@davidoclubb
Hmm. Manyverse is telling me I need an invite to a "room server". Any idea what that is or how I get such an invite?
I found this one: https://ssb-room.j-serv.de/
Click <Create new invite> and then you can paste the result in Manyverse.
Then the Manyverse app (for linux desktop) guided me through following/connecting some random IDs and additional pub rooms were also listed.
The pub rooms have timelines that show all the people that followed the room. I just clicked on a few random IDs and then followed them. Most were not online at the same time as me but, one account I actually saw a posted photo and commented on it.
I'm not sure, but apparently with scuttlebutt one cannot simply paste an ID into the app and follow this person. Seems like any connection has to be established through interacting with the social graph or through being in the same room.
@iLikeAltitude
I did manage to get up and running after getting a working build of Manyverse. The first F-Droid build I tried didn't work at all.
Did any of you monitor the network traffic of the #manyverse app?
I'm running the linux version in a linux VM and it seems that every time I start it up again, it'll load in the ballpark of 500-600 MB of traffic from the network.
After this initial surge for maybe 30 minutes it'll just idle along with very little traffic. Guess it's somehow rebuilding its database or what and once it finishes, it runs low traffic.
Either I'm doing something unusual here, or something does not work as intended.
I mean, an app that's supposed to work mostly offline and then from time to time connect to the network shouldn't use hundreds of MBs of traffic each time, right?
For reference, the ".config" folder currently uses ~ 430 MB, so it's definitely not gigantic and the "replication hops" setting is a the default "2".
I'd rather not have the VM running all the time and blocking RAM.
Maybe I just need to keep the app running in the VM instead of terminating and starting it up again? I'll try that.
@iLikeAltitude
> every time I start it up again, it'll load in the ballpark of 500-600 MB of traffic from the network.
Is that all in one direction? Could it be sending out data to peers as well as downloading when it syncs with the SSB network?
Yes, it's ~ 95 % incoming traffic.
Seems like the reason is that I was still in this room ssb-room.j-serv.de.
I guess it was mostly data from all the other peers in this room.
Let's see how it all works out now that I left the room.
I wonder whether I'm going to be sufficiently connected now. There are a handful of peers following me.
Maybe I should have done more reading before blindly trying it out.
I feel like I'm not even close to understanding enough about what's going on under the hood when I do something. And it seems to me that #Scuttlebutt is one of those systems where you need to know more about how it works in order to get something out of it, compared to other systems.
@iLikeAltitude
> Let's see how it all works out now that I left the room.
Hmm. Maybe I'll try that too.
@iLikeAltitude
Well, that didn't seem to help. The rooms seem to help peers connect somehow?
Rooms do indeed help connect.
I don't know, but I thought connecting to some room is kind of a temporary thing you do in the beginning to help onboarding and then leave the room anyway.
I now have a few connections. But the "connections" indicator shows a red "Not connected" most of the time.
Which is ok.
But this is the concept, right? You make a few connections and ideally you'll gain some level of redundancy by chance through overlapping social circles, so that there'll be someone online at least most of the time from who you can load some data from them and other users.
Maybe staying in the room permanently is a good option for some people. Idk.
For me it'd be annoying because of the behaviour I described.
Also, when I scroll through my "Hashtags" stream, there's already quite some content there even though I follow only a dozen or so tags.
Guess I'll have to play with it all a bit more to be certain how to do things.
@iLikeAltitude
> connecting to some room is kind of a temporary thing you do in the beginning to help onboarding and then leave the room anyway
When I left the room some of the online people in them disappeared from my connections list, despite the fact that I'm following them. Which gave me the impression the app can't always connect to followed peers, even when they're online?
A nicely written guide about SSB, technical but well illustrated:
https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#rooms
> The main feature rooms provide is a way for peers to find each other and establish tunnelled connections among themselves as if they were on the same network.
.. and from the section about Pubs:
> Pubs speak the same protocol as regular peers and behave like regular peers except that they are normally run on servers so that they are always online.
> Joining a pub means following it and having it follow you back. After a new user joins a pub they will be able to see posts by the pub’s other members, and crucially the other members will be able to see the new member. This works because everyone is now within 2 hops of each other ..
So maybe I'll end up doing the following: entering the room regularly so that Manyverse can get some new IPs of my peers and connect .. and then leave the room and hope the connections will remain for some time.
A question the guide above did not answer: do peers in some way exchange known current IPs of other peers?
I assume not. Probably because everyone's IP being available for look-up is very much not intended.
If not, then rooms are absolutely essential (to users who want to use SSB as a worldwide internet based social network) unless users regularly connect to a shared LAN at the same time.
