---------------------------------------- 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 (TEL) [0] Telnet to dict.org (DIR) [1] CLI Tricks: Dictionaries