--- title: SSB status: 🌱 --- ![Hermies](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/227587/114308935-73597c80-9ab3-11eb-8830-eb8ecb250eb5.png){:.w-60} _Paul Frazee, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons_ Scuttlebutt is a decentralised secure gossip platform. Like other social platforms, you can send messages to your friends and share posts onto a feed. The cool thing is that the underlying technology here means that messages are passed directly between friends via a [[peer-to-peer]] (p2p) [gossip protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol). As a decentralized social network, Scuttlebutt passes the data from friend to friend, without any central server. The data is localised and distributed so it also happens to work [[offline]]! The name, Scuttlebutt, came from sea-slang for gossip. Basically, like a watercooler on a ship, where sailors and pirates go have a yarn.