[liberationtech] Have any of you ever used Scuttlebot?

[Steve Phillips]

> Fully independent implementations are under development, but they're
difficult because the protocol as defined involves cryptographically
signing sections of regular JSON -- which, of course, has no defined order
for objects. This means that in practice, the SSB protocol is not standard
JSON plus signatures, but the entire set of nodejs JSON serialization
quirks.

SSB doesn't sort the keys first to ensure the JSON serialization is simple
and deterministic?

--Steve


On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 9:40 PM John Ohno <john.ohno at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have used scuttlebutt for a few years. Unfortunately, in the past month
> or two, I've found the clients a lot less reliable, so I haven't been on
> very much.
>
> SSB has an interesting culture. The developers are very concerned with the
> social ramifications of offline-first & truly-peer-to-peer communication,
> and are seriously discussing (and making technical decisions about) the
> kinds of media theory issues that get only idly discussed on the fediverse
> (and almost not at all in centralized social networks). For instance, SSB
> functionally has transitive blocking, & this lowers the moderation load on
> individuals, who are simply inaccessible if the number of hops between
> connections is too high.
>
> I don't know how good SSB's *privacy* features are. From what I can tell,
> they aren't very concerned with that, as compared to anti-falsification
> (which is functionally just necessarily for good p2p in an offline-first
> setting). There are private message systems, but I haven't used them (let
> alone security-audited them).
>
> Fully independent implementations are under development, but they're
> difficult because the protocol as defined involves cryptographically
> signing sections of regular JSON -- which, of course, has no defined order
> for objects. This means that in practice, the SSB protocol is not standard
> JSON plus signatures, but the entire set of nodejs JSON serialization
> quirks. In order to implement it in another language, you have to duplicate
> exactly the ordering produced by nodejs, or else old messages will not be
> interpreted as valid by your implementation and the messages produced by
> your implementation will not be interpreted as valid by competing
> implementations. Ultimately, this means that if you want a full-featured
> SSB client, you're stuck with an electron app (with all the attendant bloat
> and memory leaks).
>
> On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 2:52 AM Daniel Bosk <dbosk at kth.se> wrote:
>
>> No:
>>
>>   https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6197506
>>
>> One must design it carefully. But if done right, it's really nice.
>>
>>         Daniel
>>
>> On Sun 19 Apr 2020 01:24:02 GMT, Yosem Companys wrote:
>> > P.S. Is P2P inherently more or less secure than the alternative?
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