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The problem here is how SSB is used in practice; most content is not passed p2p, but through a single hub. This isn't part of the design, it just happens to be how they're bootstrapping right now. But it does mean that number of hops is not a good proxy for actual social closeness.

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Is that still the case? It was like this 3 years ago when I last tried it. Sounds like in practice SSB is just as centralized as a standard client-server network.

It's optional. There are some benefits to relying on a hub such as having the ability to follow channels of interest the hub hosts and structured similarly with hashtags on twitter.

There's a new feature, rooms[0], that allows members to replicate with one another and stores nothing.

[0]: https://github.com/ssb-ngi-pointer/rooms2

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