Root cause observed live 2026-08-16: onboarding/seed-restore rewrite
identity/node_key on disk but server_info.pubkey is only seeded at boot,
so until the next restart every peer-joined advertised the stale boot key
while signing with the new seed-derived key — deterministically rejected
by every receiver, once per 90s heal tick, forever.
- seed.generate / seed.restore now refresh server_info.pubkey in the live
snapshot immediately (mirrors the DID-rotation handler).
- The 90s heal loop advertises the SAME key it signs with (disk identity,
like federation sync already did) instead of the boot snapshot.
- notify_join no longer logs "delivered" for an HTTP-200 JSON-RPC
rejection; in-band errors are terminal (identical signed bytes can
never succeed on retry).
- The heal loop backs off per peer (doubling toward a daily re-assert)
instead of re-notifying every 90s forever — Observer-held peers never
appear in Trusted-only exported hints, so they_list_us could never
become true for them.
- Receiver now binds the DID to the advertised pubkey (the old check was
self-referential) and logs malformed signatures distinctly from
genuine mismatches.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
