That's just the Patchbay code for opting into the viewer, here's the change made to the viewer: http://eight45.net:7718/%MeCTQrz9uszf9EZoTnKCeFeIedhnKWuB3JH...

Oh wow, I wasn't aware of that change. I actually thought it was opt-out (hence referencing a client).

That will quickly render the web viewer useless. I wonder where and how that decision was made. There was a previous discussion about this a few months back that I saw but the consensus then was not to go ahead with it. Obviously the way overridden along the way.

The people who run the web viewers decided that they only wanted to show content from people who had actively opted in.

But no-one's in charge. Someone else could make a web viewer that shows all public posts without opt-in. (Public posts on SSB are signed cryptographically but not encrypted.)

True, but since ssb-viewer is the reference viewer maintained by Secure Scuttlebutt Consortium, my main question here is: what's the point of having a web viewer at all if 99% of users use default settings and don't explicitly opt-in?

The other question is: is this a good precedent to set for the community. I'm imagining a lot of less tech-literate SSB users could interpret this opt-in feature as a guarantee of the privacy of their SSB posts, which it certainly isn't.

Secure Scuttlebutt Consortium is a jokey name that a few early developers adopted. It's taking the mickey out of people who adopt nonsense official-sounding names to make it sound like they have authority. They may as well be called “SSB Social Technology Systems Conglomerate Worldwide Inc”, which would be just as meaningful.

> what's the point of having a web viewer at all if 99% of users use default settings and don't explicitly opt-in?

So you can choose to share your posts on the web.

> The other question is: is this a good precedent to set for the community.

I think it is: thinking about whether other people would want you to republish their content; asking first; consent. You can, but should you?

> I'm imagining a lot of less tech-literate SSB users could interpret this opt-in feature as a guarantee of the privacy of their SSB posts, which it certainly isn't.

Yeah, there's a lot of misconception. I don't think the SSB ecosystem is worse than the alternative centralised services here though. For example, I think some of them claim that “your message will be deleted after x minutes”, but they forget that someone could just take a photo of the screen

Public means public, and it's always technically possible to republish a public message. It's always been controlled by social conventions not technical means.

I think it's a good thing that the SSB community is asking moral questions about how should you treat other people, and not just questions about what the tech makes possible.

> Secure Scuttlebutt Consortium is a jokey name

Of course, but that doesn't change their authority. They have a website, a Github organisation; it is the public centralised face of the software development efforts, no matter how jokey the participants consider it nor how fluid the membership.

I agree. I don't think members of the SSBC view themselves as authority figures, but it's true that push access to the reference implementation is a form of power.

Solutions like git-ssb are an improvement, but it's a hard problem to solve: when a stranger asks you for the code for the web viewer, is the correct answer just to give them what you personally run? If so, that seems similar to what the SSBC is doing.

I'd personally love to hear more solutions to this sort of problem.