More granular networking controls for local, internet syncing

[cinnamon-bun]

What's the problem you want solved? Local and internet syncing have different privacy implications.

Local syncing lets nearby people on the same WiFi match your face to your account. Anonymity scenarios: teens vs parents; coworkers; coffee shop.

Internet syncing lets distant people match your IP address to your account. Anonymity scenarios: harassment by internet trolls. Also internet data sometimes costs money.

	Local on	Local off
Internet on	typical non-paranoid use	hide from parents / coworkers / coffee shop people
Internet off	hide from internet trolls but sync with local people (SSB meetup / activists)	hide from everyone (I use this when my VPN is turned off)

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Is there a solution you'd like to recommend? Add separate controls for local syncing and internet syncing, on the CLI and as web buttons. --offline would still control both.

We'd pass these options to ssb-conn but I don't know exactly how.

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Extra credit Separate "internet" into "pubs" and "rooms" which have different privacy properties; or add option to require approval before connecting to a pub or room-peer.

Right now SSB syncs with every pub it can discover even if you have no relationship with them. One of them could easily be logging everyone's IP addresses and SSB keys.

[christianbundy]

We'd pass these options to ssb-conn but I don't know exactly how.

Same. It's also worth mentioning that SSB-CONN doesn't expose db, hub, staging, or query over MuxRPC, so we'd need to either:

• Find a way to do this within the top-level SSB-CONN.
• Make some changes to fix the problem (https://github.com/staltz/ssb-conn/issues/9#issuecomment-554491720) so that we can actually use these methods.

[nickwynja]

I imagine the CLI option for this could be like --connections where options could be one of all | local | internet | pubs | peers | none. --connections=none would be synonymous with --offline.