@cft

At the core this is a layer violation: the pubs should not do deep packet inspection, just ship the content field unexamined, in a future-proof way, or?

Disclaimer: the only thing I know is that I know nothing, so don't take my word for this. My intuition, however, is that this likely has something to do with how how the secure-scuttlebutt package automatically unboxes private messages. I think secure-scuttlebutt's unbox tries to use ssb-keys' unbox, which calls toBuffer, which looks like it should return the correct base64 contents, but my guess is that it's erroring out somewhere and cowardly refusing to replicate.

I think a stack trace from a pub (or any replicating node) would make debugging this quite a bit easier. I'll see if I can reproduce the bug this week, let me know if you beat me to it and find the offending code.

Others who might be interested and/or knowledgeable: @dominic @arj @cel @cryptix