from what I can tell pubs reconnect when you restart patchwork or at random from what I can tell

Pub connections are ever so ephemeral – and IMHO the heuristics are less than suboptimal. Look at this:

$ grep '^Mar 17' /var/log/sys.log | grep 'port 8008 (ssb) request' | grep 84.250.164.174 | wc -l
811

That's 811 incoming TCP connections from the same IP address in less than 10 hours, or more than 1 connection per minute.