I find this pretty exciting for (hopefully; someday) wider adoption of alternative protocols:

Starting with Firefox 59, several protocols that support decentralized architectures are available for use by extensions. The white-listed protocols are:

+ Dat Project (dat://)

+ IPFS (dweb:// ipfs:// ipns://)

+ Secure Scuttlebutt (ssb://)

soapdog

Hey! I made that patch! :-D

so basically the explanation is simple. There is a whitelist of protocols you can have your WebExtension take over.

If the protocol you want to control is not on that whitelist such as an hypothetical "catgifs:" protocol, you need to prefix it like: "web+catgifs" or "ext+catgifs" depending if it will be used from the Add-on or by redirection to another Web page. This makes it inconvenient to use with lots of decentralization protocols because in many other clients we are already using urls such as "ssb:" and "dat:" (eg, check out beaker browser). In essence this allows us to implement many new cool decentralization features as add-ons now that we can take over protocols, so, you could be in Firefox browsing the normal web and suddenly see a "dat:" link, normally you'd need to switch clients to a dat enabled app, now, you can have an add-on display that content in the current user-agent you're using.

Still, there is another feature that we need before we can start really implementing decentralization protocols as pure WebExtensions, we need both TCP and UDP APIs like we had in Firefox OS (as an example, Scuttlebutt uses UDP to find peers in LAN and its own muxrpc TCP protocol to exchange data, DAT also uses UDP/TCP instead of HTTP).

I have been building little experiments in Firefox for interfacing with Scuttlebutt which can be seen at:

https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25csKtp9VmxTjJoKy17O7GA6%2F3S8...

https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25uBev5w8m8iZGVbQDo9fpr%2BCXLB...

I hope to start a conversation in the add-ons list about TCP and UDP APIs for WebExtensions soon :-)

madez

Decentralization and safer protocols are needed. Plain HTTP and even HTTPS are really not the best one could come up with. There are better alternatives, but using them is not always easy. So, thanks a lot for your work on making that easier!

soapdog

Thanks a lot for the kind words! :-) talking about safety and integrity, have you seen how Scuttlebutt works? Check the secret handshake part of:

https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#handshake

In essence, your connection to a given peer is encrypted in a way that only you both have the keys, even if someone breaks that key (such as the peer being a bad agent) it would not compromise your connection with other peers as they will use different keys. It is quite an awesome protocol.

guelo

It's nice but the fact that you can never delete a message in your feed means that it doesn't really work as a social media protocol. Some people see that as a feature since it is theoretically uncensorable, but that's not how humans like to interact.

soapdog

I have been using patchwork[1] as my main social network client for scuttlebutt. In my current experience, the fact that messages are not removable makes me more careful when writing and has led to much better and more meaningful interactions on the network.

Also remember that a message being in the feed doesn't mean it is displayed. Scuttlebutt is quite flexible, there are clients that have support for "chess messages" so their users can play chess, patchwork doesn't support those messages so I don't even see them. There is git-ssb[2] which allows people to host and contribute to code directly inside the feed, not all clients show these messages but they are all there.

New messages could be added for flagging a message id as deleted and clients could honor them and not display that message anymore, they would still be on the feed, much like in version control systems we still have access to deleted files (if no one rewrites history).

I enjoy how permanent things are there because as a side-effect it causes people to care more about the ecosystem and culture as those are permanent stuff you're putting out there. Check out this essay "the future will be technical"[3] about the culture on scuttlebutt, you'll see it is quite different than other social networks, but I agree with you, your experience may vary and what I consider an advantage, others may see as a reason not to use.

[1]: https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/ [2]: https://github.com/noffle/git-ssb-intro [3]: https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...