Recently I have been working on ssb-friend-pub github git-ssb. The motivation was @kawaiipunks Criticisms of Scuttlebutt thread. This is a plugin for sbot that allows an owner of a pub to assert ownership and providing methods to see which pubs are run by your friends or friend of friends. Hooking it up to patchbay it looks like this:

Even with the default connect to "all pubs", patchbay will still prefer pubs run by your friends. If people start running this messages should start going through quicker as you are likely to be connected to the same pubs.

Another feature is that you can set it to only connect to your own pub, thus providing you with ip safety even without running tor.

You can help test this by running the ssb-friend-pub branch in patchbay.

Implementation discussion

@arj, will it work in patchfoo with a suitable setting in ~/.ssb/config, do you think?

@kas yes, it is a plugin for scuttlebot. Patchbay is only a pretty UI for this.

Thanks, @arj.

Even with the default connect to "all pubs", patchbay will still prefer pubs run by your friends. If people start running this messages should start going through quicker as you are likely to be connected to the same pubs.

This is exciting for me from a chess point of view. Often chess moves go through in real(ish) time, but sometimes it can take longer / even up to an hour or more for me to receive a friend's move. I've always assumed this is because my patchbay is connected to newish pubs that are out of the follow graph of my opponent (or it could be that pubs just overloaded at that particular time, I guess.)

#someone-should set up a private pub ) for people who use ssb-chess =3. (with a replication distance of 1 so that it just replicates the chess players directly and doesn't get too overloaded with other replication )Maybe that should be me - yeah, I'll do it when I have a free moment soon.

CC @frankiebee @mrchico who I think were also having issues receiving each other's moves quickly recently.