I think the dev gave up on this when they learned about Nostr. I was really interested in Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) for a while, but it’s been a while since I looked around, so take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt, I may be iffy on the details.

SSB was a really cool idea, and I loved the idea of a gossip protocol. The implementation had its drawbacks, though. For example, users had a cryptographically signed and linked feed that helped ensure complete propagation of a user’s unedited content, but it couldn’t handle the consequences of a feed forking, which made multiple devices for one user on an offline-first protocol very difficult to work with because you couldn’t really guarantee that two or more clients for one feed were properly synced.

So there was an attempt to develop an SSB v2 of sorts to address some of these shortcomings. I believe the author of Manyverse was one of the people working on that. The project was never formally named to my knowledge, but you can probably still find vestiges of it on github, particularly under the Manyverse author’s profile, for something with a name like PPPPP. At some point, though, it was discovered that another protocol had been inspired by SSB and had solved a lot of the problems they wanted to address in SSB. I’m pretty sure that protocol was Nostr. Last I knew, once that had been discovered, interest in developing PPPPP and maintaining SSB clients dropped off significantly. A bit of a shame as the SSB community was VERY different from the Nostr one. Probably still some of them left using it, but I don’t see it growing the way I wanted it to at this point.