Really great comment, and it does resonate with a lot of ideas I'm planning for ssb-conn.

Yes to randomization.

Also yes to backup connections. I think that would be handled in ssb-conn-staging. I noticed that we might be missing an additional API in secret-stack (by the way, I know you're probably talking about overall protocol and other implementations, but I'm thinking how to implement this ASAP using the node.js stack). The problem is that we can't just use secret-stack's naive connect, because there are a bunch of hooks that trigger as soon as a connection happens, such as replication etc. There should be a way of pinging or connecting with multiserver, without triggering all those hooks. Basically we just need to create a multiserver client, but the challenge is that we need all the same multiserver plugins that are running in the secret-stack instance. This is why I think there has to be a change in secret-stack, to add a way of cloning the ms client with its plugins. cc @dominic I might PR this on GitHub.