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Mastodon is federated, yes? I think Diaspora is distributed. But I haven't used either in a while.



I think Scuttlebutt mentioned above is also federated as it needs Pub servers.

Also interesting to mention, because distributed like IPFS, is datproject.org and beakerbrowser.com (built on top, decentralized website hosting and browsing). I believe there are some social network projects using Dat as well.. should be on their awesome list on GH. SocialHome.network (federated) is also cool

(note: not equivalents to OpenBazaar, though)


Scuttlebutt is p2p, and pubs are not mandatory but are helpful for replicating messages among users when they are online at different times. Each user could run their own pub if they wanted to, for maximum decentralisation while maintaining the asynchronous replication.


Ah, thanks for clearing that up, cool. I thought they were required when you are in a network with a private IP to reach outside world, because there is no full NAT traversal impl, but wasn't quite sure :)


I just checked and you are correct. It seems that at the moment, peers can only sync directly on a local lan and in order to sync over the internet peers need to join a pub. But that is a technicality that will hopefully be solved in the future. Still, it's not a federated protocol because identities are global and the pubs are only used to improve uptime and availability by replicating messages among users. More on the subject here: https://scuttlebot.io/more/protocols/secure-scuttlebutt.html


Yes it is but I've not seen anyone using Diaspora. If I'm wrong that'd be great but I've not seen anything better than Mastodon with any kind of traction.




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