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Comment by remir | Hacker News Reader

I downloaded Patchwork after someone talked about Scuttlebutt on HN, but when I tried to join any pub servers on their Github repo, none of them worked/connected. 30 minutes later, I uninstalled the thing.

The idea was interesting, the UI was pleasant, and I could see this working at some tech conference where people connect with each-other and there's a common pub server so people can keep in touch afterward, but I don't see uncle Joe or grandma using this thing over FB.

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I joined a pub but 90% of the messages in my feed were other people joining the pub and subscribing to topics. 9% were people introducing themselves as new to Scuttlebutt. 0.9% were either talking about Scuttlebutt or unreachable, and 0.1% were actual content.

Sounds like you joined during a wave of new people and were only getting posts from your shared pubs. Did you contribute any content yourself and build out a network and thus increase your feed? I've been on for a year now and there is a ridiculous amount of information to read.

I was held back from using Scuttlebutt because of how convoluted it seems. I browsed the website for 30 minutes and I couldn't find a concise, written explanation of how the protocol works. And now this? If I subscribe to a pub I see all crap everyone is posting? What's the point? I'm better using twitter

I really like the idea of a distributed social network, but it needs a simpler, straightforward protocol. And it needs to be free of clutter.

Yeah, I had the exact same experience. It's cool conceptually but basically unusable at this point.

That's just now. It's evolving fast, and two new developments will improve the onboarding problem: WebRTC-based invites, and connecting p2p to friends through a DHT (Kademlia).

Same. Just tried to give it another shot and there's only 3 public servers and none are currently working

Public servers were a temporary hack and nowadays most of the community is putting their public servers down. It's not a good idea for scaling, but above all, public servers connect you with strangers, which is basically undesired for a social network with a similar use case as Facebook.

There should be a pub server for each real community. I know it's not the most user friendly, but it suffices that one person in a real community of friends is techy enough to set it up, and it's not that hard: http://butt.nz/install?url=https://github.com/ahdinosaur/ssb... (this tool enables you to install your own server with a few clicks)

You have to handle the case of people who belong to multiple communities though, whether through context switching or otherwise.

Intersections are allowed. It's not like you need strictly one server per community, because servers are just mirrors of each community member. In fact, when a server goes down, no data is lost and it's easy to put a new one up.

hey, have you tried contacting a private pub? i'm Mikey, owner of `one.butt.nz`, happy to give you an invite if you send me an email! mikey@rootsystems.nz

if you want to setup your own pub, i made an automated Digital Ocean installer (also a detailed manual) for a Docker-based pub: http://github.com/ahdinosaur/ssb-pub.

i'm also working (with funding from #ssbc-grants) on a hosted pub-as-a-service product: http://buttcloud.org.

i am interested to know about usage characteristics for running a Pub (bandwidth, storage, CPU) to be able to gauge what it will cost me to host one myself.

curious to know about your experience with that.

also is there a way to set rate limits?

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