@Zach! my ideal situation is that people only join the network through a friend's invite. however, at the moment, only pub owners can create invites, running a pub is non-trivial (we don't have a "pub-as-a-service" offering like hashbase), and the pub invite flow doesn't automate finding the person who invited you. as the maintainer of @ssb.rootsystems.nz, the most popular pub, i think it's time we end the era of "public pubs" and move exclusively to peer-to-peer invites, to avoid an eternal september where too many people join without on-boarding the culture.