I'd like to encourage anyone who is wary of Bluesky to check out Paul (and Dominic's) back-in-the-day project Secure-Scuttlebot which solved most of the issues that Bluesky suffers from by using content addressable storage and signing key cryptography correctly.

The actual SSB codebase has been kind of broken since 2020, but I have a fork on my own Github that works and comes with a basic client that you can vibe/claw on top of: https://github.com/evbogue/ssbc

I'm happy to supply pub invites to anyone who wants to play around with the old sbot with me as we work towards making social media distributed again.

> Secure-Scuttlebot which solved most of the issues that Bluesky suffers from

I've heard Paul speak about this the other way around, that the experience from SSB informed the design of ATProto. I.e. ATProto solves most of the issues in SSB

For clarity, ATProto is the protocol, Bluesky is one dozens of apps, obv the biggest and most well known outside of the ATmosphere.

Bluesky does solve a lot of SSBs problems. Both projects can learn from each other. The past can become the future and the present inform the past.

This isn't just on Paul, Jay has publically stated that she doesn't believe users (even powerusers) can be trusted with keypairs.

Jay's unfortunately not wrong about that. Hitting that balance between “so secure even I can't access it anymore” v. “so convenient that cybercriminals can access it, too” is less trivial than a lot of the “just use keypairs” crowd likes to admit — even for those of us with many years of experience working with SSH and PGP keys, let alone people who haven't the slightest idea what a “keypair” even is.

It can be both.

I'd like to speculate, with the recent success of AI agents on the command line with OpenClaw, that perhaps IRC could be the future of AI-enabled chat rooms?

> with the recent success of AI agents on the command line with OpenClaw

Clown emoji.

So you disagree?

Agree with what? It doesn’t exist outside of twitter schizos minds.

I disagree that Bluesky is in conflict with The Ecosystem Is Moving. In contrast to most decentralized/distributed protocol projects they've managed to maintain control of almost all of their infrastructure with the exception of the personal data servers (pdses) of which they control 99.01%[1]

Almost all ATProto apps just fetch posts by handle => did:plc => post-type aka "lexicon", so they depend on what Bluesky decides to give them. If someone were to introduce unknowns into the flagship product's "lexicon" they could fix that at the API or Indexing level before shipping this data to the apps that depend on their API.

An actually decentralized network would have to overcome Moxie's criticism of the ecosystem. Can it be done? We'll keep trying.

[1] https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

We can have both a directory and use content addressable storage and give people the option of using their own keypairs. They are not mutually exclusive. Bluesky chooses to have a central directory and index.

what would you do about the at-uri?

at://hash at://pub i guess I don't know why we need at:// that seems like something we'd need in Beaker Browser.

After reading the docs at https://atproto.com/specs/at-uri-scheme and building applications that integrate with the Bluesky API, it’s clear why this format is useful for interacting with their system. For developers working outside the ATMosphere, however, it may feel less familiar compared to more conventional REST API patterns.

Well, when you figure out why at:// exists and why your hand waving away it's role in your "I guess" makes it impossible... we can chat then

Until then, you are just slopping about like an ai

dude you represent yourself as a tony the AI worm.

I'll do an:// urls if you bring yourself and your code agent to myproto for an afternoon.

Yes. SSB and ANProto do this. We actually can simply link to a hash of a pubkey+signature which opens to a timestamped hashlink to a record. Everything is a hash lookup this way and thus all nodes can store data.

git-ssb was (now is again, really) one of those areas where ssb was vastly superior to atproto since all peers hosted the repos

What strategy will Nostr use to achieve true P2P social?

From what I see, WebRTC is the key to achieve direct P2P connections.

I'm involved at NOSTR project where beyond internet the connections can be made with bluetooth, LoRa, LAN (including Wi-Fi) and radio using walkie-talkies.

This is great to hear. The part about Bluetooth/radio/LoRa sounds vaguely like Reticulum. I’ve always thought that the two projects could find alignment somewhere. Nostr with Reticulum style features, or even just Nostr over Reticulum, would be unstoppable.

Sorry to say, my opinion is that such alignment will NOT be happening on the foreseeable future unless AI can be used to program whatever is missing on reticulum.

Reticulum is poorly implemented on the library side and assumes everything to be encrypted, which is heavy on network links with poor bandwidth. Plus, on radio waves the encryption is not even permitted.

NOSTR can be simplified to be less verbose and function on less bandwidth links like bluetooth, LoRa and be unencrypted (just signed messages) to legally use radio waves. Reticulum has some kind of drama against using bluetooth for transmission of data. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to change in the near times.

Tyr is probably overkill with Deltachat on top of yggdrasil. The network already is encrypted so it's fine to send plaintext emails as long as there's no 3rd party email hubs.

I think DeltaChat in this case is used mainly for spam disincentivization via mandatory encryption.

back in the day a few of us used to run ssb (secure-scuttlebot) over yggdrasil (and cjdns before that) and that system would distribute the private messages to all of the peers within 3 hops. offline peers would just sync up when online and then decrypt the messages sent to them.

ssb's been broken for around five years, but now that it's working again it'd be fun try this experiment again.

2026 could be the year mesh networks finally take off!

Curious why you believe it was broken, and is now fixed. What new development are you referring to? I agree that Patchwork kinda took a dive, and functionality started to bitrot with each new maintainer...but it still replicates feeds.

as a side note, nano do you still have a working pub with all of the historical data on it?

article is from 2016