I have a friend who is most of the way done making an open source app that handles supply chain interactions without centralization. It uses a SSB backend so there aren’t any central servers and it’s not crypto. There’s no angle for him to get rich doing this, it’s just a good idea that he wants to exist in the world. Written in Clojure.
Just saw that @staltz is giving up work on his open source #Scuttlebutt project, Manyverse. https://www.manyver.se/blog/2024-04-05 It's a shame, but although I liked the theory of Scuttlebutt, I could never gain any traction on it (admittedly I only tried for the time it took me to write this article in July 2021, which discusses Manyverse: https://thenewstack.io/scuttlebutt-decentralize-and-escape-the-social-media-rat-race/). In any case, I wish Andre well — I agree that social media these days is tough going and sometimes I struggle for motivation to engage on it too.
More than ever, we need networking protocols which are resilient, privacy preserving, bandwidth conserving, able to run on low-spec hardware, and not quite as preoccupied with being the global network for everyone ever.
We’re delighted to present Willow, a new family of peer-to-peer protocols that cater to just that niche. https://willowprotocol.org is a guide to those protocols, with full specifications, ~50 hand-drawn diagrams, illustrations, and comics, and much more besides.
Our thanks to @NGIZero for supporting this project!
what I would really like is having mastodon et al as individual peer to peer instances without any servers at all where I publish atom/activity pub for whatever I like, from "an app" locally. And I'm a volun-peer in a distributed search option to actually really find the good stuff I care about and provide it to others, too. we subscribe to individuals and topics again. I care about people, individuals, areas of interest, topics - not about sites or servers. and you toggle your own privacy model
Someone made me an offer for it but I don't know who. If this is someone actually responsible for Scuttlebutt I'll give it to them for free.
I'm not on Scuttlebutt anymore so if you could reach out to whoever's in charge these days and tell them I'd appreciate it. I tried when i used to be on, but no-one responded.
"I want to go back to how it was a couple years ago with more people actively using it as a social platform and community to enjoy life instead of chatting about protocols. I want to go back to curated diaries, vegan junkfood, internal jokes, mushrooms everywhere, coffee posts, and a kinda of cool hippie solarpunkish culture community in which the protocol was just the tool and not the objective."
It looks like "youtube" is covered already, but any #scuttlebutt about that is appreciated. The knowledge about what's best or hot at any time is also federated 😕
@Toastie I've come to the conclusion that anything more than static content is just going to be abused to harass the users. Even supposedly "declarative" features like CSS animations.
Give me static HTML or some structured data and let my client decide how/if to present it.
Come to think of it, that's one reason I love #scuttlebutt: the apps are just displaying data. No fuss, no mess, no harassment.
Small instances make the #fediverse better and more resilient. On my single-user instance, happily hosted and managed by @mastohost I am my own admin and the only user. This gave me a lot of insight into the power of instance admins and the creepy ways we admins can implement blocks with zero transparency to our users. This level of power needs a lot responsibility. Instances with more or less anonymous admins that act in intransparent ways — it's really a problem, IMHO.
@jwildeboer I totally agree. #scuttlebutt is a protocol that addresses all the issues you mentioned but didn’t receive enough attention in the past. Maybe it’s worth to have a look at it.
I don't think it was a good idea for instance admins to agree to talk to Meta under a nondisclosure agreement, but that DOESN'T make it an excuse for people to go and harass those admins. If anything they're the victims of Meta IMO, and a lot of them may still be in favor of blocking Meta regardless of whether they agreed to the meeting or not. I think we have to stick together in situations like this and act accordingly, keep in mind that "divide and conquer" is a proven strategy.
Manyverse is a social networking app with features you would expect: posts, likes, profiles, private messages, etc. But it's not running in the cloud owned by a company, instead, your friends' posts and all your social data live entirely in your phone (or computer). This way, even when you're offline, you can scroll, read anything, and even write posts and like content! When your phone (or computer) is back online, it syncs the latest updates directly with your friends' phones, through a shared local Wi-Fi or on the internet.
Manyverse already works, but it is still in beta. Download it and give it a try https://www.manyver.se/
Manyverse isn't part of the Fediverse, because it works very differently. It's part of the SSB (aka Scuttlebutt) network, and is trying to make SSB more user friendly.
However, the aim of Manyverse/SSB is very similar to the Fediverse: to decentralise social media. You may want to try it out!
Manyverse have just released their first desktop apps, so Manyverse is now available for all major platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android, iOS). You can find out more and download the apps at:
I've previously posted that Manyverse is serverless, but this isn't quite true. It can be very difficult to reliably connect internet users peer-to-peer, so Manyverse uses special servers called "Rooms" to connect users. However, actual user data is not stored online, so data storage is still serverless. There's a video explaining Room servers at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5p0y_MWwDE