Improving Federation

I see the link in my vote didn't catch. Here it is properly:

Put federation into a layer

Just to show there is already an agreement to do this, so L3MNcakes's practical proposal of forming a working group builds on this previous agreement.

@seantilleycommunit :: Good points, but not necessarily show stoppers. If we could even get 2-3 devs working on this to start out, I think we could take it a long way. I'm one! =) It would be nice if we had a developer who knows the code well to help out, but in the event that doesn't happen, I'll happily be the one to tear through the code until I understand what's going on. I would love to see some of the newer devs jump in to help figure it out too! I know the task is a daunting one, but it has to be done by somebody if we want our app to succede. This is one of the core pieces of our network and it's really holding us back on the features we can implement. I really hate telling users, "We can't do that because the distributed part of our distributed network sucks." I'd much rather start moving forward on this with limited manpower than continue waiting for a magical influx of dev power.

@l3mncakes If you want to take a look at our federation system, by all means take a look.

Here's some wiki entries that may be useful to anyone interested:

• Federation Message Semantics

• Federation Protocol Overview

• Diaspora Message Passing

@seantilleycommunit Sweet! Thanks for listing those resources here. Should be very helpful.

Come on guys, do we really need a proposal to make a plan? :)

Absolutely, Tom. It's a means of agreeing a plan and getting something done.

@tomscott haha, I thought it would be best way to get the ball rolling on this and since it purposes doing things a little differently than I've seen them done before, I wanted to make sure the community had a say in the decision. C=

meanwhile on github:
https://github.com/Raven24/diaspora-federation

;)

I hope nobody feels left out by me starting ahead on a clean-room implementation for federation... but it really is not such a complicated or huge task for it to require elaborated documents or planning.

My plan of stuff to implement for this gem is:
- DO NOT BUILD ON RAILS (bonus: lightning fast specs) [done]

• get xml de/serialization on database-unrelated entities to work in both directions [done]

• build a structure resembling what is currently known as 'to_diaspora_xml' [done]

• put payload in salmon envelope and sign/encrypt that as it is currently done in D* [pending]

• simulate sending/receiving inside a proof-of-concept test-app [pending]

@florianstaudacher Really cool stuff! Watching, will keep an eye on this. Do you think the availability of federation in a gem might, in theory, allow a developer the ability to incorporate Diaspora federation into just about any Rails app? :)