while I'm a programmer and I could do this, this is quite convoluted, and this feature is quite important to be turned on to help popularize SSB. A non technical user (which is the majority of users) would just not bother. This should be an easily accessible checkbox in the clients, and it's quite important to be easy to reach and understand.

also for anyone else looking into this, the new way to do this is to use ssb-server instead of sbot, as indicated here:
https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-server