8 ms·

SSB Rooms: a new server type for Scuttlebutt

75 points by staltz 7y ago

elcomet 7y ago
Please change the name of this project. It sounds very bad..
- RunningDroid 7y ago
  If you're talking about the name "scuttlebutt" then where I'm from (Upstate New York, USA) it's basically a synonym for chatter or gossip.
  - elcomet 7y ago
    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.
    - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
      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.
      - chrisseaton 7y ago
        I think that's a programming language, not a CPU architecture.
    - eitland 7y ago
      Or we can just get over it like git and a number of other things. I tend to be rather conservative in what I utter myself but I will actively defend the right of projects to use uncommon English words as names. In fact I think it is a net positive.
      - elcomet 7y ago
        git is not a well known word like butt is. The name scuttle butt just sounds silly, like a kid's joke
        jnwatson 7y ago
        It is a well-known term in the UK.
      - false-mirror 7y ago
        Meanwhile folks defend "GIMP", a confirmed sexual and ablest term, to the death.
        eitland 7y ago
        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 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. Oh, and if we give in on this the battle doesn't stop there, seems "butt" is next in line: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20831167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20831167 :)
    - jszymborski 7y ago
      This strikes me as odd. The last time I was in an environment where the word butt was considered rude was the third grade.
      - icebraining 7y ago
        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!
        olah_1 7y ago
        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".
        jszymborski 7y ago
        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.
  - shirro 7y ago
    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.
- catnzhat 7y ago
  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.
  - JshWright 7y ago
    Yeah, ham radio op here, and I assumed "single side band" at first as well.
  - soapdog 7y ago
    It was created by a sailor who wanted a way to talk to his friends. So the name actually fits.
marknadal 7y ago
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.
- olah_1 7y ago
  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.
  - black_puppydog 7y ago
    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.
olah_1 7y ago
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.
- nine_k 7y ago
  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.)
  - olah_1 7y ago
    >And transparency, (tunable) FOAF features is exactly what made it possible rather quickly I'm interested in hearing more about what "FOAF" is and some examples of what you mean :)
    - reificator 7y ago
      At a guess I'd assume `FOAF` = `Friend of a Friend`.
      - olah_1 7y ago
        Probably, thanks. Iris (built with Gun) has "degrees of separation" as well. https://iris.to/ https://iris.to/ I believe SSB does have degrees, but I'm not sure how many.
StavrosK 7y ago
Does anyone know of an HN room or pub we can join? I've been wanting to try SSB out but never really clicked with a community.

75 points by staltz 7y ago

elcomet 7y ago

Please change the name of this project. It sounds very bad..

RunningDroid 7y ago
If you're talking about the name "scuttlebutt" then where I'm from (Upstate New York, USA) it's basically a synonym for chatter or gossip.
- elcomet 7y ago
  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.
  - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
    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.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      I think that's a programming language, not a CPU architecture.
  - eitland 7y ago
    Or we can just get over it like git and a number of other things. I tend to be rather conservative in what I utter myself but I will actively defend the right of projects to use uncommon English words as names. In fact I think it is a net positive.
    - elcomet 7y ago
      git is not a well known word like butt is. The name scuttle butt just sounds silly, like a kid's joke
      - jnwatson 7y ago
        It is a well-known term in the UK.
    - false-mirror 7y ago
      Meanwhile folks defend "GIMP", a confirmed sexual and ablest term, to the death.
      - eitland 7y ago
        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 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. Oh, and if we give in on this the battle doesn't stop there, seems "butt" is next in line: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20831167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20831167 :)
  - jszymborski 7y ago
    This strikes me as odd. The last time I was in an environment where the word butt was considered rude was the third grade.
    - icebraining 7y ago
      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!
      - olah_1 7y ago
        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".
      - jszymborski 7y ago
        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.
- shirro 7y ago
  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.
catnzhat 7y ago
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.
- JshWright 7y ago
  Yeah, ham radio op here, and I assumed "single side band" at first as well.
- soapdog 7y ago
  It was created by a sailor who wanted a way to talk to his friends. So the name actually fits.

marknadal 7y ago

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.

olah_1 7y ago
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.
- black_puppydog 7y ago
  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.

olah_1 7y ago

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.

nine_k 7y ago
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.)
- olah_1 7y ago
  >And transparency, (tunable) FOAF features is exactly what made it possible rather quickly I'm interested in hearing more about what "FOAF" is and some examples of what you mean :)
  - reificator 7y ago
    At a guess I'd assume `FOAF` = `Friend of a Friend`.
    - olah_1 7y ago
      Probably, thanks. Iris (built with Gun) has "degrees of separation" as well. https://iris.to/ https://iris.to/ I believe SSB does have degrees, but I'm not sure how many.

StavrosK 7y ago

Does anyone know of an HN room or pub we can join? I've been wanting to try SSB out but never really clicked with a community.