Just heads up that I will be shutting down most of the #planetary pub servers over the next couple weeks. We are going to leave couple of the system pubs running and also the room server at planetary.link. I don't think this will impact anyone's scuttlebutt experience dramatically. All Planetary users should be set up to talk to all the system pubs unless they opted out, and as I said a couple of those will keep running.

I'm not sure how many folks know but when we were playing with the idea of topical pubs we spun up quite a few. We have 30 digital ocean droplets still humming along. But we're trying to reign in our infrastructure costs and the topical pubs which were never really that useful are an easy target.

I'll also be shutting down the Planetary Push Notification service, which watches the Planetary pubs for mentions of Planetary users, then sends a silent push notification to their app. The app fires up in the background and does normal syncing with pubs and rooms, and notifies the user if it downloads the posts where they were mentioned.

What's cooler is because most of the smarts are in the Planetary client, Planetary users will continue to get notifications even after we turn off the web service. Because the same routine runs when the app is launched in the background. And foreground. The web service just enabled it to happen a little faster. Github says @Christian Bundy wrote this service 5 years ago. It had a pretty good run.