"Following" a person means that you save any messages that are written by them or their follows. This is a separate thing from "connecting": connecting lets you ask the pub if they have seen any new messages from the feeds you're saving. It does not require you to be saving the pub's feed, unless one of your follows is following that pub.

The pubs you follow are in your Friends + Follow lists just like people are. They really are just regular accounts that are reachable through the internet. If you have a publicly reachable IP address you can announce it for friends to connect with you directly.**

Cons of unfollowing all pubs: If you are behind a NAT or firewall and do not connect to anyone locally, you want to make sure that the pub is still following you, or one of your friends. If the pubs unfollow you and anyone who follows you, then your messages will never leave your computer.

Pros of unfollowing pubs: The public pubs get a lot of new people, so not following them means avoiding a lot of boring "Hi i'm new" messages and the occasional troll. Patchwork is better at hiding the extent of the problem than Patchbay, but these messages are still taking up space on your hard-drive.

** it looks like the gossip module might not automatically interpret these yet.

@Alanna There are two kinds of pubs you connect to: (1) those that you manually joined by adding invites, (2) any pub that your computer 'discovers' in the social graph.

The second type is the more confusing type, and it's a decision done a long time ago that we'll likely revert. Basically everytime someone joins a pub, they also automatically under the hood publish a msg that announces to the social graph that this pub exists, and other peers pick that up and attempt to connect to that pub.

Unfollowing pubs basically has the effect of pushing pubs more distant to you in hops count. For instance, I am at hop 1 to you because there is only one "follow" distance between you and me. But if you don't follow a pub, then the closest it can be is hops 2 (you follow person X who follows the pub). One of the benefits of not following a pub is that you won't be hops-2-distant with strangers anymore, you'll be hops-3-distant, if those strangers are connecting to a hops-2-distant pub. Overall this means that you'll connect to less random pubs, only to pubs you already know. But I think it's a somewhat weak action, not too effective at pruning which pubs you connect with. I think we just to change the code so that there are more reasonable defaults, and specially once you block a pub you should never connect to it anymore (but currently you would connect!).

@alanna

By default, most of us host the people we follow and the people they follow (friends of friends), so when you're following a pub you're hosting all of the people that they follow, which could be anyone. For me, it's a question of whether you want to host content from people who have pub invites or whether you want one of your [human] friends to follow them before you want to host them.

Lots of my friends follow pubs and follow new users, so even though I don't follow pubs I'll still see lots of new folks, but personally I've found that the firehose of brand new users is a bit of a drain on my attention and sense of community. On the other hand, I started out as a rando with absolutely no scuttle-friends, so I appreciate that a real person (@fabian!) followed me, which would have introduced me to folks who don't follow pubs.

@alanna

I used Patchbay's /query page (woo @mix!), which let me search for pubs that I'd joined. It looks like the pubs you've followed are:

• @L+nPFTM...
• @uRECWB4...

It doesn't look like those pubs are super active with new users, so you may not have the same problem that I had.

In case anyone finds it useful, my query was:

{
  query: [
    {
      $filter: {
        value: {
          author: '@6OxffMLNyxkboLjCqv29WnMPhH8O3qFrcXCR6KrKcPI=.ed25519',
          content: { type: 'pub' }
        }
      },
    },
    {
      $map: ['value', 'content', 'address', 'key']
    }
  ]
}

@masukomi

I think the number of hops depend on which client you're using or how you've configured ~/.ssb/config. For example, Patchwork does two hops, although the default in ssb-config is actually three hops (like you mentioned). My intuition is that once #ssb-ooo is rolled out across our clients then the default number of hops will drop to two.