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Comment by movedx | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering what the social network equivelant is to OpenBazaar? Is there one that's as easy to setup and use?

Scuttlebutt is the first one that comes to mind. One of the more popular clients is Patchwork, which can be downloaded here:

https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/releases

Another awesome one is Fritter (a twitter clone), which can be used with the dat protocol and through the Beaker browser. More details here:

https://github.com/beakerbrowser/fritter

Just checked out scuttlebutt. Everything published is public on the network and is immutable. Forever.

Cool project for sure but seems like a bad tech to build a social network on.

Immutable, yes, but you can create encrypted posts. Also, you can set up your own custom network and private pubs if you want.

I dunno. There's something nice about holding people accountable to past statements. There's also something nice about knowing that "If I hit submit, I'll be stuck with this FOREVER" People tend to be a bit more thoughtful in that scenario. The thoughtless jerks aren't, of course, but there's not much that can be done about them in any social network.

Practically speaking the only thing anyone every _really_ complains about is the inability to edit typos.

Mastodon is the closest thing I've seen but I've never tried setting it up.

Mastodon is federated, yes? I think Diaspora is distributed. But I haven't used either in a while.

Yes it is but I've not seen anyone using Diaspora. If I'm wrong that'd be great but I've not seen anything better than Mastodon with any kind of traction.

I think Scuttlebutt mentioned above is also federated as it needs Pub servers.

Also interesting to mention, because distributed like IPFS, is datproject.org and beakerbrowser.com (built on top, decentralized website hosting and browsing). I believe there are some social network projects using Dat as well.. should be on their awesome list on GH. SocialHome.network (federated) is also cool

(note: not equivalents to OpenBazaar, though)

Scuttlebutt is p2p, and pubs are not mandatory but are helpful for replicating messages among users when they are online at different times. Each user could run their own pub if they wanted to, for maximum decentralisation while maintaining the asynchronous replication.

Ah, thanks for clearing that up, cool. I thought they were required when you are in a network with a private IP to reach outside world, because there is no full NAT traversal impl, but wasn't quite sure :)

I just checked and you are correct. It seems that at the moment, peers can only sync directly on a local lan and in order to sync over the internet peers need to join a pub. But that is a technicality that will hopefully be solved in the future. Still, it's not a federated protocol because identities are global and the pubs are only used to improve uptime and availability by replicating messages among users. More on the subject here: https://scuttlebot.io/more/protocols/secure-scuttlebutt.html

There are very few totally distributed applications out there, and no social networks ones that I'm aware that have any traction.

I think Diaspora is the closest:

https://diasporafoundation.org

Anyone that has or is close to having something like that would probably do good to get the voice out there just about now.. Marketing vice, and for anyone that is sitting on the fence to bail other "solutions".

as noted elsewhere in this thread: Scuttlebutt. https://scuttlebutt.nz

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