Short story: have you noticed some of your posts missing from other user’s mentions, RT’s, replies etc? Upgrade to 0.9.20 now! 
Long story:
DHT stands for Distributed Hash Table. twister uses DHT to store user resources like profiles, avatars, but also standard posts. This is not the primary mechanism of posts propagation to your followers (which is bittorrent) but it is the mechanism used to send mentions, to reference (link) replies and stuff.
The thing with DHT is that data persistence is only statistically guaranteed. All peers are each contributing a small bit of storage capability to the twister network as they hold copies of some people’s posts. If, due to an extremely unlucky event, all peers go offline at the same time it would be like losing memory of posts. So, because peers come and go, we periodically perform a refresh on stored keys, that is, each peer tries to re-store the keys he has to the other 8 closest nodes.
Then another bad thing could happen: if the network was temporarily down at the exact time you hit “send” button, your mention wouldn’t be stored at DHT. ever.
Of course this is not good. So with 0.9.20 I’ve made a very small improvement to this logic: all DHT resources that are locally produced will also enter the local list of items to be refreshed. That means that even if your network was down when you hit “send”, twisterd will still get a chance to send this content to the right peers later (given that you leave your twisterd running).
So give it a try!
Miguel
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