Absolutely brilliant. I love it. I love the look. I love the text. And I love @angelica's sketch - I think it's perfect as it is.

Is something like this useful to you too?

I would definitely use it.

Could it work with our current pub methods? In other words: Is it as simple as I think to just make sure yr following a pub, remember the pub's name, and request in some way an invite code from that pub?

I'll let an expert answer that but my impression is yes.

Is the tool accessible enough, while keeping our values present?

My feeling is yes.

AND! How's the site? It's roughly styled, and so if y'all have any opinion's on colors, font, and copy, I am all ears. Also, it uses a sketch from @angelica for the letter head but I should say that it's just a sketch and done quickly because she is sweet.

It's awesome.

Are you doing something to detect the user's OS and show a Windows installer if they're not on a Mac?

I really love the pubs description.

Is there a friendlier, less technical way of saying "if we're not on the same local network"? I remember what you were saying about a friend confused by the word "server". How would they respond to the phrase "local network"? It says a lot that you've managed to make the whole process so non-geek friendly that these words stick out :)

--like, it's not actually on the web--

This is perfect in tone. Absolutely perfect. The sub-editor in me says stick spaces between the punctuation and the words and maybe consider an emdash instead of two hyphens but the two hyphens has a certain typewritten charm and to quibble over spacing feels painfully pedantic given how excellent this is.

I haven't tested it yet or watched the video and probably won't before tomorrow because it's late here. I just wanted to congratulate you immediately on this because it's damn good. Excellent work!

this is rad @zach. @matt looks it's the MVP of what we were discussing with invites.

I think this would be a great leaping off point for a personalised way to invite people.
Let's try using it and see how it goes.

do we want new users to follow pubs?

Technically it is possible to onboard people without pub invites. It’s just not simple of you are not in the same room/doing it async. If i and the new uxer both Post contact: Messages to follow each other she can connect to pubs and other peers without ever using an invite. Our friendship will be enough for pubs (granted, with hop > 0) to accept her connection and sync.

I think the iffy part her is the async setting since you can’t follow them until they made a key.

Is that essentially clicking the "follow" button?

to make it short: yes. type:contact is used for following and blocking. I think patchbay only shows type:post in the feed and annotates votes/digs on them. ( patchbay and -foo have a nerdier approach towards messages. They show all the messages but it can feel spammy at times since you see all the dig/follow/subscribe sprees that people go through. )

do you mean the real life setting of not being in the same room, or on at the same time?

yup, that is exactly what I meant and you are correct on all counts. You could add your own public key to your generated personal invite, which is also much safer because e2e encryption is nothing without some proper key verification but it's also just a matter of time before there are more than one zach here.. ;)

buuut if I'd have to run an errand suddenly and couldn't let the new person in for a few hours that would be a pretty bad onboarding experience in my book but it is perfect for the sync setting and it is what we should strive for imho since it also maps much better onto the personal friend-of-a-friend thing.

Your tool inspired me to make a beaker browser app to generate an invite (as a beaker / dat site.) I thought it'd be a good excuse to try out making my first beaker app :).

Beaker browser has an API that allows you to create new beaker sites from within a site so I made a site that you can fill in the template values on a form and then once you hit 'submit', it will create a new beaker site with your generated invite page. You can then view that site in your library, publish the changes and click 'share' and then upload your generated site to hashbase.

https://hashbase.io/happy0/scuttlebutt-invite-generator ( Note, it only works in beaker browser. Dat link: dat://scuttlebutt-invite-generator-happy0.hashbase.io )

github link to my (very hackily written in about 2 hours) project for anyone curious about the beaker API: https://github.com/Happy0/beaker-scuttlebutt-invite-generator/blob/master/index.html

I wrote the form labels in Scottish for now. I'll probably translate them to English in a day or two :P. Unless someone wants to submit a pull request and do it for me :).

Note: not suggesting we replace your python tool with this. I think your python tool is a lot nicer to use. It just inspired me to try out the beaker API :D.

@Zach! the invite page looks great. I wonder if this may finally help people to join when i invite them remotely.

I want to share another hosting option for the onboarding pages: ssb blobs.
Example: &Ls5cXpU... https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/&Ls5cXpUjr+6o+eD/CRmXd3HaAf0GDOy6xnc0FGOi4DI=.sha256
https://git.heropunch.io/&Ls5cXpUjr+6o+eD/CRmXd3HaAf0GDOy6xnc0FGOi4DI=.sha256
This should work on any public ssb-viewer or git-ssb-web instance.

How to:
I generated an invite page with the onboarding link generator. Then I found files linked from the generated page, downloaded them, added them as blobs (curl -s ... | sbot blobs.add), and replaced the links with blob links (prefixed with "/"). Then I gossipped with pubs until the https links above worked. I didn't change the fontlibrary links though because there are a lot of resources to migrate there and I haven't yet written a script to automate the process.

i just realized, instead of generating and publishing separate static sites for each person you invite, can we have a single invite page where the params can be passed in as url query params? (the parts of the url after the ?) like /invite?invitee=Alice&inviter=Bob?inviterKey=@arst

i can have a play at this some other time.