Forked Feed

A forked feed generally refers to a Secure Scuttlebutt identity that is cryptographically invalid. Most Secure Scuttlebutt clients, including Planetary, don't have a good way to handle this and so the feed appears to be broken. Often the feed owner can continue posting to their feed, but no other users will see their posts.

This happens because all of a user's posts are stored on a chain (or feed) that is signed by your secret key. Every link in the chain must connect to the next link in the chain. Sometimes due to bugs or failed key migrations a chain link can end up linking to two new links instead of one, creating a fork in the chain.

This is a major rough-edge in the Secure Scuttlebutt protocol, but one that will hopefully be smoothed out eventually. For now, you should make sure that your key is only used by one app on one device at a time, and exercise extreme care when migrating it to another.

See more in Debugging