I'm really worried about the total amount of data each user will end up lugging around though.
Also, append only => no deletes, correct?
Also, append only => no deletes, correct?
This is something that will probably take some puzzling to get to a sustainable mechanism. The strategy I've heard talked about most often is to append metadata that marks it as 'deleted', so when things populate or 'gossip' further, it won't show up in the user interface. Instead it's labeled as 'archived' or 'deleted', or has a link to it's replacement.
Also, how much you download is related to how many people you follow, and text doesn't take up a ton of space.
As for text not taking up a ton of space. Sure. Except it's text with it's metadata, and possibly text generated by a few hundred people.
A friend and I managed to exchange ~24k messages on Slack over the last 3 years (~4k each / year); using it like some kind of "private twitter" where we would just post anything that might be of interest to the other.
What would it be like if I follow 300 or 1000 people doing the same, over Secure Scuttlebutt?
- At 1 byte per character (from what I've gathered, Unicode characters actually take up 1 to 4 bytes) - 140 characters / message (because Twitter proved it's usually enough) - messages' metadata (50 bytes?) - 4.000 messages / user / year - following 300 people
We'd get... 228MB / year?
That's actually way less than I expected!
I wasn't even worrying about the legality of it. Simply that you end up lugging those messages around on your devices.
And better be careful about what you post, because there's no taking it back.