PeachCloud

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PeachPubTildeFriendsScuttlebuttLimitations & Alternatives

The current form of PeachCloud (in 2025) is a web interface for managing a tildefriends Scuttlebutt pub, that can be installed via a yunohost application or via a bash script (instructions are here).

On a technical level, this largely fulfills many of the original goals of PeachCloud, but on a socio-technical level, there are still many limitations to PeachCloud's broader vision, as since 2020 a lot of energy has moved out of the Scuttlebutt ecosystem and into other protocols, including TinySSB, ATProto, Nostr, P2Panda and Earthstar.

This was largely because certain things in the core of the SSB protocol were not ideal for many usecases (inability to delete posts, limited support for private groups, no support for multiple devices), and while many solutions were proposed to these limitations, so far none have been fully implemented and adopted.

With all of the original funders and developers having moved on to other projects, some have described the current state of Scuttlebutt as a "permacomputing P2P anarchist ghost ship" that continues to sail despite most of the crew having jumped off.

This may still be of interest, a rare ecosystem outside of the tech hype cycle, and at the very least stands as a testament to SSB's truly distributed architecture. Even in this more minimal and unfunded from, cory continues to maintain and add features to tildefriends (as of 6.23.35), as well as a number of other developers still building projects and experiments on top of Scuttlebutt.