What is a pub?

Hi, I'm mix, and I'm one of the people developing on scuttlebutt, and also trying to figure out how to make some of the concepts we're building with more accessible

A hand wavey story

Pubs are like public houses (e.g. your local bars, or cafes) - places with a gossipy bar-keep or barrista where you can drop by and share news. If there are enough pubs, and everyone swings by them occassionally, then information gets around fairly reliably, and we don't need a central source of truth / knowledge.

Why pubs are currently needed

While scuttlebutt is p2p, there isn't an easy way for peers to locate other peers, or to know when other peers are online.
(It might be possible to use an introducer, but it's also been important for us to not subscribe to any system which centralises any special role. This is why we have avoided using DHT)

We decided to put some peers online so that they were :

• in a know location the whole time (at a static IP address)
• they were always on (unlike my laptop)

If I get my pub to follow me and my friends, then it's "interested" in replicating any news it hears from them.
If we know where this pub is (and perhaps follow it), we can check in with it and ask for any gossip it might have heard of.

This is what an invite set up - a 2-way follow (the pub follows you and you follow the pub)

pubs (advanced)

When you use an invite, there are 3 messages that are published.

The pub publishes a message saying :

• I follow @mixmix

This means that it will ask anyone it bumps into for copies of things you've said. It also means that people who follow the pub will also be interested in things said (the network has you listening to your direct friends, AND their friends, in case you'd like to get to know them)

You publish messages saying :

• I follow @pub_mix
• there's a pub called @pub_mix over at pub.mixmix.io

This means you start following things the pub says (not much) and things that friends of the pub say (if this is a pub you and your friends go to, then this will allow you to find them)
The second message is really nice. It's a message that is gossiped about other gossiping centers (pubs). It's means if you know and follow me, then you'll hear that I think there's this nice little pub at pub.mixmix.io , so you can swing by there.

Now you don't need to be following a pub to drop by and ask the bar keep there whether they've heard from people you name exactly. So you'll find if you look close that your computer gossips with a range of people to ask for news. This makes the network super resiliant, and means even if you've only used on invite, you kinda have many pubs.

Did that make any sense ?

This is one of the hardest and densest stories to tell at the moment. So if it didn't make sense, I'd love to hear where it isn't clear enough.

Also, if you've got an alternative story you'd like to propose / try, that would be awesome too

Very nice introduciton to pubs and how they tie into availablility and friend-of-a-friend replication!

Maybe some interesting previous discussion:

• pubs are not peers
• asynchronous user invites

i currently lean to one of them but have to do more thinking.

Also in favor of what @ezdiy is saying. The pubs currently too convlated into the foaf graph.

@ppiixx it's a bit sketch at the moment - some pubs also run a web frontend so you can just go to it and it'll generate an invite for you.
Other's have generated multiple-use invites which are posted somewhere.
Others you just have to ask the people who run it to poke at it to make you an invite, or to manually follow you.

@zach! if you are coming at it from a literary perspective, you should check out @dust's old posts. He hasn't been around recently, and I don't know where is is now, but he wrote some great stuff.