Hacker News Reader

Comment by rattray | Hacker News Reader

So it seems there are two ways to exchange information:

1) be on the same wifi (presumably great for dissidents in countries with heavy-handed internet control, and inconvenient for everyone else)

2) use "pubs", which can be run on any server, and connected to ¿through the internet?

So most users would use pubs, which are described as "totally dispensable" (a nice property). But how can users exchange information about which pub to subscribe to? Is there a public listing of them?

It seems like the "bootstrapping server" problem (eg; reliance on router.bittorrent.com:6881) will still exist in practice. For that matter, is there currently an equivalent to router.bittorrent.com that would serve this purpose?

This seems like a potentially significant project, and I'm excited by the possibility that it might actually take off – hence the inquiry.

View on HN

It depends if you want to use it like Twitter (public announcements) or like Facebook (closed small/medium circles). If you use like Facebook, then it's enough that one person among your circle of friends (probably the most tech-savvy one) would host a pub and use that for their friends. You can see how you would probably be connected to a few pubs, because you usually have different circles of friends. If you want to use it like Twitter, then indeed we might need a DHT, but the point there was the resilience of the network.

Okay... in the FB case, though, my friend has to send me the IP/DNS address of their pub somehow, right? eg; Signal?

What about organizing groups, which might currently use Slack? For example, political dissidents who don't necessarily all know each other personally. They must use some other communication channel to communicate pubs?

Item 1 also applies to people trying to communicate in post-disaster scenarios (e.g. earthquakes).

I know some people who work in that area, and every time one of them finds out I work in software their first question is about mesh networking. If SSB is what it seems to be (user friendly, no-frills ad hoc mesh networking) then that would be huge for emergency and disaster planners! Is it mature enough to be used in this way?

The equivalent to a bootstrap node is the pub to which you used an invite code to connect to when joining the network (unless you connect to the network in a different way, like by being followed by someone else on your LAN). When you use an invite code, you publish a message with the pub's address on your feed. When peers replicate your feed, they see those messages, and thereby find out about new pubs to connect to.

There is indeed a list of pubs https://github.com/ssbc/scuttlebot/wiki/Pub-servers

Reply on news.ycombinator.com