I was in bed trying to get some sleep and just had to get up to write some thoughts spinning in my head (not the first time this happens).

I'm pretty convinced that we need different types of SSB "servers", of which "Pub" is just one of those types. They should all be disposable and non-essential, they should all be "a nice plus that makes life easier/faster". Here are the types I'm currently thinking of, and their respective purposes:

• Pubs
  • Purpose: bring a community together or a circle of friends, replicating their logs
  • Connectivity: stable, constantly online, usually one per community
  • Discoverability: URL and invite
• Antennas
  • Purpose: store and replicate logs from one account only (think: follow this antenna to get andrestaltz's public log)
  • Connectivity: rather stable, mostly online, can be many
  • Discoverability: URL, no invite
• Bees
  • Purpose: provide discoveries of random people
  • Connectivity: frequently rebooted (destroying all data), unstable, definitely many
  • Discoverability: DHT, no invite

With the recent onboarding of many people to SSB, mostly due to my public pubs, I noticed that these public pubs served a very different purpose to what was originally thought as a pub. Also, because I don't know these people being onboarded, I'm not so confident about hosting their data on my VPS servers, and I have felt like taking the VPS down. However, it wouldn't be a problem to simply put them up again. And so I thought about highly ephemeral servers. And the idea of pollination and bumblebees came to mind. Insects have a very short lifespan, but they are very important for "spreading" stuff in nature.

Notice that these different types of servers are still basically the same sbot that runs in Patchwork, they just run in different modes and with different configurations. It's very easy to implement these types by tweaking sbot code. And all these 3 different types are entirely opt-in. You can choose, e.g. not to look for Bees in a DHT. However, it would be good that as a default, your client app would look for Bees so that you get at least some onboarding, without being stuck before getting a Pub invite. Also, I'm interested in setting up my own Antenna(s), and allowing people to follow my content (and only that) if they wish.

What do you folks think?