Maybe the one thing that we really should remove is the list of pubs from the onboarding docs.

@aig, if this happens we can still do that, but removing this useful on-boarding feature seems a high price for a problem that could be fixed in a short time (by removing it then and blocking the users).

@farewellutopia, I agree with @Powersource here.
Rooms are also a much much better onboarding tool for new users in general (since they won't be bomb-shelled by the huge amounts of data present on pubs in the onboarding pub list.

https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-server/wiki/%23ssbrooms is the place

Thanks @Powersource (phone) and @Hendrik Peter.

I have little experience with rooms, how does it work if a completely new user without any contact joins a room? I assume they only see the IDs of other users but no names or other contents, so they have to randomly connect to some user to see some more content and follow more users. How to their content gets visible? By joining a pub a new user starts with a follower, but how does a new user without any off-butt connection to others scuttlers get followers?

the first connection one makes is bit of a gamble yes. most people hovering in the room that I have up (picoroom) have some kind of relation to each other, so you connect to one and it will pull the names and details of most other people in the room.

I should probably include an instruction on mine to point people at "connect to this guy when you join the room to fetch some initial information". thanks for pointing that out!

To expand on

Andre was pointing towards bit of a special feature in a post he made last week to check out the profile of a room peer without puffing up your own local DB.

...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.

That idea is not implemented yet though