Federation


Federation has become the established term for an old concept, the idea that everyone should run her own server and applications connect the appropriate servers as they need, just like SMTP and HTTP have always done. Only in the domain of Chat and Messaging that isn't enough. You almost always end-up requiring an interserver protocol, which has led to different constellations:

  • IRC - a system where all servers need to trust each other, so they cannot openly federate and let everyone join in with their own server
  • NNTP, which isn't realtime.
  • PSYC, which promoted the concept of federated servers since 1993 (the [synconf] paper discussing problems of IRC and how to address them) or 1991 (the legendary public brainstorm session with BuGless).
  • Jabber, which in 1998 took a much simpler approach and just got going.
  • Centralistic systems which are now offering federation to those willing to pay for it, using the SIP protocol.

By now federation is heavily criticized for its habit of exchanging massive amounts of private data on servers in the clear. This could theoretically be reduced, but it doesn't really happen, as it's trying to introduce privacy as an add-on. That has never worked, privacy needs to be planned for by design.

PSYC developers have decided to move on and are presenting a fully distributed and end-to-end privacy-enabled solution in psycd, which operates on top of darknet technology. That means, PSYC as a syntax and protocol lives on, but the federation architecture is gone.


Related Issues:

Retrieved from "http://about.psyc.eu/Federation"