This week in Scuttlebutt

A sample of life in the Scuttleverse.

There are currently only 28 people helping to fund the future of Scuttlebutt through the SSB consortium!

Totally Random

@dangerousbeans

got serious

and made magic.

@kas picked some chiles

They also shared some nice scratchy jazz music from a 1963 Nissen-Fjeldsted Swingtetten concert.

@sam_uk is planting 1000 trees in Bristol (UK) and "..then using the coppiced wood to create heat, power and biochar to capture and store carbon."

@nanomonkey roasted coffee beans in a wok on a Biolite stove.

@andresaltz_phone ponders "What's the value of self-quantification?"

@cluelessjoe shared a list of interesting articles on the topic of climate change

@KawaiiPunk joined us and noted that we don't have a wikipedia page!

Someone should totally get on that.

@netafly shared a history of the Conqa startup (where they work) and the trials it's gone through to get where it is today.

@adamsky connected their nook as an external monitor and discussed about bit about it.

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Software Misc

@christianbundy posted

Just in case anyone else has wondered what posts would look like with more of a Reddit or "Hacker" "News" style: it's not great.

@KawaiiPunk asked some questions about Privacy and Security on SSB and got some useful answers (good for new folks).

Community

@bobhugen was discussing a local emergency situation where information was dispersed via Facebook. SSB is obviously great in disaster scenarios but how do we overcome the network effect and/or expectation that FB is where you go to find out community news?

@andresaltz asked

What was your first internet community experience?

and people answered.

@mijkl describes how discovering SSB led them to a job working on Holochain full time.

@Alana

[Has] joined a kind of online anti-racism fire fighting crew, who gets into comment threads that have or likely will go toxic and tries to change the tide.

The "Terms of Engagement" are worth a read for anyone considering similar work.

@Dominic started discussing the idea of LiquidTrust

"LiquidTrust" is a trust model somewhere in between trust than "trustless"... In a liquid trust system, you need to give someone your trust, but you can choose who. You can also revoke your trust in specific actors, but the system will continue to function for you...Really, we've been thinking about this idea the whole time we've been working on ssb, but we've lacked a catchy name for it...

And @elavoie followed it with a discussion of Liquid Association

Summary: We don’t need presidents, secretaries, or core contributors to organize in groups around common issues and interests. Voluntary groups may instead form and evolve by individuals with equal power greeting/shunning one another to form emergent sub-groups, and then leaving once their interest in the issue or in the group dynamics has waned.

post 2 of 3

@randolo is looking for someone to discuss Scuttlebutt on their podcast.

I have been doing a weekly podcast since 2007 and would like to have people join us to talk about Scuttlebutt and Patchwork. It's called Visions Under Construction, and while it began as a tech talk about VoIP, it changed last year to a more human-oriented chat. We talk to people about their vision of what they'd like to see, what they're working on and how they hope to evolve.

@Stephen Reid shared a conversation with @Richard D Bartlett on Stephen's podcast.

Geeky

@noffle made an indexed-tarball creator.

It's a tar archive, but with constant time random reads & writes & deletions, as well as ZIP-style multi-file support.

@gozala shared a list of interesting programming languages plus thoughts on them.

@Piet has been "...experimenting with using an oldschool relational db for scuttlebutt." Then discovered that SQLite has a JSON plugin that allows you to query stored JSON structures. Needless to say there was much geeking out over possibilities by many people.

@cryptixInTheCloud shared "...a screenshot of tale:net and patchbay running of the scuttle-shell started by patchtron"

@aljoscha forked a post about a database that allows efficient querying of the causal order of ssb messages to not derail the thread.

TLDR: Building a database that supports querying the causal order is not trivial, but possible.

Also...

I finally wrote up the abstract bpmux interface for multiplexing, and bpmux/rel, a concrete protocol for providing this interface over a reliable, ordered, bidirectional stream. In addition to the multiplexing features provided by packet-stream, bpmux has backpressure on all payload data, allows cancellation and closing of all logical channels, and supports heartbeats for the top-level connection, all logical streams, and requests. All of these are required for building robust distributed programs.

There are many details for the curious

@bobhugen has been "...collecting a bunch of related threads about rethinking details of the SSB protocol."

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These summaries are brought to you by @masukomi. I would love to hear your suggestions about how to make them better, or ideas on things to include.

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Sooooo grateful for the #butt-summaries ! Being this behind on #scuttelbutt news it makes me happy to have some stuff condensed. I'm sorry for missing out on all the action. Couldn't be helped.