Portable Social Graph is a Killer App of Decentralized Technology

Great article Adam. I believe I have another item to add to the short list of killer apps of decentralized technology: the portable social graph.

I don’t know if you’ve been tracking Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB)? It’s a decentralised gossip platform for a growing number of apps that communicate through peer-to-peer data exchange. There is one database, many apps.

So for instance, I use Patchwork every day for social networking. The UX is like a mashup of Facebook and Twitter.

Recently I tried out an alpha release of a new SSB app called TickTack, which is similar to Patchwork, but focussed on long-form writing — it’s Scuttlebutt’s answer to Medium.

The extraordinary, breakthrough, holy moly I’m living in the future aspect of this experience was discovering that the social graph I had built in Patchwork is portable, all my friends and followers were immediately accessible on this new app, because my identity and all of my relationships are written into the public (encrypted) ledger.

I think the main reason Facebook can get away with being such an anti-social company is that they hold my address book hostage. The cost of me leaving is too high. Having a portable address book completely changes the power dynamics between user and provider.

SSB is early stage, maybe a few hundred daily active users. But already people are communicating with 4 or 5 fundamentally different interoperable apps. The ability to innovate new user experiences in that context feels like a real breakthrough.