@piet if you feel I have missed something, please point that out!

I can't really answer a question like "do I understand your usecase?" we can only talk until we both feel like we understand each other. Also, just because I read something, doesn't mean I understood what you ment, I can only react by my interpretation of that. Please don't assume that something I say is automatically right just because I wrote that code.

The things I am suggesting are all things that I think would be simple to add, or necessary to make it work right.

On that note, I've just realized that you can't just flipflop replicate.request, because when you do replicate.request(id, false) it will send a "I don't want id signal" (-1) and that will screw with with request-skipping, because if you disconnect with the remote during the -1 state, they will remember that you don't want that feed and not mention it next time. (this may break eventual consistency - there are loads of tests in ebt to catch things like this)

Instead, we want to send a the signal that we do what that feed, but not right now! This is already sent if you are getting it faster from another peer. See the code in epidemic-broadcast-trees/v3.js (and v2.js was the old way to encode that). for example, epidemic-broadcast-trees/events.js timeout (line 390) checks if we are expecting messages on a feed but havn't got them, and cycles to another peer for that feed. it calls setNotes(peer, feed, seq, rx) to tell peer that we do (rx=true) or do not (rx=false) want to receive feed from them, but that we are up to seq.

To pause a feed, we just need to be able to set all peers to rx=false for a given feed.