Planetary

Planetary and Secure Scuttlebutt: The Foundation of Decentralized Social Media

Before the rise of Bluesky, Farcaster, and Nostr, there was Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB)—a peer-to-peer social protocol that quietly pioneered the concepts now shaping the next generation of decentralized social networks. At the forefront of this movement was Planetary, a decentralized social media app that put users in control, built on the Secure Scuttlebutt protocol.

Discovering Secure Scuttlebutt: A Radical Alternative

When I first discovered Secure Scuttlebutt, it was an obscure but powerful experiment in truly decentralized communication. Unlike traditional social media protocols like ActivityPub, which still rely on servers, or hosted platforms that require trust in centralized infrastructure, SSB offered something completely different:

• Fully peer-to-peer – No servers, no central authority, and no need for permission to participate.
• Offline-first – Users could sync content via local networks, even without an internet connection.
• Cryptographically verified identity – Every post and interaction was signed, ensuring authenticity without relying on external authentication providers.
• Data ownership – Your data was stored on your own device, not on a company's servers, giving users full control over their digital presence.

While other decentralized protocols were still conceptual or in their infancy, SSB had already solved core problems of trust, privacy, and resilience—issues that still plague modern social media networks.

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Building Planetary: From Idea to Launch

Seeing the potential of Secure Scuttlebutt, I recognized an opportunity to bring its ideas to a wider audience. I founded Planetary, a social media app that leveraged the power of SSB while offering a user-friendly experience for mainstream adoption.

To build Planetary:

• I raised investment, with Bloomberg Beta leading the funding round, bringing in mission-aligned investors who saw the potential in decentralized social media.
• I built and led the team, assembling engineers, designers, and product thinkers who believed in creating social technology that empowered people instead of exploiting them.
• We developed a polished, mobile-first experience, making Secure Scuttlebutt accessible to everyday users without requiring technical expertise.
• We launched Planetary as a fully decentralized social media platform, giving users a glimpse of what a world without corporate-controlled social networking could look like.

The Blueprint for the Future of Social Media

Planetary and Secure Scuttlebutt laid the groundwork for what we now see in emerging social protocols like Bluesky’s AT Protocol, Farcaster, and Nostr. These newer protocols have embraced the ideas that SSB pioneered years earlier:

• User-controlled identities and data sovereignty
• Decentralization beyond federated servers, eliminating single points of failure
• Social graphs that users own, portable across applications
• Resilience against censorship and corporate interference

While each of these modern protocols has taken its own approach, the foundational principles of SSB and Planetary directly inspired their architectures.

The Legacy of Secure Scuttlebutt and Planetary

Bringing Secure Scuttlebutt from obscurity to a model for world-changing social protocols was an ambitious and rewarding challenge. Planetary wasn’t just another app—it was a proof of concept for a new way of thinking about online communication.

The vision of a world where people control their own digital interactions, free from corporate surveillance and centralized gatekeepers, is more relevant now than ever. The next wave of decentralized social networks continues to evolve, but their roots can be traced directly to the work we did with Secure Scuttlebutt and Planetary.

The future of social media is decentralized—and we helped set it in motion.

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