That's a very limiting definition of 'death' and it may as well have applied for "Linux Desktop", yet Linux as a Desktop choice is increasingly popular, just not at a growth rate that would satisfy Silicon Valley: https://www.justingarrison.com/blog/year-of-linux-desktop/
As for 1: you don't have metrics for that. As for 2: you don't have metrics for that.
If you don't want to store people's data, then an SSB "room" server is the option, and in fact is the best type of server currently serving the SSB network. More info here https://www.manyver.se/faq/admin-room
(I develop Manyverse) Onboarding in SSB is invite-driven and thus is at odds with safety. If you want to "find people" easily, and easily join the network, then this means that any harasser can also do the same. Improving Onboarding while not sacrificing Sustainability and Safety is my top priority and there are several protocol advancements being worked on, more information here: https://gitlab.com/staltz/manyverse/-/wikis/Starchart/
What makes you think it is dead when there are active users every day, development is active, and there's a developer conference this week (https://p2p-basel.org/)?
Manyverse is cross-platform and it's the main desktop app nowadays: https://manyver.se
The Scuttlebutt.nz website hasn't been kept up-to-date. SSB's development is also decentralized, so this means that not everything moves forward in unison, so depending on who you ask, Scuttlebutt.nz is not the official frontpage.
Manyverse creator here. We're working on the desktop app and it's almost ready. I use it on a regular basis on my own desktop. Check a screenshot and progress report at the bottom of this blog post: https://www.manyver.se/blog/2021-09-update
Hi, I'm the creator of Manyverse. This part definitely needs to be clarified/improved on the UX side, and we know what should be done (we had a UX project dedicated to this: https://www.manyver.se/ux-research/ ) and we'll work on it soonish (still this year according to our roadmap). SSB is an invite-based system, and this is very important for community safety, this is what makes SSB really stand apart as a nice social network.
If you, or anyone reading this, wants to join our community, send me a DM on Twitter @andrestaltz with a short comment on who you are and what you're interested in, and I'll invite you if you seem trustworthy and friendly.
Hi, I'm the creator of Manyverse. We definitely want to be on F-Droid, the reason it's not there at the moment is merely technical. Manyverse is a beast to compile on F-Droid servers, requires compiling Node.js (Mobile) from scratch, compiling several Rust dependencies, C++ dependencies, and it's a React Native project (which comes with its own headaches). Some while ago the build broke and I've been pouring hours into it trying to bring the build back, but it's killing me. Sorry for the inconvenience
We're almost finished with a proof of concept of meta feeds for partial replication, and we're working on compiling statistics on how much will it reduce the total payload sizes during replication. For that purpose we built a network simulator to simulate replication at scale: https://github.com/ssb-ngi-pointer/netsim/