So I onboarded a bunch of cool people at the recent #holochain intensive - @interactiveparticle @AnastasiaU @ChrisD @Wollum @ryan @Eric Bear @Amanda Jansen @Belinda Noakes - but it seems like I may have inadvertently created some little islands in doing so?

Didn't see the (new?) "local" feature in Patchwork working for us, so they mostly all entered via the public butt.caasih.net invite code. Thus they could all follow each other pretty easily; and eventually someone on that pub who was close enough to me propagated to them, and they could locate and friend me. Basically the same process as described here. A related question I've been wondering about is what this onboarding method does to someone's local datastore with regard to content from users they don't care about- how long do they get content propagated from randoms? Does it stop as soon as they unfollow the pub? And data that comes down during this phase is never going to go away given the current status of the tooling, correct?

Anyway, I don't follow any pubs; so now there exists a small group that is connected to each other and to me. Some of those people presumably never came back online. Others certainly did, as I've been talking to them.

My question is, how will those people be progressively introduced to other users in the network, and to new content? Are we certain they are seeing new content? Are there any constraints on when they will be synced- for example, do they need to be online at the same time as me given I am their gateway to the rest of the network? Or is it sufficient that one of my friends / followers is online at the same time as they are? Is the pub still pushing some data to them?

Apologies if these are well-travelled topics; feel free to point me at any documentation that exists :)

I really don't think so- I think (and agree with @cel) that pubs are evil and should go away.

By following people and responding to them directly, yes- but I imagine without the assistance of pubs to handle replication for you this means that both parties or some mutual connections need to be online simultaneously in order for any data exchange to occur. I'm seeking to understand what set of on-the-ground requirements need to be met at this level in order for syncing within a network of semi-connected peers to occur.

He just came on board the other day, mainly because he liked Patchbay and wanted to geek out on his own installation. Here he is! :D @thedavidmeister