Scuttlebutt is a peer-to-peer social network that is completely decentralized and independent of the standard internet. It is resilient at every level unlike federated services like Diapora and Mastodon.
It reminds me of the old FidoNet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet systems I used to use many years ago, long before I had access to the internet. The difference is that this technology is designed to be secure.
I also remember chatting with a political activist years later who said he regretted the disappearance of those old BBS networks because they were much harder for repressive governments to censor and control. He used to hand out floppy disks to activists across the world to facilitate communication that was outside of the listening range of government eavesdroppers.
Scuttlebutt looks to me like a return to this older, more resilient and ultimately more liberating approach to social networking. This technology is part of the solution Andre Staltz was talking about in history TEDx talk that I posted yesterday.
https://plus.google.com/+JohnAHardy/posts/Qao9ED1REbX
John Hardy Developer 
I remember saying that if there was a huge push to control and censor the internet that this sort of solution would be the result. And I was told that I was a fool.
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This looks really cool, and I really want to give it a try. I looked at the GitHub for the Patchwork client, and it says “99.6% JavaScript, 0.4%. HTML” …Fuck.
I really hate Node.js and NPM, but I installed them from the Ubuntu repository, cloned Patchwork, checked out v3.9.0, and ran “npm install”.
The first thing that surprised me was that this damn client requires Electron. Why? It’s JavaScript and Node, just launch a damn server and tell me what localhost port to connect to. So after downloading the Electron binary without asking my permission, the “build” process failed.
“Error: Could not detect abi for version 8.10.0 and runtime electron. Updating “node-abi” might help solve this issue if it is a new release of electron”
I still hate Node.js and NPM.
If anyone can tell me how to run this as just a stand-alone server that I can connect to on localhost:port, I’d appreciate it.
I someone can point me to a non-JavaScript client for Scuttlebutt I’d appreciate it even more. I’ll write one myself in Haskell but that’s going to take a few years.
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