Federation

[titpetric]

I'm documenting some references here about Federation, with the goal of analyzing existing solutions we can pair against, it's restrictions and requirements as they apply to crust (messaging or otherwise).

• https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
• https://github.com/go-fed/activity

The main intent is to achieve server 2 server federation, where two (or more) Crust users on different instances may connect "directly" and have a communication channel which replicates between servers. As such, initially this would apply only to direct messaging and group messaging (private channels).

Effectively:

1. servers create a p2p mesh network (possibly on-demand instead of always on),
2. one server holds the "master" user account, while all others have "shadowed" users,
3. to initiate a connection, user A(server1) has to add user B(server2) -
   • does the server allow federation (settings),
   • server pairing (handshake, signatures - some form of verification later on)
   • shadow account creation (server2:A, and server1:B),
   • live status updates as allowed by the server(s) - is the user online, etc.,
   • message replication when a message is sent to the group (O(N) where N number of crust servers),

The starting scope would only support messaging groups, as they are not subject to role memberships or require federation of additional resources (channels, roles, permissions).

[alexiskraft]

@zmija Should we have a separate project for this long-term stuff? My target is that we have Federation in place by end of 2019.