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.