> Secure Scuttlebutt (not a fan, but it's much better than AP)
If you have any specific feedback about which improvements are most important to you, I'd love to hear it. It's hard to see things with fresh eyes after you've been working on them for a bit.
I actually think that the SSBC has done a fantastic job with it: the work that's been done is really impressive. I'm mostly just not a fan of the ground it's built on; the implementation itself is amazing, and the protocol is solid. I wish you good luck with it!
And to anyone unfamiliar, I recommend checking out the "Principles" section of the handbook; there's a lot of interesting stuff in it, and it proves that Scuttlebutt's really got the best culture/morality of any distributed network so far:
It's a quirk of the main feed encoding type, but there are other feed types (e.g. Gabby-Grove) that are major improvements. Right now the main hurdle is just adding support for more feed types to the major clients, which is something I'm actively working on.
SSB is great; I'm not sure if others would agree, but while I think it has a lot of problems, none seem inherent (i.e. while they mightn't necessarily be easy to fix, they wouldn't involve any major architectural overhauls or scratch rethinks; what's there is conceptually sound).
The main issue for me is performance and resource usage, which is tricky since a lot of the traditional solutions to perf/resource challenges are cloud-based, which would erode ssb's value. Thinking about SSB on older recycled or embedded systems, etc. is hard.
The other is NIH; this is definitely something I feel the community is acutely aware of however; I recall seeing discussions of parallel implementations in Kafka, etc. years ago. I haven't kept up with recent development though.
The performance problem is hard, but we have lots of active experiments that I'm optimistic about. Implementations in Golang and Rust, a handful of great database experiments (even simple stuff like Sqlite), and a bunch of people who are actively using SSB on low-resource devices daily. The Manyverse app in particular runs on Android devices, which are going to be very resource-constrained when compared to most computers.
The NIH problem is hard, but I think we're moving in the right direction.
If you have any specific feedback about which improvements are most important to you, I'd love to hear it. It's hard to see things with fresh eyes after you've been working on them for a bit.