A social network off the grid – mobile and available on Android

Manyverse is a social networking app with features you would expect: posts, likes, profiles, private messages, etc. But it’s not running in the cloud owned by a company, instead, your friends’ posts and all your social data live entirely in your phone. This way, even when you’re offline, you can scroll, read anything, and even write posts and like content! When your phone is back online, it syncs the latest updates directly with your friends’ phones, through a shared local Wi-Fi or on the internet.

We’re building this free and open source project as a community effort because we believe in non-commercial, neutral, and fair mobile communication for everyone.

( Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux)

Forgot this existed, tested it 5 years ago or so. Latest release is from 2019.

AFAIK every message propagates through the entire network, not knowing its destination, but only the rigth recipient can decrypt it. As a consequence of the scuttlebutt protocol.

That didnt seem scalable to me …

Pika
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further more the opencollective project hasn’t seen an expense report for development since july of 2024 only domain renewals. so it’s not like they are working behind the scenes and just haven’t pushed anything to the gitlab (which also hasent seen any real development activity since july 2024)

edit: I just saw this on their blog.

Personally I will not do any more work on Manyverse. And my impression is no one else is planning to either. At most I might do a patch release (no features/big bug fixes) to wrap up a grant. The codebase could maybe keep living in a fork where the backend is swapped out with some other protocol, but this is a big project which would probably lose backwards compatibility with the current SSB main network, and I don’t think this is very likely to happen. Personally if I’d work on a P2P app now it’d probably be a (comparatively) “smaller” project, like a chat app or similar, using a newer protocol.

so it sounds like the project is essentially dead

Cooper8
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Sadly Secure Scuttlebutt Protocol is abandonware, as is it’s more scalable but far less tested successor PZP

The p2p social approach seems so necessary, but projects that actually implement it are fraught with challenges it seems.

@Zerush@lemmy.ml
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The problem is that P2P is a very minority approach. A lot of projects fail because of the lack of users. Most people, even privacy concient, prefer to use decentralilized solutin for communications. I2p and similar. Even those are only a few % of the communications (hopefull more in the future).

Cooper8
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The question is why is this the case? The simple answer is p2p solutions struggle with asynchronous communications due to variable uptime of consumer devices. That said, that can be overcome by various means.

Establishing a user base for any communications platform is a challenge, largely adoption is driven by user experience and project narrative. There is no reason a p2p project couldn’t meet these criteria, they have before many times for file-sharing.

In fact, I think a self-hosted cloud storage solution with a communications platform built on it could be a great way to get a network of this type established. I know various file-sharing platforms like Soulseek have had these features, but I wonder if you slapped a WhatsApp clone UI onto it and push it as “own and share your files securely, no one you don’t specifically share the file with ever holds the files” if that wouldn’t pick up some steam.

The download link to Fdroid says 404 page not found, lol.

@Zerush@lemmy.ml
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Well. you can download the .apk file, this works. The app is still in beta, it works, but issues like this with the store may ocurre.

Ulrich
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Where is FDroid repo?

Can I have some room invitations?

nithou
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Not available on the App Store in my country sadly

How did you solve the problem that phone IP addresses are essentially all NATted? I was looking into this myself, but the fact that phones don’t have a public IP address stopped me.

Nate Cox
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Is this like… real? Seems like it’s coming out of left field.

@Zerush@lemmy.ml
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I don’t know, probably. Well, anyway P2P is always the best solution to avoid that big corporations are breathing in your neck.

Gitlab page https://gitlab.com/staltz/manyverse

The secure scuttlebutt protocol is definitely real.

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