Ok, you’ve been hearing about Scuttlebutt and decided that “Yes, I do want to join an amazing social network with lots of good people that no company can control and also happens to also work offline.

Here’s a quick overview with the basics you need to know.

First off Scuttlebutt is a protocol on which many different kinds of apps can be built.

As for the social network, there are many clients, just like there are many Twitter clients. It doesn’t really matter which one you use. They’re all talking on the same network.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Scuttlebutt lately (see my Why Scuttlebutt post), and Srol just wrote a great post about how Mastodon makes the internet feel like home again.

There’s a lot of good reasons for people to use tools like them for socializing online, and I don’t want these services to just wither as their users wander off. I want there to be options that aren’t controlled by large companies, but at the same time services that require servers (like Mastodon) need someone to pay for those servers. And while Scuttlebutt doesn’t need servers, the “pub” servers do play an important role. I find myself wondering what is required for a social network to succeed? Are businesses a critical part of the equation?

I fell in love with the scuttleverse because of the people who are inhabiting it. Regardless of UX/UI, I continually come back because here I found people discussing practical ways of building their own airships, and what life is like doing guerilla gardening in Berlin or living in a self-reliant shack on top of a lava flow. There’s a distinct social anarchist bent to the discussion, and folks are not only discussing alternate societies at length, but also have the skills to realize them. – Zack! -> here

v2.1

(Note: Manyverse / mobile users please see the warning at the end.)

Offically Scuttlebutt doesn’t support posting from the same identity on multiple computers (as of Dec 2017). Unofficially, it’s easy but requires a little bit of care. In practice this means never run the Scuttlebutt client on two computers at the same time.

The gotcha is that if you post from both computers before the changes of one have had a chance to replicate to the second via scuttlebutt one or both of your feeds will get screwed up and other people won’t see some of your own posts ever again.