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Federation and gopher
June 27th, 2018
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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
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