Patchwork Alternatives

Patchwork

It's better than email because:

- Private messages are end-to-end encrypted, always.
- You have to follow somebody to get messages from them, so you won't get spammed.
- Your mail can be public broadcasts or private, and you'll only see replies by people you follow.
- The datastructure is a global mesh of append-only logs, which can support new types of data (not just "mail").
- Users are not bound to one server/host (what we call "pubs") and do not have to trust the servers.
- It's very easy to setup and maintain your own pub.

It's better than twitter and facebook because:

- Private messages are end-to-end encrypted, always.
- The software runs on your device, so there's nobody tracking your browsing.
- The application-code is FOSS, so you're free to fork or write new applications without a gatekeeper setting terms.
- Data is saved to your disk, and so the application works offline.
- You can sync directly with friends over the wifi.

Because we're still in development, **you'll need to contact an SSB team member (in #scuttlebutt on Freenode) to get onto the network!**
That's our informal barrier to entry right now, since we're not prepared for lots of users yet.

Patchwork embeds the [Scuttlebot networked database](https://github.com/ssbc/scuttlebot ), so if you're running Patchwork, you don't need to run another scuttlebot server.