DWeb: Social Feeds with Secure Scuttlebutt

In the series introduction , we pointed out the importance of putting people in control their particular social interactions online, instead of enabling for-profit companies be the arbiters associated with hate speech or harassment. Our own first installment in the DWeb collection introduces Secure Scuttlebutt, which envisions a world where users are in complete control of their communities online.

This post is usually written by André Staltz, who has written extensively on the fate of the internet in the face of mass digital migration in order to corporate social networks, and is a primary contributor to the Scuttlebutt project. – Dietrich Ayala

Getting started with Scuttlebutt

Scuttlebutt is really a free and open source social networking with unique offline-first and peer-to-peer properties. As a JavaScript open supply programmer, I discovered Scuttlebutt two years back as a promising foundation for a brand new “ social web” that provides an alternative solution to proprietary platforms. The interpersonal metaphor of mainstream platforms is currently a more popular way of creating plus consuming content than the Web is definitely. Instead of attempting to adapt existing Internet technologies for the mobile social period, Scuttlebutt allows us to start from scratch the particular construction of a new ecosystem.

A local database, shared with buddies

The central concept of the Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) process is simple: your social account is really a cryptographic keypair (your identity ) plus a sign of messages (your feed ) stored in a nearby database. So far, this has no regards to the Internet, it is just a local database exactly where your posts are stored in an append-only sequence, and allows you to write standing updates like you would with an individual diary. SSB becomes a social network when all those local feeds are shared amongst computers through the internet or by means of local networks. The protocol facilitates peer-to-peer replication of feeds, to be able to have local (and full) duplicates of your friends’ feeds, and upgrade them whenever you are online. A single implementation of SSB, Scuttlebot , uses Node. js and enables UI applications to interact with the neighborhood database and the network stack.

Using Scuttlebot

While SSB is being applied in multiple languages ( Go , Rust , C ), the main implementation at the moment is the npm package scuttlebot plus Electron desktop computer apps that use Scuttlebot. To build your own UI application from the beginning, you can setup Scuttlebot plus a localhost HTTP server to render the particular UI in your browser.

Run the following npm command to add Scuttlebot to your Node. js project:

  npm install --save scuttlebot
 
 

You may use Scuttlebot locally using the command range interface, to post messages, view text messages, connect with friends. First, start the particular server:

  $(npm bin)/sbot server
 
 

In another terminal you may use the server to publish a message inside your local feed:

  $(npm bin)/sbot publish --type post --text "Hello world"
 
 

You can also consume ask codes to connect with friends plus replicate their feeds. Invite unique codes are generated by pub servers
owned by close friends in the community, which act as mirrors associated with feeds in the community. Using an invite program code means the server will allow you to connect with it and will mirror your data as well.

 $(npm bin)/sbot invite. accept $INSERT_INVITE_CODE_HERE
 
 

To create a simple internet app to render your local give food to, you can start the scuttlebot server in the Node. js script (with dependencies ssb-config and pull-stream ), and serve the particular feed through an HTTP server:

 // machine. js
const fs = require('fs');
const http = require('http');
const pull = require('pull-stream');
const sbot = require('scuttlebot/index'). call(null, require('ssb-config'));

http
. createServer((request, response) => 
    if (request.url.endsWith('/feed')) 
      pull(
        sbot.createFeedStream(live: false, limit: 100),
        pull.collect((err, messages) => 
          response.end(JSON.stringify(messages));
        ),
      );
     else 
      response.end(fs.readFileSync('./index.html'));
    
   )
. listen(9000);
 
 

Begin the server with node server. js , plus upon opening localhost: 9000 in your internet browser, it should serve the index. code:

 < html>

< body>
< script>
 fetch('/feed')
. then(res => res. json())
. then(messages => 
        document.body.innerHTML = `
          <h1>Feed</h1>
          <ul>$messages
            .filter(msg => msg.value.content.type === 'post')
            .map(msg =>
              `<li>$msg.value.author said: $msg.value.content.text</li>`
            )
          </ul>
        `;
       );
< /script>
< /body>

< /html>
 
 

Learn more

SSB applications can achieve more than social messaging. Secure Scuttlebutt is being used for Git collaboration , chess games , plus managing on the internet gatherings .

A person build your own applications on top of SSB by creating or using plug-ins for specialized APIs or various ways of querying the database. Observe secret-stack for details on how to build customized plugins. See flumedb for information on how to create custom indexes within the database. Also there are many useful repositories in our GitHub org .

To understand about the protocol that all of the implementations use, see the protocol guide , which clarifies the cryptographic primitives used, plus data formats agreed on.

Finally, don’ t miss the particular frontpage Scuttlebutt. nz , which explains the look decisions and principles we worth. We highlight the important role that will humans have in internet towns, which should not be delegated to computer systems.

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