[HN Gopher] Manyverse - A social network off the grid
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Manyverse - A social network off the grid
Author : graderjs
Score : 166 points
Date : 2021-09-21 18:18 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.manyver.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.manyver.se)
| sergiomattei wrote:
| We off the grid grid grid, this for my kids kids kids.
|
| Obligatory joke aside, very cool project! Eager to try it out
| now.
| null4bl3 wrote:
| Branding says manyverse.
|
| Reviews says it's just scuttlebug
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| >scuttlebug
|
| If the last part of that comment is dig implying that SSB is
| buggy, then providing some additional details about bugs we
| should be aware of would be illuminating.
| choff wrote:
| I found this article[1] which provided this insight into the
| relationship between the two.
|
| > Now, in 2021, there is a growing underground project called
| Scuttlebutt that is tackling the decentralized web from a
| different perspective. Unlike Diaspora and Mastodon,
| Scuttlebutt is not a product for end-users -- rather, it's a
| protocol (like HTTP or RSS). Decentralized social network
| products, like Manyverse and Planetary, are being built for
| end-users on top of the Scuttlebutt protocol.
|
| [1] https://thenewstack.io/scuttlebutt-decentralize-and-
| escape-t...
| anonymous532 wrote:
| I think Manyverse is just an UI for whatever Scuttlebug is.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt
|
| Secure Scuttlebutt, not Scuttle _bug_ , as GP has it.
| anonymous532 wrote:
| butt _hehehe minion laugh_
| Jtsummers wrote:
| It's an implementation of SSB, but not SSB. Just like you
| wouldn't say Chrome _is_ HTTP, but that it has an
| implementation of the HTTP protocol.
|
| Also, "scuttlebug", a not-so-subtle insult or odd typo?
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I wonder why the F-Droid version hasn't been updated in almost a
| year.. The Google play version is from 2 weeks ago.
|
| I would expect for the privacy conscious community that F-Droid
| would be a big plus?
| stilisstuk wrote:
| Personally. Yes. Fdroid is a plus. And it's especially annoying
| seeing it abonded without any explanation.
| bovermyer wrote:
| The app is pretty slick, actually.
|
| I just wish it was easier to discover SSB users.
| [deleted]
| iszomer wrote:
| Or not. IIRC, one of the main ethos of SSB is to establish
| contact peer to peer not pick them out of the crowd (or swamp).
| bovermyer wrote:
| I suppose. The chance of meeting someone who uses SSB _and_
| discovering that fact is near zero, though.
|
| This reminds me quite a bit of trying to find someone to
| email back in the early 1990s, before the web existed. I
| might be excited by the technology, but if there's no one to
| share it with, that dulls the excitement rather a lot.
| edoceo wrote:
| Like Bump on the first iPhone
| afro88 wrote:
| My hesitation is also the proposition: if everything for a
| community is stored on my phone, does that mean one person could
| post something illegal and now I have illegal material on my
| phone even if I never clicked a link to it? That's scary.
| joshka wrote:
| A naive semi-unrelated question - why don't cell phones support
| LoraWAN (or similar mesh protocols)? This sort of thing could be
| ubiquitous in that landscape.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Because LoraWAN was designed for low power,
| intermittent/sporadic communication from battery/solar operated
| things spread out over a wide area. It's bandwidth is limited
| to 50kbits/sec per channel so its design is for sending small
| messages. Perfect use case would be something like a farm where
| you want to monitor dozens of small things such as the
| temperature in the barn, water level in a stock tank, monitor
| an irrigation system, monitor soil conditions, etc.
| int_19h wrote:
| It sounds perfect for local-area SMS?
| cheezymoogle wrote:
| 50kbp/s is equivalent to dial-up speed. 3G was only four
| times faster at 200kbp/s. I wouldn't say that LoraWAN's speed
| is the limiting factor.
|
| A single second of transmission (i.e. ~6kb) is about 1,500
| characters in UTF8, assuming no overhead. With an average of
| 6 characters per word, that's still 250 words per second,
| more than ample for human communication.
| toxik wrote:
| I tried to open the app and it crashed immediately every time.
| iOS 15
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I wish them luck. I will start using it when I know anyone else
| that uses it.
| janandonly wrote:
| Same. Also still buggy.
| winternett wrote:
| Also I'd be very concerned about who developed it and why, and
| what the EULA truly is.
|
| If everything is decentralized, there are no records if you get
| threatened, extorted, or harassed on a platform, and harmful
| content isn't saved anywhere notable.
|
| At then end of the day, no platform can guarantee security but
| they all do cost money to develop and operate and nothing comes
| truly for free... this we all know... There is some motive for
| the platform being developed, which is unclear at this point to
| me.
|
| I'd rather deal conservatively and cautiously with non P2P
| platforms at this point just to be fully honest.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I suggest reading up on Secure Scuttlebutt itself and seeing
| why it was made and by whom. That may help answer your
| questions regarding their motive.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt
|
| http://scuttlebutt.nz/
| void_mint wrote:
| You linked two pages with practically no data. I'll paste
| all relevant data from both to save others the trouble.
|
| > Scuttlebutt can be transformative for society,
| decentralizing and enabling local community development
| free of big corp. It is a fast growing decentralized social
| network. As an alternative to the large corporate social
| networks it enables autonomy for the users and a free zone
| from big data harvesting...
|
| > Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) is a peer-to peer communication
| protocol, mesh network, and self-hosted social media
| ecosystem.[3][4] Each user hosts their own content and the
| content of the peers they follow, which provides fault
| tolerance and eventual consistency.[5] Messages are
| digitally signed and added to an append-only list of
| messages published by an author.[6] SSB is primarily used
| for implementing distributed social networks, and utilizes
| cryptography to assure that content remains unforged as it
| is propagated through the network.[7][8]
| anarchogeek wrote:
| Manyverse is a great app, one of several compatible ones which
| use the secure scuttlebutt protocol.
|
| For ios another open source one is https://planetary.social/
| which i wrote.
| lifty wrote:
| Is it still the case that your identity is connected to a
| single device?
| anarchogeek wrote:
| Soon! We've got the new scuttlebutt metafeed format that will
| allow us to support multiple devices and a bunch of other
| interesting things.
|
| https://github.com/ssb-ngi-pointer/ssb-meta-feeds
|
| So the answer is soon.
| ubicomp wrote:
| It's awesome to see this evolve!
| joshuakelly wrote:
| Great to see this advancing - I met you a 33C3 when this was in
| the works.
| amelius wrote:
| Why is offline mode such an important feature for a social
| network? Is bad cellular coverage still an issue?
| fabianhjr wrote:
| It is when many users are solarpunks living on boats.
| nabeards wrote:
| Yes, not everyone even has cellular data.
| Semiapies wrote:
| For much of the world, yes.
| jonstaab wrote:
| I think "offline" is sort of a smell test for decentralized.
| The problem isn't cell coverage, it's resilience. Centralized
| networks can implement censorship, get hacked, lose your data,
| become unavailable, and have to be accessed in a particular
| way. With scuttlebutt, you none of those particular limitations
| exist, at least in the same way.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Mobile only? Only an Android/iOS app, no web/desktop option?
| staticelf wrote:
| While it seems cool, I just think that it is kind of self-
| defeating?
|
| Sure I can see my friends posts after a while, but at the same
| time if you really live off-grid you will probably not have a
| connection for a while and in these times there is really no use
| case for the app anyway.
|
| I just think I am most likely to check the stuff I want to check
| whenever I have a connection. But perhaps I am wrong.
| jonstaab wrote:
| Scuttlebutt (the underlying protocol of Manyverse) is the best
| decentralized social network I've found so far. It takes a much
| more radical approach than that of federation ala Mastadon, which
| is just centralization in miniature.
|
| Under the hood, scuttlebutt uses multiple independent
| blockchains, each tied to a single user. The upside of this is
| that it makes for a great eventually consistent gossip protocol;
| the downside is that the entire chain needs to be propagated for
| any of it to make sense, making it a very storage-intensive
| protocol.
|
| Private messaging is implemented in a really interesting way
| using cryptographic envelopes that are publicly gossiped, but
| only decryptable by the recipient -- whose address is also
| encrypted and therefore hidden.
|
| Personally, I'm looking forward to when they introduce a good
| decentralized solution for moderation. This would help keep the
| size of the chain smaller, and make the information you see more
| usable.
|
| The Scuttlebutt Protocol Guide [0] is a really easy and
| interesting read, I highly recommend it.
|
| [0] https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/
|
| Edit: clarified what Scuttlebutt is.
| Naac wrote:
| Its not very clear from your comment ( or from the Manyverse
| landing page ) but Manyverse is an android/ios app for the
| scuttlebutt social network
|
| More clients are listed here: https://scuttlebutt.nz/get-
| started/
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out, I initially thought they were
| talking about an alternative network.
| fossuser wrote:
| I think Urbit solves some of the issues that remain unsolved in
| Scuttlebutt. When you have non-zero cost NFTs as IDs on the
| network you make spam a non-issue and moderation 'easy'.
|
| Avoiding blockchain in the actual system design also gets rid
| of the storage-intensive protocol issue, it's my favorite
| approach of the attempts to pull of these decentralized
| systems. It's also the only one I thing could truly work at
| scale as a new underlying system that applications can be built
| on top of from those I've seen.
|
| The ability to update code across the network and the built in
| incentives for infrastructure nodes (stars) are really
| interesting. I also think the functional OS design is pretty
| cool.
| strict9 wrote:
| > _Under the hood, scuttlebutt uses multiple independent
| blockchains, each tied to a single user._
|
| Now wondering why the landing page for Manyverse prominently
| says: " _No token. No ICO. No blockchain._ "
|
| It makes the downside you mention "making it a very storage-
| intensive protocol" more interesting, and confusing for someone
| trying to understand the tech stack behind it.
| jonstaab wrote:
| Maybe I'm getting some semantic distinction wrong. Each
| user's thread is essentially a cryptographically linked list.
| It differs from Bitcoin for example in that there's no change
| of ownership, and so no forking or input/output transactions,
| it's just a linear list of events. There are no gas fees or
| tokens, since there's no need to pay for anything, each peer
| voluntarily gossips information.
|
| The description you cited is also probably more for marketing
| purposes than technical explication. No one wants to use a
| social media platform built on ETH, the experience is just
| horrible.
| px43 wrote:
| Yup, that's just a Merkle tree.
|
| In a blockchain, blocks occur at regularly timed intervals,
| and are distributed globally, which is all enforced by some
| distributed authority mechanism, like Proof of Work. Rumor
| has it that Satoshi was originally going to call the data
| structure a "Timechain" but wanted to emphasize the
| cryptographic integrity feature more than the time keeping
| feature.
| [deleted]
| subpixel wrote:
| My phone has tons of space, but if my entire Scuttlebutt
| network is stored on my phone, aren't I looking at eventually
| running out of storage?
| jonstaab wrote:
| Yes, I think the current central hub has around 30GB or more
| of data. In my mind, this is the key limitation of
| Scuttlebutt, and I'm not sure it's fixable. Scuttlebutt is
| still worth learning from though.
| hkt wrote:
| Scuttlebutt can also work by DHT, so couldn't the central
| server eventually go away or function or minimally?
| darig wrote:
| Learning what not to do? Obviously an all encompassing
| blockchain will never work. What is to learn?
| fabianhjr wrote:
| With a lot of usage and blobs I am sitting at about 10GB vs
| over 20GB of whatsapp.
| beckman466 wrote:
| My Scuttlebutt/Patchwork data is about 2-3 gigs of storage.
| You can also make your experience lighter by making it text
| only by changing the permissions on the blob storage folder
| to read only.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Note that what gets stored is your own posts, and those of
| the accounts you follow + another hop or two. If there's
| someone out there on the network who you don't interact with
| and your follows don't follow, you won't be storing their
| data.
| dleslie wrote:
| > I'm looking forward to when they introduce a good
| decentralized solution for moderation.
|
| Is there some form of filtering available? Ie, only show posts
| from friends and friends of friends?
|
| It appears to have blocks and mutes.
| fabianhjr wrote:
| > Is there some form of filtering available? Ie, only show
| posts from friends and friends of friends?
|
| That is the default, there is no global state nor consensus.
| It will only fetch and store content 2-degrees (of following)
| away from you.
| jonstaab wrote:
| The problem here is how SSB is used in practice; most
| content is not passed p2p, but through a single hub. This
| isn't part of the design, it just happens to be how they're
| bootstrapping right now. But it does mean that number of
| hops is not a good proxy for actual social closeness.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Is that still the case? It was like this 3 years ago when
| I last tried it. Sounds like in practice SSB is just as
| centralized as a standard client-server network.
| jonstaab wrote:
| Last I checked (almost a year ago fwiw) you had blocks,
| mutes, and the ability to specify for your node how much you
| gossip in terms of how many hops you are away from the
| source.
|
| What I'm interested in is something like the ability to
| subscribe to a trusted source's moderation in order to
| inherit their blocks and mutes, or at least to penalize
| certain content that is less likely to be trusted or
| interesting.
| sykseh wrote:
| Wish they would QR the dang invite codes :D
| dang wrote:
| One past thread:
|
| _Manyverse - A social network off the grid_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18065567 - Sept 2018 (117
| comments)
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(page generated 2021-09-21 23:00 UTC)