Hi! I'm the creator of Manyverse.

That's right, it's using a ton of space. We are currently working on a new protocol extension for SSB targeted at solving exactly this. Here's a presentation from some months ago, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKr208wpr6Y , although our designs have changed a bit during implementation. See also https://github.com/ssb-ngi-pointer/ssb-meta-feeds-spec

We're building this under a grant from the EU Commission, NGI Pointer, read more about it here https://www.manyver.se/blog/2020-10-update

We're almost finished with a proof of concept of meta feeds for partial replication, and we're working on compiling statistics on how much will it reduce the total payload sizes during replication. For that purpose we built a network simulator to simulate replication at scale: https://github.com/ssb-ngi-pointer/netsim/

Note that what gets stored is your own posts, and those of the accounts you follow + another hop or two. If there's someone out there on the network who you don't interact with and your follows don't follow, you won't be storing their data.

Yes, I think the current central hub has around 30GB or more of data. In my mind, this is the key limitation of Scuttlebutt, and I'm not sure it's fixable. Scuttlebutt is still worth learning from though.

It should be fixable by running your own personal "server" that is always online and has a good amount of storage, isn't it? The mobile app can sync to your personal server and fetch a limited history whenever needed.

Scuttlebutt can also work by DHT, so couldn't the central server eventually go away or function or minimally?

I wasn't aware of that, I'd love a link to learn more about it. But anyway, the architecture supports a totally decentralized network; Manyverse supports p2p gossip, I think across a LAN, and maybe bluetooth as well?

This limitation is a feature :) Humans are only good at forming social relationships with a limited number of people (Dunbar's number). Scuttlebutt isn't designed to connect you with total strangers, only friends-of-friends-of-friends — a social network.

Unfortunately most of us have no friends (who use it)

My Scuttlebutt/Patchwork data is about 2-3 gigs of storage. You can also make your experience lighter by making it text only by changing the permissions on the blob storage folder to read only.

Where did patchwork store the data? I uninstalled it a while ago, but I'm guessing data is still sitting somewhere on my drive.

On mac it's in the user directory in a folder called .ssb

If you want to remove it i first recommend making a backup of the 'secret' file, located in that folder, as it contains your private key, in case you ever want to use that identity again. if you do delete that file you will not be able to add new entries to that original identity.

Thanks!

With a lot of usage and blobs I am sitting at about 10GB vs over 20GB of whatsapp.