Manyverse still has the direct friend-to-friend invites, right? I'm pretty sure Patchwork still doesn't have this :/
If I could connect to the friends I know in person first, that would be great.
I think social networks gain momentum by being useful to real friendships and then the discovery aspect kicks in later. If it's all about finding random internet friends, it's going to set the tone for the whole life of the network.
All of the long-time users will be cemented in their random internet relationships and will be hesitant to then mix their real life relationships into that later on. It's just normal that these different social circles organize and it's normal that people don't typically mix them.
To me, it's the other way around. Most of my real friendships were initiated by contacts on social networks. This is the only way I could have met a number of wonderful people who live far away from my city.
And transparency, (tunable) FOAF features is exactly what made it possible rather quickly. If anybody here remembers FriendFeed, they had this mechanics well-polished. (They also invented the Like button.)
They like to call the relationships "hops" in SSB. I think Manyverse replicates only 2 hops (the people you follow directly and then the people they follow), but the desktop client replicates 3 hops.
I think the reason that SSB isn't super well documented yet is probably because the protocol is still subject to change and not yet set in stone. I think Manyverse tweeted something about how SSB might get mutability and a delete propagation message in the future even.
Regarding "degrees of separation". I think it makes sense to have the degrees be
1. "I have met this person in real life, known them for a long time, and can confirm that they are who they say they are".
2. "I only know this person through the app, but we both like and respect each other and are friends"
3. This is either a 1st or 2nd degree relationship of one of my 1st or 2nd degree relationships.
So theoretically 1 and 2 are the same, the difference being you like scanned a physical QR code verifying 1 and know them IRL for example.
That way the degrees can double as a "web of trust" that serves as identity verification.
Apologies, @staltz could you expand more? Is this centralized? Or federated, along the lines of Mastodon?
Why not do this decentralized? Should be possible. NAB (p2p Reddit) does something similar with GUN via "spaces" that are under a public key, but requires no centralized host/server/etc. should be trivial to do the same in SSB.
Rooms are decentralized. It's not following the end-to-end principle, because rooms are intermediaries, but there can be many rooms, they are fungible, and they are not hard coded anywhere. It's possible to build similar functionality on a DHT, but it has a couple of downsides:
1. The bootstrapping servers for DHTs are legitimately centralized and hard-coded servers
2. On a DHT you leak your IP address to many other peers, with rooms you leak your IP address only to the room administrator. (This is supposing without an anonymization layer, which would have some non-negligible overhead)
3. Connecting to DHT peers is not as reliable and consistently functioning as a static IP address, considering all sorts of network situations, specially mobile data plans
That said, I don't have anything against DHTs, and in fact I might improve how Manyverse uses DHTs. I just think it's important that users know the drawbacks of each approach, and then users can choose whichever approach fits their needs best. This is why Manyverse focuses on multiple connectivity modes: LAN, Bluetooth, Pubs, Rooms, DHTs. I think the more of these we have, the more resilient the network will be. So my argument isn't for rooms instead of DHTs, my argument is that adding rooms is good to fill in a gap in choices for connectivity.
Seems like it's federated and if you really connect with someone you meet, you can probably choose to become "friends" and store each others' directly, bypassing that federated/centralized server.
SSB as a technology is about as decentralized as it gets.
All posts are stored locally, you can write posts and replies and do everything offline. Then when you share some medium with other peers, they gossip all their updates, as well of the updates of their friends and friends of friends.
That medium can be a shared wifi (if it allows UPD multicast) or it can be bluetooth (only for manyverse so far... desktop bluetooth gossip is haaaard) but at the moment, the shared "medium" is often an internet server.
These servers ("pubs") are not any different from normal ssb peers, they just expose a public IP and don't have NAT.
There's two issues that people take with pubs:
1. They make the ecosystem less decentralized, moving it more towards a sort of federation. But it's not like you only connect to the pubs you select. Usually an ssb application will connect to many different pubs that it knows about, so there's no single point of failure there.
2. Following a pub means that you get blasted with a fire hose full of random strangers' (everyone who signed up for that pub, plus their friends) posts, which take up space on your drive, and (more importantly) need to be verified and indexed locally. That makes onboarding very slow and tedious, especially on mobile devices.
Rooms relate to the latter. They're an easy way to have a pub server that only connects you to the group of people you want to be connected to. Well, if you don't share invites to it around freely that is. And it's simple to set up, even for less technical people. Maybe think of it like a NAT traversal with extra crypto.
Like that, onboarding a friend onto SSB is a bit more elegant: you still give them an invite, but to a room for a social circle that they already fit into, or even a room just for you and them. Now instead of having to let the device sit and digest a thousand feeds over night, it only gets the feeds they would want to know about. It's much more like local off-grid onboarding.
I think it is everywhere in the english language world. It might not be in common usage but most adults would know the meaning.
Butt is such an innocuous word for arse it is used by preschoolers and cartoons. It isn't offensive to anyone and clearly it no more means arse in this term than it does when referring to the end of a cigarette or gun or hitting someone with your head.
I once had a client see a server monitoring package refer to daemons and I thought I was going to be the victim of a satanic panic but I quickly pointed out how the spelling differed from the usual biblical version and that a bunch of hippies in california in the 60s were into mythology and the name stuck. People are weird.
In non English-native countries, people don't know this word.
So it just sounds like "scuttle butt" and I don't want to recommend something with "butt" in the name to people.. which is a shame because it looks like a nice project.
When I search for gimp on ddg, the whole front page is filled with information about the GNU Image Manipulation Program. You can try for yourself here: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=GIMP&t=fpas&ia=about
If anything, if people actually cared about the disabled they should rejoice that this word is getting a new meaning. I for one didn't know the original meaning of that word until someone line you told me.
Do you live in an English environment? I think words like butt can sound worse for those of us who don't, since we don't use it colloquially (we use the native equivalent), only in more "forceful" cases. Frankly the first that comes to my mind hearing that word is "what what".
Still, I like the name and would be sad if they changed it!
English also has the word "but" with only one t. So actual English speakers aren't automatically triggered when they hear the sound of "b-u-t" together.
"Scuttlebutt" sounds like a hokey old timey word and it has only one definition.
As an English speaker, it's also miles better than "toot"(Mastodon) which has multiple definitions and the most common is "to fart".
I live in a weird mix of English and French (Montreal) :)
It's just surprising to me since butt always was less formal than "posterior" and less rude than what we'd more frankly call an "ass".
I definitely want to acknowledge that I know not all environments are similar to mine :)
I'm just surprised to hear there are contexts where someone might find the phrase "I've fallen on my butt" to be more rude than if any other body part was mentioned. I would have assumed the problem is less the word choice and the fact that people are being rather prude about bodies and their function, much like grade schoolers are like to be.
Considering that it made you do a double-take, and convinced me to click on it, I think it's a perfect name for a project.
In a similar vein, there's a CPU architecture called "brainfuck", oft-stylized as "brainfck". It's a lot* more memorable than something like MAOIIA or something.
The only reason I can think of to justify a name change is that both SSB and scuttlebutt are terms used in sailing. Initially I thought it was a single side band radio based chat room system for sailors.
If I could connect to the friends I know in person first, that would be great.
I think social networks gain momentum by being useful to real friendships and then the discovery aspect kicks in later. If it's all about finding random internet friends, it's going to set the tone for the whole life of the network.
All of the long-time users will be cemented in their random internet relationships and will be hesitant to then mix their real life relationships into that later on. It's just normal that these different social circles organize and it's normal that people don't typically mix them.