Jon Spriggs wrote:
I've been following the conversations of the past few days about
having a central repository of data about servers and clients and
SMS-by-email hosts, and I wondered if this doesn't break the federated
model.
You're conflating three different issues.
The second two things you mentioned -- clients and sms email patterns --
wouldn't be part of a central repository; they're part of the database
at each Laconica site. We already distribute data for SMS email patterns
in Laconica; I simply was proposing a way to make it easier to manage
numeric IDs of these patterns. Since most clients will have their source
identifiers hard-coded, it makes sense to distribute the DB of client
info with Laconica, too.
Finally, the repository of data about servers actually has nothing to do
with federation! It's only a list of servers that respond to our
Twitter-like API (which is unrelated to OpenMicroBlogging). Servers can
be part of the OMB network without being listed in the database; this
would only be for public Laconica sites like identi.ca, bleeper.de and
army.twit.tv that want to let new users register.
How about if Alice's Laconica instance asks Bob's laconica instance
about every other OMB instance it knows, and tells his instance about
every OMB instance her's knows about? This could happen the first time
they talk, and then every X hours, where X could be every 24, 120 or
even 2400.
Well, first of all, that'd be inefficient -- data would make a
drunk-walk across the Internet, and plenty of valuable information would
never make it to places it's needed.
Second, there's a huge trust issue. Why should Alice's server trust
Bob's server to give it any information about other sites besides Bob's
own? Because it's running Laconica? Alice can't even be sure of that.
This seems like a huge security risk, and the kind of trust code we'd
have to build in (only replace a client tag with a new URI if we hear
about it from 4 different servers, blah blah blah) is really not worth it.
Third, it's really chatty, for information that changes very slowly
(Verizon doesn't change their email pattern very often).
Fourth, when I install Twhirl for the first time, where should it look
when it's showing me a list of possible Laconica sites I might have an
account on or might want to connect with? It's going to need a place to
look for that info anyways; we might as well have a publicly-available
list that anyone can use.
-Evan
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