Legitimate things I've seen come up a few times in these discussions:

• confusion about pubs, and joining
  "the network" (Are channels on pubs? Why can't I see any content?)
• confusion about exactly what is encrypted
• annoyance at seeing lots of "following" messages (Why am I seeing who a pub follows etc?)
• people want to be able to post things that can only be read by their friends (do I really have control over my data if anyone spidering the network can read this? Isn't this still data mineable?)
• concern about moderation in a "free-for-all" decentralised network? (who has the power to take things down?)
• implementation of ssb in other languages is difficult because of its assumptions based on javascript's json implementation
• standard growth assumptions, assuming we want more randoms on the network (it's just another app on the pile trying to get my attention, go away!)

I actually think there is a lot of valuable info in these discussions. It's nice to get some candid feedback from some random users on Patchwork for the first time. Sure it isn't all necessarily constructive, but I think it is important to hear people's raw experiences.

This stuff is making me rather keen for cutting pubs out of the default ssb story. Can't wait until invites and ooo are widely deployed and we have some kind of direct peer syncing (web-rtc style)! And of course private groups should allow people to "only post to my friends".

As for data mining, I think that as public "free-for-all" pubs go away as alternatives are available, it will be a lot harder to get into a network in the first place to start spidering. Already we have no idea how many scuttle-islands there are out there! I've been starting to see issues on github from people that are outside of my 2-hops and also outside of pub 3-hops.