If I could connect to the friends I know in person first, that would be great.
I think social networks gain momentum by being useful to real friendships and then the discovery aspect kicks in later. If it's all about finding random internet friends, it's going to set the tone for the whole life of the network.
All of the long-time users will be cemented in their random internet relationships and will be hesitant to then mix their real life relationships into that later on. It's just normal that these different social circles organize and it's normal that people don't typically mix them.
And transparency, (tunable) FOAF features is exactly what made it possible rather quickly. If anybody here remembers FriendFeed, they had this mechanics well-polished. (They also invented the Like button.)
I'm interested in hearing more about what "FOAF" is and some examples of what you mean :)
Manyverse discovers and syncs over both Bluetooth and Wifi
Why not do this decentralized? Should be possible. NAB (p2p Reddit) does something similar with GUN via "spaces" that are under a public key, but requires no centralized host/server/etc. should be trivial to do the same in SSB.
1. The bootstrapping servers for DHTs are legitimately centralized and hard-coded servers 2. On a DHT you leak your IP address to many other peers, with rooms you leak your IP address only to the room administrator. (This is supposing without an anonymization layer, which would have some non-negligible overhead) 3. Connecting to DHT peers is not as reliable and consistently functioning as a static IP address, considering all sorts of network situations, specially mobile data plans
That said, I don't have anything against DHTs, and in fact I might improve how Manyverse uses DHTs. I just think it's important that users know the drawbacks of each approach, and then users can choose whichever approach fits their needs best. This is why Manyverse focuses on multiple connectivity modes: LAN, Bluetooth, Pubs, Rooms, DHTs. I think the more of these we have, the more resilient the network will be. So my argument isn't for rooms instead of DHTs, my argument is that adding rooms is good to fill in a gap in choices for connectivity.
That medium can be a shared wifi (if it allows UPD multicast) or it can be bluetooth (only for manyverse so far... desktop bluetooth gossip is haaaard) but at the moment, the shared "medium" is often an internet server. These servers ("pubs") are not any different from normal ssb peers, they just expose a public IP and don't have NAT.
There's two issues that people take with pubs:
1. They make the ecosystem less decentralized, moving it more towards a sort of federation. But it's not like you only connect to the pubs you select. Usually an ssb application will connect to many different pubs that it knows about, so there's no single point of failure there. 2. Following a pub means that you get blasted with a fire hose full of random strangers' (everyone who signed up for that pub, plus their friends) posts, which take up space on your drive, and (more importantly) need to be verified and indexed locally. That makes onboarding very slow and tedious, especially on mobile devices.
Rooms relate to the latter. They're an easy way to have a pub server that only connects you to the group of people you want to be connected to. Well, if you don't share invites to it around freely that is. And it's simple to set up, even for less technical people. Maybe think of it like a NAT traversal with extra crypto. Like that, onboarding a friend onto SSB is a bit more elegant: you still give them an invite, but to a room for a social circle that they already fit into, or even a room just for you and them. Now instead of having to let the device sit and digest a thousand feeds over night, it only gets the feeds they would want to know about. It's much more like local off-grid onboarding.
