. It supports file storage, pull requests and issues in a completely distributed fashion, with no central server. Each ssb node replicates the files for the repositories it's interested in, and shares them to other peers.