Distributed bittorrent-like social network?

Distributed bittorrent-like social network?

1. I don’t know much of Secure Scuttlebutt, but I do know it seems to be there to stay (and p2p, although of course in practice some people additionally run always-on nodes on VPS to improve connectivity)

   1. Yes! Scuttlebutt is the kind of thing I’m looking for. I should have though to look on Wikipedia too, because from Scuttlebutt, I landed on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking

      Thank you all.

2. snej

   edited 1 hour ago

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   Ditto Scuttlebutt. Which I tried a few years ago but found the UI awful (in the default app at least), and more significantly, it was a resource hog. Just joining one ‘pub’ and following a few people resulted in a half gigabyte of data downloaded, and the app kept re-indexing over and over.

   Anyway, long story short, I’ve been building my own distributed system, Tendril, with a lot of influence from Scuttlebutt but with more efficient data structures & protocols, plus the core is C++ instead of JS and it uses SQLite instead of some bespoke JS database.

   I’ve been honestly procrastinating opening it up, adding “just one more feature” instead, but I’m super close now. I just uploaded the iPad version to TestFlight today (there’s also a Mac app and a bare CLI version that runs on Linux with a browser-based UI.)

   I guess I’ve just outed myself without thinking ahead :) It does seem like a good moment to be unveiling this. Anyway, message me privately if you want an invite.

3. gcupc

   4 hours ago

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   I second the mention of Secure Scuttlebutt. There are some things I don’t like very much about it, but it certainly meets your requirements.

4. There’s https://cabal.chat/ but I think it’s only chat (for now?)

5. Is what you are thinking of functionally different from a federation where most or all users run their own server and federate with each other? One of the goals with federated networks is being able to own your own data, either by running your own node or exporting your data to move across nodes. Distributing the data itself would run somewhat counter to that goal, so I wouldn’t expect it to have as much backing as the current federated networks.

   Maybe ZeroNet is also similar to what you’re thinking of.

   1. snej

      1 hour ago

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      One of the goals with federated networks is being able to own your own data, either by running your own node or exporting your data to move across nodes

      In a federated system you can’t own your own data unless you run your own node, because your data is tied to a single node. Running your own node is not something most people are capable of, making this sort of an elitist goal.

      In a truly decentralized system everyone owns their own data in that (a) it’s signed, so no one can alter or forge it, and (b) anything private is encrypted, so people who weren’t meant to read it can’t read it. Admittedly you do lose control over where public data is stored, since it’s cached by any number of peers, but I believe the same is true in Mastodon.