A publish-subscribe data messaging system in which wildcard subscriptions are represented in an approximate membership set or filter, such as a Bloom filter, for distribution to brokers together with formatting rules associated with the wildcard subscriptions, where a broker receiving a publication topic of a data publication for distribution to other brokers uses the formatting rules provided by any given broker to create wildcard versions of the publication topic for matching with the wildcard subscriptions that are represented in the approximate membership sets or filters provided by the given brokers, where, if a match exists, the data publication is forwarded to the given broker.