Lots of good thoughts @Hendrik Peter

all of a sudden your algorithm starts filtering away those you would disagree with but also people you’d potentially agree with.

Yes, this would be an inconvenient. I think since reading these discussions, I have changed my opinion: I would no longer vote for automatic hiding of content based on 2nd party blocks. I would rather do flagging: indicate to the user that the person who wrote that content is blocked by some of their friends. The subtlety of the UI display of this flagging is important. A tiny flag has different community effects than a red big warning.

Most of the time I don’t block people because they are bad, but because they are too great hubs of links, relations, etc for my poor 64gb iPhone to deal with.

You can use private blocks (block messages encrypted to yourself) for that. Then it doesn't signal to other people that these are bad accounts. That's supported in Manyverse at least. We probably need to find a better way of UI-displaying these different semantics. One of them is a customization of your diskverse, another one is a community signal.

Right now SSB clients will try to connect to whatever they can connect to.

ssb-conn's default scheduler configures that you need opt-in, and Patchwork uses ssb-conn but on top of that it also adds more features to automatically connect to others. When I made a PR to Patchwork to use ssb-conn, I didn't remove these features because I didn't want to change the baked-in opinions that Patchwork had, I only wanted to upgrade a module.

Ever since I’ve been more careful and ever since I’m no longer connected to pubs anymore I’ve noticed a fair amount of “possible connections” to have become @UnReAdbleCiphers123.

I have the same kind of problem, but I don't think ad-hoc usernames given by the room is a good solution to that. In fact usernames alone are not enough to understand who is a certain person. But there's something coming up that may be decent: partial replication! Once we have partial replication built (it's an #ngipointer goal), it will allow your client to fetch the about of an account without fetching all of their other content. And maybe we may be able to fetch their latest N posts (this is harder to do when there's all sorts of temporal corner cases in distributed systems), maybe.

Even if we don't get partial replication, another solution is that when you open this anonymous account, a prompt shows on your SSB app saying "do you want to temporarily view this account's content?". If you press yes, it performs replication of that feed (possible because you're directly connected to them, so no gossip), but stores the replicated content in /tmp or something, and let's you view their content. If you don't follow them, the content would be automatically deleted later.

A bigger change that would make sense in my mind: “Trace-routes”. How/why are messages from person X (and their extreme left/right buddies) arriving to me?

Superb idea! I have to write it down somewhere where I can remember.