A social network designed on social interactions

Intro

When we mention social network, most users of Internet will think about Facebook, Twitter, TokTok, Instagram, SnapChat.

What is a social network? Human is a social being. We need to interact with other people. Communicating and sharing with a group of friends, friends of a group of friends, etc.. (reucrring function ;-). All of this feels so natural to us, such as with our family, coworkers, and so on…

Early days

In the early days of public Internet, a pionneer protocol emerged called NNTP. Usenet, as it was called, the protocol was published in 1986. NNTP permits news articles from news servers to share with each news server that wanted to subscribe in some categories and a list of peers.

internet service providers, assiocations, could run their own Usenet server and integrate the newsgroup network. People could then debate for any kind of topic, react about a published article, share pictures of their cats. (Yes cat pictures have been present from the early days of Internet).

There was no central server that would decide what to publish or not. Each Usenet server administrator could decide what to block or filter. This was a normal design of using Internet and provide services by relying on communities to setup their nodes and integrating Usenet network.

This led many Usenet servers to come up, in many different countries, many different cities, many different communities. Each managing their own way their Usenet server.

Internet architecture natively encourages such design that follows the interconnection of different groups of people. It follows what is the human social interaction.

Profit model

Some commercial actors, such as the popular called social networks people can cite by heart, created closed and proprietary networks. Goal was to lock their users in the company’s service and ensure they remain connected as much as possible. Profit could then come from finance with advertisment, personal data exploitation.

Online services do cost money, online means hardware and electricity, both need to be paid. So, if you don’t directly pay the service with your money, a profit-driven model gets their money by exploiting your attention, presence, and personal data. terms of service didn’t read will give you some insights about the online services you may be using without paying with your money.

Profit growth is then proportional to the sum of users and the total time spent. Behaviour-based content and UI can then exploit our cognitive biases to meet these goals for even more profit. Encourage emotions, quick reactions, … As the more profit you gain, the more you seek, the deeper you fell in such loop.

This is as much social as green in green energy.

Discover Secure Scuttlebutt

Secure scuttlebutt is a FOSS libre project. It is a decentralised social network, taking advantage of the architecture of the Internet. Shortly summarized: a database protocol for unforgeable append-only message feeds. This protocol permits development of applications…a social network for instance!

Main concept: users should own their personal data and control the exploitation of it. User data is stored in the user device, there is no central company to keep them. You can then decide to use whatever data preservation strategy fits the best your needs. Let the user decide, this is a real change, you are not anymore a powerless consumer.

your social account is just a cryptographic keypair (your identity) plus a log of messages (your feed) stored in a local database. SSB becomes a social network when those local feeds are shared among computers through the internet or through local networks. Secure Scuttlebutt, SSB, uses the gossip protocol over a peer to peer network architecture. Your SSB application, when online, tries to sync with your friends, contacts, family, also using SSB.

Assuming you have close friends, you may meet them regularly at different locations. SSB can sync directly over the same WIFI.

A nicely made video describes how is SSB different from other social networks we use to know by showing a use case.

SSB can be independant of Internet. You contacts/friends in your diary shows their public key. You could save updates on a USB stick, give the stick to a friend & they could get the updated content. This would then work for sneakernets.

You can travel where there is no Internet access, post your messages during the travel, and SSB will sync whenever you come back connected to Internet. You can consult at any time your content, received posts, offline, this has no dependance to a connected server.

Doesn’t it sound like an application that respects your time offline? It is up to you to decide when you’re online or not. No algorithm to ensure you become addict to stay connected at all times.

This also means that SSB is a good fit for areas where the Internet connection is unreliable. We need to also consider all the different areas of the world.

There is no global directory of users. You have to know the public id of someone to interact with. As such, groups, communities, evolve as in the real world, there is no enforcement for a global group. SSB can remain very local if your group is only local. As said, SSB will support what the user decides, no the other way around.

Once you have a friend on SSB.

• you see her posts
• you see posts from people she follows This, again, fits what we do in real life.

Pubs: public nodes that user can follow. bots that’ll follow you back, allowing you to see the profiles of others connected to them. Think like real pubs where you meet your friends or new people.

SSB is a young social network, multidevice is not yet supported.

It is an append-only log. This means that once you post a message it cannot be deleted. This provides advantages against censhorship, but also highlights the fact that you must pay attention to what you post. But think of it, your posts will remain in the database of your friends, and possibly friends of friends, but not further. They won’t have a global visiblity, because there won’t be a central server to get a copy of it. Private posts are end-to-end encrypted so nobody else as your recipient can read them.

peer-to-peer exposition: as you directly connect with your contacts, they will know you real public ip address, as they will reveal it to you. Well…the same that is revealed to any website with ad trackers you connect to. If you require privacy of a certain degree, this won’t involve only SSB, then you should be using a VPN all the times, or you already know how to use Tor to decouple your public ip address.

No giving off the impression that everything is perfect and that anyone is better than anyone. It feels, well, real, which is something online socializing has been sorely lacking.

Centralized social media platforms have failed society in many respects. misinformation, ego-driven content (the constant thirst for likes and followers), groupthink, and the fact that people don’t really listen to one another on platforms like Facebook and Twitter

Scuttlebutt removes the selfish incentives of social media, as we currently know it, by purposefully narrowing your network. using Scuttlebutt (and its apps, like Manyverse) is to escape the rat race of mainstream social media and find a quieter, less pressured place to connect to other people Scuttlebutt is by definition not always-on, like Twitter or Facebook. It’s sometimes-on, to give you time to enjoy life off the grid — on a boat, or otherwise.

SSB has the concept of rooms. This provides a server that can act like TURN for VoIP. To ease the connections of each user, wordaround the NAT or double NAT issues, a dedicated ssb node, self-hosted, can privide invite links, in an open way or private mode. Each user will connect to that room server. Contacts will then be able to sync with each other in an end-to-end-encrypted tunnel relayed by the room server.

The room feature provides an intermediate solution to pure peer-to-peer connections that may be difficult in some network configurations. With rooms, no peer can directly know your ip address as communication is relayed via the room server.

Pubs hold copies of several SSB user accounts. If those are your friends, you can sync with them, while they are offline. Pubs permit to discover new people.

Rooms do not store any data. Online friends connect to each other via the room host.

It all started in nodejs for programming, but different languages are coming into the scene such as Go and Rust.

SSB won’t be mainstream, and has no goal of become the one. However it provides a human-based design respectful social network that people are free to join. This a great FOSS project that gives power to the users and does consider real life offline as a great time to live.