Community

P2P Basel (Feb. 21-23rd, 2020)

Christian Tschudin (aka ‘cft’), Aljoscha Meyer (aka ‘Aljoscha’), and Zenna Fiscella (aka “zelf”) co-organized and co-hosted the first P2P Basel workshop at University of Basel, as part of the informal “No Internet” initiative. 

Zenna (aka ‘zelf’) demoing the awesome poster she designed for the event.

About two dozens of people from around Europe (and even some from the US!), including Yours Truly (aka “elavoie”), gathered for the weekend and actively and enthusiastically participated. There was one session of prepared presentations, in a more academic style, that will be made online later. The rest of the workshop were “unconference” sessions, where the topics covered were suggested and hosted by participants themselves.

One notable discussion for me was the exercise Christian led in articulating some of the various directions in which the SSB project is growing. It is actually quite hard to provide a roadmap for external stakeholders, such as our awesome backers and other potential funders, because the project is actually organically growing from the initiatives of individuals and small groups without an explicit master plan. Nonetheless there is still some structure and directions to those initiatives that are illustrated in the following picture:

Partial and implicit roadmap of the SSB project, as reflected by some of the initiatives of different individuals and groups.

The roadmap is full of acronym and shorthands, so for the uninitiated these stand for:

1. Privacy: adding more secure communication and tools for users;

2. SSB: growing the current core infrastructure and maintaining existing clients;

3. GabbyGrove: supporting new encoding formats that enable, among other things, indicating that the content of some messages can be deleted;

4. Grow-Only Sets (GOS): replicating peer messages based on sets rather than single-writer append-only logs, enabling among other things (easier) sharing of the same identity across devices and removing some of the difficulties in handling forks at the networking level;

5. NetLog/L2: replacing TCP at the hardware level with a networking protocol based on the replication of single-writer append-only logs, essentially trading greater memory usage in networking infrastructure for lower bandwidth requirements;

6. ScuttleValue$: extension of the project in commercial spaces, with private initiatives and sound economic models;

7. Beep Beep: using SSB/Bamboo for implementing tools to organize decentralized festivals.

It is important however to remember that our community is much larger than those who attended the event, and the previous initiatives are only a slice of everything that is happening in our world-wide community.

Some of the participants gathered for a group photo at the end:

Some of the participants of the P2P Basel workshop on the top terrace of the Computer Science department with the Rhine River in the background.

For those interested, meeting notes and pictures are shared on SSB. Here are some of the main topics covered:

Lightning Talks

SSB Browser - Web Extension ssb: %Xfcfc80h05r9P2AVfM7hj4zWa6D3LzSNxswbcLKOR8A=.sha256

SSB Type System ssb: %iXkjFpUVYaki+L/XJxLiGVw0KMT4/OAzD/u+MMbC/BI=.sha256

Knowledge Graph ssb: %MGKpQ3qNLDv3QM2ddia5v74Qr2C8FUhkwSqqhvFLlW4=.sha256

Meeting Local People ssb: %ehussyWjxYRy4g/6Np1E/UTTvJxqovdfkIhGQ4AYs1c=.sha256

Beep Beep ssb: %jbopzCOcvniVcpdEYEejIZ1jwwEdQIJZFtzMvZxDlcI=.sha256

SSB Browser ssb: %kpNmyOzKCM5qQCOdk7u1B/BweNYA7G6ig6ib8QAsfJ8=.sha256

SCP ssb: %v/vW4htXUDUjzrpDYgxDM3wwEevhIhCVCsWVLECu+BQ=.sha256

Patchfox ssb: %fcNEYQxWIU0TczAgHWjOUnzQaHgTCA826ZN58Xckxoc=.sha256

Other Sessions

Private Groups ssb: %NI7zOrS7ljrcm4Yje3onDXiu/lXz1C/q6Jg1ZA2V8uc=.sha256

Privacy (in General) ssb: %gNJjsZb+jxc032+uZunkj8HyGDO7LFQXHpD+rndvN0s=.sha256

List of Clients ssb: %t41fzvhMcGY9ZiAEDlTPVnND6t/g0grX3ouKGdyttw8=.sha256

Easier on-boarding ssb: %y/4kpkhnsdVJddS0+mgSR+MLEGxnMz7p3+p/pILrg2g=.sha256

Inter-operability ssb: %9dY8mlSTyKpJnOvyODgoGBftdGFde28v2HYcWJHlECU=.sha256

Sustainable Usage of Permanent Storage ssb: %nsV1+ZfdifrMGcGYgArQp3tZv2OL6+79X0s4jApTeag=.sha256

Roadmap ssb: %qwv1CZCwTsYjteKlOSunu/QXModVdZwO9NmovBxEIh4=.sha256

Upcoming Events

Scuttlecamp 2, June 8th-12th 2020, Moinho, Brasilia

Picture of a kid playing in the street of Moinho.

Tickets for Scuttlecamp 2 are now on sale on Open Collective! For those without the means, a limited number of scholarships are available to subsidize the costs. For others with more financial means, you can sponsor a ticket for others.

ssb: %mgarVZwEyn5cuvXAdHApzgkp89UPAxkN6QIoXeGMtoo=.sha256

Mix Irving (aka ‘mixmix’) is also looking for a volunteer to help increase the Diversity, Inclusivity, and Accessibility of the event. The job requires asking for money and support, actively seeking out who may benefit from a Scholarship, and making sure budgets are balanced. Mix had a blast doing it for both Scuttlecamp 1 and DWeb Camp in the last year and is quite keen to help someone else learn about and do this work.

ssb: %co2sCeVn9L1UEvS2EIcf99vVX4E0ya6VoVUdxXWrv8w=.sha256

If you intend to go but are not quite ready to buy your ticket, you can signal your intention in the following SSB gathering:

ssb: %mgarVZwEyn5cuvXAdHApzgkp89UPAxkN6QIoXeGMtoo=.sha256

EMFCamp, Eastnor, UK, July 23rd-26th, 2020

Some community members are interested in going to Electromagnetic Field, “a non-profit UK camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers”. You can chat with them on SSB using the #EMFCamp hashtag. 

ssb: %WlqHdd0buPrgWcguBfoxCDO7cb2kQACv7PUqFj1GRPY=.sha256

Arts

I will start covering a bit more of the arts of SSB, in order to carry across a bit of the (sometimes quirky!) community culture in this newsletter.

Show me your #foffee

Andre Garzia… (aka ‘Soapdog’) started sharing his coffees in August 2018. 

Picture of a coffee cup in front of a French press.

This sparked a quite popular trend of sharing coffee pictures that spanned 314 posts as of writing this newsletter. A month ago, Skyebend, probably mistyping the #showmeyourcoffee hashtag, shared their morning coffee with the #showmeyourfoffee hashtag.

Not missing an opportunity for meme building, Zach Mandeville (aka ‘Zach!’) shared his own “foffee”:

Picture of a foffee.

Followed by Angelica B. (aka ‘Angelica’):

Another picture of a foffee.

This spawned another 46 posts such as this:

A final picture of a foffee.

You can join in on SSB with your own morning foffees!

#foffee #showmeyourfoffee

Skyebend foffee ssb: %18N87K0/gCVpELI7/Jse8lOOI9TKArGB9syvtUMXxTM=.sha256

Zach!’s foffee ssb: %ayaZxeuykD4OEYqznrxbfxU14Zfhz3iBLTcpDR/15Qc=.sha256

Angelica’s foffee ssb: %CYjusPn4jglftX5SjGrNYE3sX2iy0isAhkqOQove8MU=.sha256

Technical

erlbutt

After months of hiatus, C. Moid (aka ‘moid’) resurrected his erlbutt, an Erlang implementation of SSB. This is part of a larger endeavor that may one day lead to the creation of a company that could provide Electronic Health Records for patients in a decentralized manner. The most recent work includes refactoring and learnings on interoperability with other existing implementations, such as Go, JavaScript, and Rust.

ssb: %cM0ggpTkgYXzRgltSP5R9aJ0PBFyT0IU/FJc+h4/0t8=.sha256

ssb: %FwI8hyvjE/BpPL2ACllpUmk5iSP5771q1C7c4FmIZdc=.sha256

Eventual

Nichoth (aka ‘nichoth’) is making progress on Eventual, an SSB photo sharing application. They are almost ready to test it with real people!

ssb: %/PKLgEKQqNi1S3XIw3JagcdsgKOR9wRb9j2RXNzj1bg=.sha256

ssb: %Cr7M2Jqh9ltjmwCyF8aoMfi7jVpqMWTNzvfUoyK0ReM=.sha256

Oasis 2.13.1

Christian Bundy (aka ‘Christian Bundy’) released version 2.13.1 of Oasis, skipping a bunch of previous unannounced versions. It now includes, among other things: follow/unfollow/block/unblock interactions, many UI improvements, additional views, and many bug fixes.

ssb: %rVnQe3+vwRsdSFKYxGngpVQljzOZZoPyit2kxFE9lR4=.sha256

Private Groups

Mix Irving (aka ‘mixmix’) announced the first version of the private group specification with significant progress made in collaboration with Keks (aka “keks”) and Dominic Tarr (aka ‘Dominic’). The Application Programming Interface (API) is also stabilizing.

Progress ssb: %THxjTGPuXvvxnbnAV7xVuVXdhDcmoNtDDN0j3UTxcd8=.sha256

API ssb: %QXdVyQu8Cu3lD+DGQhiTUUr21DvtyFNkZV8oHunzd2w=.sha256

ssb-suggest 1.2.0

Mix Irving (aka ‘mixmix’) also improved on the autocompletion when @-mentioning people in the clients, with the release of [email protected].

ssb: %YkZcQeOTxmVjNtYgR6dEdS2nGMCheEOCpPYr2Em8iso=.sha256

followers.js

Charles Lehner (aka ‘cel’) released a script to show who is following you that you have not followed back, with useful filtering options that show how “live” (i.e. days since their last message), “old” (i.e. days since their first message), and “active” (i.e. number of total messages) their logs are.

ssb: %M0oKQswfj5xUFYgcftZxSxFv2sBILEv3IHEsEs1s1q8=.sha256

Community Infrastructure Learning Group (CILG)

The CILG continues to meet and decided to start using an email app to centralize their communications. You can join them on this mailing list.

ssb: %fA4i+417HkxXi7hPze8tw+Dl8fT5lvlc+VXPrvGbaQY=.sha256

ssb: %MXUfvmKi+vl3R3DSJW5boLhbCwO9UC3x6wrbgCmHrOQ=.sha256

SSB-Browser as a Web Extension

Jacob Karlsson (aka “Powersource”) published SSB Browser as a firefox addon, making it easier for everyone to install.

ssb: %/GzxwrxBAeh0rcFXK5ihv/F/+GhXa2gqHXrhUQYJ7Nw=.sha256

Patchfox 2020.2.1

Andre Garzia (aka ‘Soapdog’) released a new version of Patchfox, with new message styles and a Zine mini-app view.

Picture of the zine view of Patchwork, showing the various posts of the #basel channel.

You can fund them on their Open Collective.

ssb: %iAuYhV5rAs+t/+gyWVilPOTSnmnEl9SJdj6bZlSnRRA=.sha256

Planetary is Open Source

Evan Henshaw-Plath (aka ‘Rabble’) announced that Planetary’s iOS client is going open source, with a Mozilla Public License. Contrary to their initial plans of onboarding new users on a separate network key, which would have segregated the new users from the existing community, they will connect them with the current community. Planetary still stays a for-profit corporation backed by venture capital, but will be converted to a public benefit corporation so they won’t have to maximize profit over everything else.

ssb: %tcUricYZbeewYU8QFvFbNZ62QkfWTljs3Sn9ln07EBc=.sha256

Manyverse

Andre Staltz (aka “andrestaltz”) released a new version of Manyverse, another iOS client for SSB. The new version adds, among other things, a “Settings” screen with options to free up space by limiting the total amount of storage used by the application to store blobs (ex: images). You can fund them on their Open Collective.

Finances

Thanks to ‘martin’, ‘cryptix’, ‘Timothy Robinson’, ‘Lance Wicks’ and all our other backers for their continued support. You have collectively added 192.88$ (after fees) to our accounts in February. This has helped to pay for Cel’s hosting fees (-11$).

See you again in April!

Erick (aka “elavoie”)