
SSB Rooms: a new server type for Scuttlebutt - staltz
https://www.manyver.se/blog/announcing-ssb-rooms
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olah_1
Manyverse still has the direct friend-to-friend invites, right? I'm pretty
sure Patchwork still doesn't have this :/

If I could connect to the friends I know in person first, that would be great.

I think social networks gain momentum by being useful to real friendships and
then the discovery aspect kicks in later. If it's all about finding random
internet friends, it's going to set the tone for the whole life of the
network.

All of the long-time users will be cemented in their random internet
relationships and will be hesitant to then mix their real life relationships
into that later on. It's just normal that these different social circles
organize and it's normal that people don't typically mix them.

~~~
nine_k
To me, it's the other way around. Most of my real friendships were initiated
by contacts on social networks. This is the only way I could have met a number
of wonderful people who live far away from my city.

And transparency, (tunable) FOAF features is exactly what made it possible
rather quickly. If anybody here remembers FriendFeed, they had this mechanics
well-polished. (They also invented the Like button.)

~~~
olah_1
>And transparency, (tunable) FOAF features is exactly what made it possible
rather quickly

I'm interested in hearing more about what "FOAF" is and some examples of what
you mean :)

~~~
reificator
At a guess I'd assume `FOAF` = `Friend of a Friend`.

~~~
olah_1
Probably, thanks.

Iris (built with Gun) has "degrees of separation" as well.
[https://iris.to/](https://iris.to/)

I believe SSB does have degrees, but I'm not sure how many.

~~~
fenwick67
They like to call the relationships "hops" in SSB. I think Manyverse
replicates only 2 hops (the people you follow directly and then the people
they follow), but the desktop client replicates 3 hops.

~~~
olah_1
I think the reason that SSB isn't super well documented yet is probably
because the protocol is still subject to change and not yet set in stone. I
think Manyverse tweeted something about how SSB might get mutability and a
delete propagation message in the future even.

Regarding "degrees of separation". I think it makes sense to have the degrees
be

1\. "I have met this person in real life, known them for a long time, and can
confirm that they are who they say they are".

2\. "I only know this person through the app, but we both like and respect
each other and are friends"

3\. This is either a 1st or 2nd degree relationship of one of my 1st or 2nd
degree relationships.

So theoretically 1 and 2 are the same, the difference being you like scanned a
physical QR code verifying 1 and know them IRL for example.

That way the degrees can double as a "web of trust" that serves as identity
verification.

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StavrosK
Does anyone know of an HN room or pub we can join? I've been wanting to try
SSB out but never really clicked with a community.

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marknadal
Apologies, @staltz could you expand more? Is this centralized? Or federated,
along the lines of Mastodon?

Why not do this decentralized? Should be possible. NAB (p2p Reddit) does
something similar with GUN via "spaces" that are under a public key, but
requires no centralized host/server/etc. should be trivial to do the same in
SSB.

~~~
olah_1
Seems like it's federated and if you really connect with someone you meet, you
can probably choose to become "friends" and store each others' directly,
bypassing that federated/centralized server.

~~~
black_puppydog
SSB as a _technology_ is about as decentralized as it gets. All posts are
stored locally, you can write posts and replies and do everything offline.
Then when you share some medium with other peers, they gossip all their
updates, as well of the updates of their friends and friends of friends.

That medium _can_ be a shared wifi (if it allows UPD multicast) or it can be
bluetooth (only for manyverse so far... desktop bluetooth gossip is haaaard)
but at the moment, the shared "medium" is often an internet server. These
servers ("pubs") are not any different from normal ssb peers, they just expose
a public IP and don't have NAT.

There's two issues that people take with pubs:

1\. They make the ecosystem less decentralized, moving it more towards a sort
of federation. But it's not like you _only_ connect to the pubs you select.
Usually an ssb application will connect to many different pubs that it knows
about, so there's no single point of failure there. 2\. Following a pub means
that you get blasted with a fire hose full of random strangers' (everyone who
signed up for that pub, plus their friends) posts, which take up space on your
drive, and (more importantly) need to be verified and indexed locally. That
makes onboarding very slow and tedious, especially on mobile devices.

Rooms relate to the latter. They're an easy way to have a pub server that only
connects you to the group of people you want to be connected to. Well, if you
don't share invites to it around freely that is. And it's simple to set up,
even for less technical people. Maybe think of it like a NAT traversal with
extra crypto. Like that, onboarding a friend onto SSB is a bit more elegant:
you still give them an invite, but to a room for a social circle that they
already fit into, or even a room just for you and them. Now instead of having
to let the device sit and digest a thousand feeds over night, it only gets the
feeds they would want to know about. It's much more like local off-grid
onboarding.

