@gieryn,

Should I unfollow some pubs?

I haven't followed any pubs for months. I think it works very well. However…

At any given time you will be able to read posts from everyone who is within your hops radius. If your client has hops=2 you will be able to see posts from your friends and their friends. Having one or more pubs as friends dramatically increases the number of IDs within your hops radius. You could achieve the same by following more people. The latter method will also give you more control over what posts you see.

Some time ago I set hops=7 – something I like to think about as “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon + The Extra Mile” – as an experiment, and it works well for me. On the other hand, @alanz has recently set hops=2, so the mileage may vary.

Just for the record

$ date +%F
2018-11-11
$ sbot config | jq .friends.hops
7
$ sbot friends.createFriendStream | sort -u | wc -w
10104