Although Scuttlebutt is a nice solution, I think it fails to replace Facebook because:

1. Different use case: trying it out it reminded me more of a Slack/IRC/bulletin board than anything else.

2. Different framing: it uses a public square (Twitter) framing (follow, follower, channel) instead of a personal relationships framing (friends, groups, etc).

3. Too complex for casual users: this is kind of ironic because Scuttlebutt is modeled after real life interactions but in a way it ends being too complex with pubs (public and private), long and cryptic user IDs, etc.

These are some reasons but there are more. Happy to discuss them.

I have been intrigued by scuttlebutt for a few months now, and these are pretty interesting comments you make. Did you try to discuss them with the community around scuttlebutt?

I left a similar comment in a random discussion around this topic in Scuttlebutt. I'm not really sure where I could address for a proper discussion as a) they have their idea, which is legit and b) they don't have any incentive to listen a random guy with some random thoughts :)