Decent

A local-first, decentralized social client built on pzp (the "ppppp" successor to Secure Scuttlebutt).

The name plays on decentralized — and is mildly self-deprecating. It's decent.

Decent treats human and programmatic use as co-equal, first-class concerns. You can scroll your feed in a browser, or let an AI agent read and post to your feed through the same local API. It runs entirely on your machine — no servers, no accounts, no cloud. Your data is yours.

Status

🌱 Early scaffold. This is a fresh project. The backend stands up a real pzp node and publishes to your feed; the web UI is minimal. Expect sharp edges. We're public from the start because we intend to build this with friends.

Why pzp (and not SSB / ActivityPub / AT Protocol)?

We evaluated all four against two principles: decentralization and local-first.

• ActivityPub (Mastodon) and AT Protocol (Bluesky) trade away local-first for reach — your data lives on a server someone else controls.
• SSB (classic) is decentralized and local-first but its design has accumulated warts (append-only with no deletion, unbounded storage, single-keypair identity).
• pzp fixes those: a multi-device account tangle, real deletion, storage caps, and a DAG feed model (no forks). It's dormant upstream but its core (ppppp-db, ppppp-sync) is finished and stable — it builds and passes its full test suite on current Node.

We're not chasing a big network. Decent is for tinkering with technically-curious friends, seeded partly by mirroring content in from other platforms.

Full rationale and the protocol comparison live in docs/decisions.md.

Goals

1. Local web app first, with the door kept open to a mobile app (verified feasible — see docs/decisions.md).
2. Human and programmatic usage are co-equal. Agents interact via a companion CLI or the local API directly.
3. One-way mirroring of posts/accounts from other social platforms into pzp. (Posting out is out of scope for now.)

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  apps/web        Svelte SPA (the human UI)   │
└──────────────────────┬──────────────────────┘
                       │ HTTP / JSON (localhost)
┌──────────────────────┴──────────────────────┐
│  packages/backend    Node process:           │
│    • pzp node (secret-stack + ppppp-* )      │
│    • local HTTP/RPC API                       │
└──────────────────────┬──────────────────────┘
                       │ same local API
┌──────────────────────┴──────────────────────┐
│  packages/cli        companion CLI            │
│    (humans + AI agents, co-equal with the UI) │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Portability constraint: the backend is portable-by-default so the mobile door stays open. It must never import sodium-native directly — always go through sodium-universal (whose browser/react-native field swaps the native crypto addon for a WASM/JS fallback). See docs/decisions.md.

Monorepo layout

Quick start

npm install

# Start the backend (creates an identity on first run, publishes a hello post)
npm run backend

# In another terminal, talk to it via the CLI
npm run cli -- whoami
npm run cli -- post "hello from the CLI"

# Or run the web UI
npm run web

Contributing

We're building this in the open with friends. If that's you: open an issue, start a discussion, or just clone it and tinker. The decision log in docs/ is the best place to understand why things are the way they are.

License

AGPL-3.0 — in keeping with the SSB/pzp ecosystem and the spirit of building software that stays free.