Walled Garden Breakout, Pt. 2: Secure Scuttlebutt ----------------------------------------------------- Post by Rusty If Mastodon & other Fediverse platforms can feel like a foreign realm to those naturalized to the walled gardens of Zuckerlandia or Twitistan, then Secure Scuttlebutt [SSB] feels akin to that portion on antique maps marked "Here Be Dragons." SSB is more than a protocol or a platform; it's a theoretical concept for restructuring social media. I've actively been spelunking through SSB for 2 months now & my experience has been a mix of exhilaration & frustration. While SSB promises to restore user controls & freedoms, it's currently an awkwardly complex protocol that severely limits its appeal for mass adoption. This is not to say that folks should simply give up on SSB. A super young protocol, it's actively being developed by enthusiastic volunteers from around the globe. I also think that SSB teaches us a number of important lessons: we need to build & use networks without servers & we need to create digital connections that diversify beyond the internet. ++ How it Works ++ Secure Scuttlebutt promises a totally decentralized social media universe, what many dub the "Scuttleverse." It creates peer-to-peer networks in which folks communicate or "gossip" through each others' computers directly. Like other P2P networks, Scuttlebutt negates the need for accessing servers where vasts amounts of information are stored. It's worth rehearsing here how most social media protocols work. Typically, you use a software platform to post information on a server's central database that is then shared according to specific programmed constraints. For example, let's say you tweet a link to a cat video that is tagged with #CatsOfTwitter & #Meowmers. That information is stored on Twitter's servers & it becomes indexed on the company's database. Twitter then sends that tweet to all of your followers & it makes the tweet discoverable to anyone who searches those hashtags. SSB as a protocol functions very differently. For example, let's say you type an entry about your adventures in composting in Patchwork, one of SSB's applications. That post lives on your "diary" in a database housed in your computer's directory. When the application detects that you can share information with others, that composting entry is released to your friends' computers. Essentially, the protocol syncs the information on your "diary" with that of your friends & your friends' friends. Scuttlebutt's developers proudly embrace this fact. Users own their data! Your posts are stored on your computer & they're stored on your friends' computers. You don't even need to use the internet. As long as you possess the public identification key of a friend, you can send messages to each other through all kinds of networks. You could save updates on a USB stick, give the stick to a friend & they could get the updated content. Or you could type up a slew of messages in Patchwork in the midst of the Appalachian Trail over the course of a month. When you get to town & use a cafe's wifi, your diary will become synced with your friends' diaries & they'll see everything you wrote while you were incommunicado. Or you could post an update about living in an internet-free off-the-grid community in New Mexico. A friend then visits you & gets the update through a synced Bluetooth connection. When they go back to town for a college class, they connect to the institution's wifi & your updates get sent to others on your network. Scuttlebutt's birthplace is New Zealand & the NZ folks still exert a powerful pull in its communities [the Scuttleverse's other prominently featured geographic locations include the US, northern Europe, & Brazil, although English clearly dominates]. Understanding New Zealand's geographic isolation is necessary to understanding why SSB came into existence. Birthed from the brain of Dominic Tarr, SSB was originally an attempt to cope with New Zealand's unreliable internet connections. Instead of thinking that this roadblock had to be overcome, Tarr & soon others developed a way to network using localization & disrupted connectivity as foundational concepts. As a result, SSB feels no need to be globally uniform; there are actually multiple Scuttlebutts. One can use a number of applications programmed to understand the protocol: Patchwork, Patchbay, Patchfoo, Patchfox, Manyverse, etc. There are also a number of communities that exist in the Scuttleverse &, unless there is a person that connects them, they are not even aware of each others' existence. This is because SSB doesn't archive users into a central, searchable database. You can't just look up friends like you do on Facebook. You need to switch public ID keys with another person in order to find them on the Scuttleverse. Once you become friends with a person, you also see posts made by folks that they follow too. This ability to only see posts made by folks that are connected to your friends is what Scuttlebutt developers dub "gossip." The logic is that the Scuttleverse's online networks mirror how real life social networks operate. Perhaps because developers understood that folks look for personal connections online that they cannot find IRL, they did create a way to connect with folks that you didn't know prior to using SSB. There are public nodes, called "pubs" that new users can follow. Pubs are essentially bots that'll follow you back, allowing you to see the profiles of others connected to them. Pubs are the best gateway into exploring some of the Scuttleverse's communities. ++ The Communities ++ As the first section probably makes apparent, SSB is not easy to understand. Developers in the Scuttleverse engage in verbose meta-discussions about the protocol & those discussions are beyond cryptic to someone like me. The issue of techno-esotericism might be one reason why the number of active users is quite small. Based on many observations, I'd put the number of active users around a couple hundred worldwide. Compare this to Mastodon's couple hundred thousand or Facebook's hundreds of millions & you get a sense for just how small these SSB communities can be. Like all small towns, the Scuttleverse can be a peculiar place with certain outsized personalities. Most folks join pubs to find other new users &, as of right now, there are only a handful of pubs that are publicly open. As a result, new users are exposed to particular folks & ideas over & over. This creates a situation where some users determine the tenor of SSB's discourse. Add to this the fact that longtime users have accumulated lots of followers. When they post, a lot of people respond to them. At least when using SSB in Patchwork, every time a person responds to a post, that post gets sent to the top of your feed, meaning that you can see the same posts over & over for a period of time. Folks tend to be quite friendly in the Scuttleverse & there is a fierce optimistic streak in many of them. Most are actively working in human-centered technology projects or trying to combat the effects of climate change. Scrolling through a set of Scuttlebutt posts makes you feel less depressed about our collective future: "Wow, there are people who do give a fuck!" However, folks only actively engage with you if your posts directly feed into ongoing topics of debate. The range of hotly discussed topics remains quite small, including issues such as SSB development & design, mesh-networking, living off-the-grid, etc. However, when a fellow "butt" does engage with your posts, they offer thoughtful responses that I have never encountered anywhere else in social media. When I used Facebook & Twitter actively, I found folks just relied on the like buttons to do all the responding for them. And while folks on Mastodon are quite responsive, the platform's structure encourages quick, clipped commenting. Since SSB folks write extended posts that possess the depth one usually associates with blogs, they also carefully read through others' content. Fellow "butts" have given me a lot of insight & help when they respond to my questions. Khimaros, a fellow Mastodon & SSB user told me that SSB is so attractive to him because it offers superior content compared with other social media outlets. I agree with his assessment so long as a user is interested in that content's current limited range. Since Scuttlebutt is a decentralized protocol, it also means that no one person or group can actually control the Scuttleverse. In other words, SSB relies on an incredible amount of trust. There are no designated moderators who police what others say. No one can boot trolls & other malicious actors from networks. Individual users can block other individual users, which stops their devices from syncing, but parts of the Scuttleverse could theoretically transform into toxic cesspools. Sure, users try out a variation of anarchist consensus decision, but I've seen that turn quickly into a kind of agonized clusterfuck. Without more formal safeguards built into the protocol, I worry that SSB could become another instance of what the Tactical Technology Collective dubs "weaponised design." ++ Current Challenges ++ Probably the best known issue with SSB is that your identity is tied to a device. If I download Manyverse on my mobile phone, the application generates an ID key for me on that phone only. This means I cannot access my connections if I went to Patchwork on my laptop, for example. If you want to use SSB on multiple devices, you need to create multiple identities. Considering that users have grown accustomed to accessing their accounts on any available device, this is a major roadblock to SSB's widespread adoption. While "butts" are overwhelmingly optimistic about the protocol, everyone agrees this is a major pain in the ass. Another problematic issue is that you cannot delete posts. Once your posts appear on others' computers, they no longer have a singular home where they can be accessed & destroyed. Once you send out those posts, they now have multiple homes. I understand that the protocol's very structure makes deletion difficult. I do. Many developers argue that SSB is the place for "sober" commentary, that the permanence gives folks pause for posting. I don't know: we've collectively witnessed at least 4 decades of online bad behavior. Also, folks say stupid shit all the time. Should they be held accountable forever? What if they wish to leave Scuttlebutt? What if they're being targeted by malicious actors? What if they just wish to reduce their digital shadows? If you can't delete your posts, do you really own your data? Of course, what I'm perceiving as a flaw could be seen as an advantage to other users. A SSB user who asked to remain anonymous did tell me that they were actually thinking of using the protocol's permanence to their advantage: "I've been considering what it would be like to use it as a repository for my academic writing (and my published writings' PDFs)." Furthermore, the specter of permanent posts prematurely kills conversations on SSB. While the vast majority of users on any network would qualify as lurkers, the percentage is way higher on SSB. Khimaros told me that he hesitates posting because of "the irrevocable nature of activity" on SSB. The above-quoted anonymous user also mentioned frustrations with the inability to form "always-private groups" where identity & conversation couldn't potentially leak out. Another worrisome issue regards privacy protections. Other users, for example, can identify your IP address & other identity markers. Developers mention that you can use a virtual private network [VPN] or access Scuttlebutt through an onion router to obscure your IP address. However, is it fair to put the onus of protection on users? While VPNs & Tor are not exactly difficult, they do require a level of technical familiarity that not all general users possess. Others more versed in technology than myself have voiced concerns about the protocol's encryption as well. ++ Scuttlebutt's Potential ++ Despite some major challenges, I believe in SSB & think that it could become an integral tool in building a more human-centered & ethical internet. I don't think it will ever become the primary social media network of large swathes of people. Yet I don't think SSB should necessarily aim for that either. Instead, I see its greatest potential as being a tool for aiding communication between individuals in a closed network. I'm imagining a kind of altnet where one of two options occurs: 1.) all the participating individuals trade public ID keys with each other & agree to not join any pubs; 2.) as SSB user told me, an administrator could configure participants' encryption keys to only recognize each other. SSB would make for a great tool in a closed network because everyone's information is stored on each other's computers. There would be no corporate spying or targeted ads. Since you avoid outside servers & could even avoid the internet, the rules of discourse could be negotiated by the active participants. In other words, SSB could help maintain autonomous digital spaces at a time where they are rapidly disappearing.