---------------------------------------- | |
Federation and gopher | |
June 27th, 2018 | |
---------------------------------------- | |
Some of you guys were talking about a "federated gopher" on | |
Mastodon the other day. At first I was all into the idea and | |
getting ready to chime in with support. But then I started | |
thinking about what that would mean and I hit a wall. I think my | |
understanding of federation in recent context has skewed away from | |
the community idea. With all the work on ActivityPub and the new | |
clients popping up in the Fediverse I feel like I should probably | |
spend the time to figure out what it is everyone is talking about | |
when they use the word Federated. | |
Since we're talking definitions here, I figured I should start by | |
telneting to my happy dictionary [0] that I described in an old | |
phlog post [1]. Then I ran my query: "define english federation". | |
Here's what popped out: | |
<security> The establishment of some or all of business | |
agreements, {cryptographic} trust and user identifiers or | |
attributes across security and policy domains to enable more | |
seamless business interaction. | |
As {web services} promise to enable integration between | |
business partners through {loose coupling} at the application | |
and messaging layer, federation does so at the identity | |
management layer, insulating each domain from the details of | |
the others' authentication and authorization. Key to this | |
loose coupling at the identity management layer are | |
standardized mechanisms and formats for the communication of | |
identity information between the domains. {SAML} is one such | |
standard. | |
From the sound of that definition, gopher is already federated in | |
that identity information between domains is inherent to the | |
protocol because it's irrelevant. There's no authorized use | |
mechanism here and the act of hosting content on a server is | |
enough to identify the source. Since I host on gopher.black, if | |
your use of gopher queries my server you have used standard | |
mechanisms and formats for the communication of that information | |
between the domains, right? | |
Maybe the reason I'm having such difficulty is because my only | |
exposure to federation as an idea has been via things like | |
Mastodon which have far more interoperable parts. Content from one | |
independent system is consumed and becomes content within another | |
one, and the source of that content, the author, server, etc, all | |
need to be accounted for in the communication. That requires more | |
than gopher for sure. | |
Even so, I'm not satisfied. I think there's more to federation | |
than that definition. The context in how people discuss it seems | |
to imply something else, but I can't put my finger on exactly what | |
that might be. Distributed systems like IPFS come up a lot in | |
those discussions, but I don't see a black & white relationship. | |
I guess my slow brainmeats can't get past the idea that federation | |
means I control my shiz but it can interact with everyone elses | |
shiz in the same way. Am I so far off? Let me know with a reply or | |
email or mastodon or a hand written letter. | |
Yes! Hand written letters are my absolute favorite. They | |
demonstrate all that extra effort, they're physical treasures, and | |
I get to silently judge your personality through bullshit | |
handwriting interpretation that I make up on the spot. Everyone | |
wins! Send me an note with a reference to a pgp key and I'll send | |
you back my mailing address on the down-low. | |
Cheers, fedi-gophers | |
[0] Telnet to dict.org | |
[1] CLI Tricks: Dictionaries |