@tonych
The initial_witnesses array is used only when your hub starts for the first time.
It seems complicated to have witnesses diversity to emerge unless some major industry player claims he is running a witness and asks for adoption. Although the project adoption looks going well it may take some time for this to come.
In the meantime, I beleive we should start to show that the network relies on community independant operated witnesses for at least a portion of the 12 default list (my personnal opinion is 6 over 12).
On the project side: I think it is really important for the mass adoption that independant witnesses now show up (would later be spontaneously replaced by thoses of notorious captain of industry when they come in) to guarantee witnessing diversity.
On the candidate witness side: unless validating, candidate witnesses are just bleeding byte. It comes, soon or later, quite frustrating and leads to discouraging skilled volunteers.
As you know, together with a hub service to the community, I am operating a witness at MEJGDND55XNON7UU3ZKERJIZMMXJTVCV
Would you agree on setting up this witness as a default in byteball.org/bb and in the conf.js files on Github as a first step to diversity? (I personnaly choosed to replace the 12th one starting by UENJ)
Please take a couple of minutes to think about it.
It is great that you are getting expertise running nodes, but we need well-known trusted people/orgs as witnesses.
There is no such requirement for running hubs, and I'm happy to see the hub network decentralized.