@mmckegg

Almost everyone here right now was at once a stranger. What brought us together?
I think what we desperately need are real groups. A lot like how reddit treats sub-reddits.

Agreed and agreed.

By design, SSB connects you with:

• People that are a few hops away from your self-declared friends.

There is also the social need for connecting you with:

• People that are a few hops away from your self-declared interests.

And for that we need to consider how to solve "stranger discovery", and we need to reconsider the benefit of DHTs for that. The upside of DHTs is that they connect you with strangers, the downside is that they connect you with strangers. (No typo!) It would be pretty straight forward to use mafintosh's discovery-channel to join a swarm of peers that follow the same interest, channel food or dogs or whatever, and it would de facto work like hashtags on twitter, helping you find people using the same string.

The problem with DHTs in the context of SSB is that getting data from those people would happen by "friending" them on the same intimacy status as your real friends, which would in turn trigger SSB to replicate those stranger's data to your friends, etc. There should be a way of having ephemeral replication.

I think this has to do with an idea I proposed: hop configuration should be per-friend, not globally. I should be able to say: follow dominic and also replicate all of his friend's data because I know dominic represents a community I want to be part of. But also I should be able to say: follow this rando for a while, but only them and none of their friends, I'll try this for a while without commitment and see if it'll be interesting or not. I almost feel like there should be a way of putting out-of-order together with DHTs and 0-hop configuration in order to build some sort of twitter hashtag equivalent use case to meet people who are posting under the same channel.

Also, this shouldn't be in conflict with how things currently work, because I should be able to make that rando a real friend and choose to opt-in to multi-hop replication from their circles, that kind of stuff.

There's no reason scuttlebutt.nz needs to be the primary entrance to all possible SSB communities

Thumbs up. Every time we say "SSB" it should sound like saying "RSS": just a technology that is cool and useful, but by itself empty of humanity (and it should be so). When we say something else, like Solarpunk, that should evoke much more humanity and community feelings.