# What Is the Difference Between Patchwork and Scuttlebutt?

*And what is patchbay, and ssb, and every other mysterious term I've been hearing?*

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**Scuttlebutt** is the general idea or concept around all of this.  It's definition is loose, and is often just meant to refer to this entire _thing_, in the way someone refers to "the internet" or "this afternoon".  In this case, the _thing_ is the idea of a network organized similar to an actual social graph, which communicates messages in a way similar to gossip.

**SSB** stands for SecureScuttleButt.  It is the protocol through which we can exchange messages, read each others' feeds, and make friends.  You could compare it to [TCP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol), which is an underlying protocol for how devices connect to one another on the internet.  TCP is a network protocol, though, while SSB is a local protocol.  This means it doesn't require any sort of  internet connection to work.

**Patchwork**,**Patchbay**, and **Patchfoo** are different applications used to interpret and display the various messages transmitted through SSB.  A rough analogy would be that if SSB was like TCP, then an application like Patchwork would be like a web browser.

A better analogy for all of this would be that Patchwork is a car you ride in and SecureScuttlebutt is the road you drive on. There are other types of cars that drive on the same road and you can drive a different car to the same place (car = application, road = protocol).
* With this analogy, the current car models for driving on ssb are:
	- Patchwork: family station wagon
	- Patchbay: pickup truck
	- Patchfoo: jeep
	- git-ssb: digger.

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**Sources**
* The answer is compiled from multiple posts from [this thread.](https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25m8%2B25i3i5LCRioA%2FCAqARVb0HNA6TTdvi4B0CxBd8eo%3D.sha256)  Shoutout to @dominic for the car analogy.