I know I'm moving the goalposts here but do you know of any native applications instead of javascript web apps packaged with a headless browser?

Out of curiosity: which UI toolkit would you like to see? Qt/gnome/..?

There now is a python and Go base and rust is starting as well.

There are a number of applications built upon the scuttlebutt protocol, most use some nodejs somewhere.

https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/applications

I don't. I'd love a Scuttlebutt client that follows the GNOME HIG — like what [Fractal] is for [Matrix].

[Fractal]: https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnome.Fractal [Matrix]: https://matrix.org/

All of the actual applications are listed here, there's nothing with winforms or whatever:

https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/applications

The core implementation is written in javascript so it's not surprising it uses Electron, it's a pragmatic option.

When I looked two years ago, SSB wasn't documented as a protocol or storage format much, and instead focused squarely on usage from JS code and a million of micro-dependencies via npm, making it hard to tell data formats from implementation details.

I haven't checked since, but unless the situation has substantially improved since, it's no surprise that the JS implementation is the only one out there.

Reply to self - apparently the situation has indeed improved and there are some proper docs, plus code in Python, Go and C:

https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/

I tried the app. It triggered my laptop fan's panic mode.