@cy
> What was that non-blockchain network... Briar I think?

Briar is a neat experiment, but they've never shipped apps for anything but Android. The problem with depending on one proprietary OS ought to be obvious, Goggle's recent decision to start farming Android app devs is a good example;

https://keepandroidopen.org/

So until it's cross-platform, Briar is a fun toy, but not suitable for production use.

@soapdog

@cy
> Dunno what one would be good though

Depends on your use case/ threat model. Ask yourself questions like; who do I want to communicate with and why? Are you looking for software for an existing group/ network of people who can make and action decisions about where to communicate? Are you wanting to adopt an app to make new contacts among its current network? How sensitive are the communications? Etc, etc.

@soapdog

@cy
> I just use the Fediverse, nothing else seems worth bothering with

Same. Other than email and SMS, and occasional use of Matrix and even less often XMPP.

@soapdog

@soapdog
> the fediverse is indeed cool, but it is not the p2p I aim for

Pure P2P networks have been the holy grail of every new generation of cypherpunks since the 90s. They've never worked out. Everything that's turned out to be practical for use beyond dogfooding has some kind of supernode, and that's not even a bad thing;

https://bridgeseat.substack.com/p/in-defence-of-servers

> It is very costly to run an instance in terms of bandwidth

If you use Mastodon, sure. There are much more efficient fediverse servers.

@cy

@strypey @soapdog @cy

dat works now.
ppl keep ignoring it, but its battle tested and mature.

@serapath @strypey @cy

Just read the thread and there are many good points in it. As I said before, I'm not here to attempt to convince any of yous or have a flamewar.

I disagree with many of the view points expressed in the thread around terming SSB as dead or extinct and claiming it is only valid if old time developers are still present. Don't forget, I wad there from the start as well. Find it mildly annoying to see it called hobby even if it was not intentional.

@serapath @strypey @cy

SSB worked back then and still works now. It has more features now than it had back then.

I also think that people in this thread are pushing requirements and constraints in SSB that were NEVER a part of SSB protocol.

SSB is a network for connecting friends. It follows the same semantics of real life social interactions and groups.

It has never been a privacy oriented protocol for adversarial situations.

@cy @serapath @strypey you are doing nothing wrong, this is a limitation.

It uses a lot of disk space so it can be offline first. You have all the data. It shouldn't become super slow forever. On the new version, I added a better search engine but it takes a while until it indexes everything and also it takes longer to load on launch, but once it is running it is very good.

You can't delete cause you can't modify the signature chain. That is the secure part of secure scuttlebutt.

(1/2)

@cy @serapath @strypey

most of that data are actually blobs, which are images and other attachments, those can be deleted and will be fetched again from the network if needed.

I will add a blob manager in the next version.

@soapdog @cy @strypey

i love ssb.
i just wish p2p enthusiasts would embrace it to rebuild ssb just the way it is, but now you can sync only the tip of feeds and drop old data because it inherently supports sparse but verifiable replication, which would alleviate one of ssb's limitations