I've been tinkering with SSB recently as well and I'm also finding it difficult to figure out how to interface with the wider SSB network in the 'correct' way. The communication protocol is well documented and easy to implement if you have libsodium available. Building applications on it should be straight forward considering it's just an eventually consistent event store.

I am having a few issues though. The 'api' that patchwork and other parts of the network use on top of the communication protocol seems to not be documented at all outside of the 'post' message. I'm not sure if it's not documented or if I just haven't discovered it yet. For example, I'm having to dive in to the code to see how a 'vote' message is formatted. I'm not sure how all of the various clients are staying compatible. None of the message formats seem to versioned in anyway either.

I'm also not sure what are the 'correct' ways to introduce my own message types. Should I use a vendor prefix in the type or something? Is it bad form to pollute the network with your own message types that other clients can't understand?

I've just started diving in to all this so maybe I just haven't gotten deep enough yet. I wrote a little toy SSB implementation last weekend to learn the protocol. I've really enjoyed playing around with it so far but I'm still not sure if it's the right fit for the applications I want to build yet.