Ssb, or secure-scuttlebutt, is a distributed gossip protocol designed for social sharing. Every node has a partial view of the network, which makes it hard to get a count of how many total users there are, but according to a network crawl run by a developer in Nov 2019, there are around 16,000 nodes on ssb. Users are distributed across a few different client apps that work on desktop (Patchwork) and mobile (Manyverse, Planetary).
Each post is appended to the last, in an append-only log establishing chronological ordering from the very first. Because every post is chained to the last, there’s currently no way to delete or edit posts. When you follow a user, you will begin to store and sync their posts. An ssb application is constantly sharing data with other nodes in the background while you use it.
Users can pick a human-readable nickname that is associated with their key, but nicknames are not unique since there is no global registry. Others can mention me by my nickname @arcalinea, but someone else could also use the same name.
Key management is one of the biggest challenges, as users inevitably lose and forget their passwords. Users are in complete control of their identity. That means if they lose their cryptographic key, they can permanently lose access to their account. Keys are also currently stored on devices, which makes it impossible to sign in to one account across multiple devices — a basic feature of social networks users have come to expect.
To attempt to address the problem of key management, a project in the ssb ecosystem, Dark Crystal, has implemented a social key recovery system. It splits keys into shards to store with family and friends who can be trusted to help reconstruct a lost key.
At the ssb protocol level, there is a “flag” feature to send a strong negative signal about bad actors. There is no global moderation, and no specialized moderators. Applications built on top of ssb allow users to “block” and “ignore”. A block in ssb functions more strongly than a block in centralized networks because it means that blocked users no longer have their data passed through those nodes. If enough people block a user or group of users, their part of the network will become cut off from the rest.
Maintainers of p2p networks do not have to pay for hosting costs, since there are no servers and the network naturally grows in capacity as new users join. Developers who want to work on more than a volunteer basis need to find their own funding. The ssb ecosystem is supported through a variety of grants, donations, income from side projects and consulting, and a few companies that have raised money to build applications on ssb.
