Re:Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook
by maemilius on Thursday April 19, 2018 @03:07PM
(#16879022)
Minor nitpick: API stands for "Application Programming Interface". There are plenty of private APIs in use right now all over the world.
Re:Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook
by crowbahr on Thursday April 19, 2018 @05:34PM
(#16880360)
Thanks for the correction! I did not know that. I guess that makes me one of today's 10,000.
Re:Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook
by underwater on Thursday April 19, 2018 @09:41PM
(#16881553)
How can Scuttlebutt prevent (2) from happening? If you share data with your friends, how can you know that they haven't installed an app that will slurp up that data wholesale?
The only solution would to be to enforce reasonable app usage in the client, and then require all your friends to use that client. That seems to defeat the purpose of a decentralised protocol.
Re:Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook
by gregknicholson on Friday April 20, 2018 @02:05AM
(#16882485)
Nothing can prevent that from happening. DRM cannot ever work. Facebook can't stop “friends” from slurping data either.
The SSB protocol has other design goals beyond “be Facebook but less evil”; for example it works seamlessly offline.
1. Follow you from site to site, scooping up all the data they can on you.
2. Allowed all of that data to be accessible not just by you opening up to a bad actor app, but by any of your friends opening up to a bad actor app.
Calling it "overly open APIs" is misleading at best. The point of an API is that it is a public interface. If Scuttlebut has proper permissions controls then they wont have these problems... and because they're open source those problems can be scrutinized rather than remaining opaque.