SSB was designed by an ocean sailor to be a social network that was infrequently synchronized and then only by local connection. The idea being, when sailors went ashore or rafted up for a gam to catch up on the scuttlebutt, they could synch their databases and have something to read on the next leg of their journey.
Blockchain tech was used to assure that messages created by others had not been altered in transit.
SSB ran into design limitations when the more recent developers tried to imitate something like Mastodon. It can work, but it's definitely idiosyncratic. It does tend to grow a large db, but space is rather cheap these days.
He is pivoting into a new protocol which is intended to preserve the community aspect of SSB, while providing important factors, like the need to delete previous posts.
The last 3 times I tried to use it the ~5 projects you had to run/put together to get any higher-level usable application were always in some way incompatible with each other, as they always seem to be in a constant mode of refactoring. Figuring out a set of compatible versions looked like more like a dark ritual than anything else.
I'm not sure. The last time I tried using it, I had a similar experience.
Nobody was ever able to coalesce a coherent UX/UI around ssb, the core contributors at the time weren't interested in scaling the network without outside funding.
I was working on implementing lighting fast discovery for ssb using a distributed BitTorrent-like tracker. Getting onto the ssb network took way too long. Still, there were not many users on the network, and nobody seemed interested in growing.
ssb/ssbc is a fun and cool project built on solid code by smart people.