Map with aggregated points from other platforms - visibility of existence of users across platforms

[mariha]

Visibility of existence of users across platforms

• on a map, users from other platforms aggregated per location, no individual hosts are shown
• no individual user data (usernames or profiles) is shared, data stays on the platform user allowed to store it.

[chmac]

Edit: I now see there are other issues like OpenHospitalityNetwork/openHospitality.network#3 which address topics like this.

What's the tech approach to this?

This is a super difficult problem in my opinion. To illustrate I share a hypothetical situation. Say we have 3 networks which are federating. One for the American Nurses Association, one for the Harvard Alumni, and one for Girl Guides of America. Some questions arise:

• Does each network decide on a network level which other networks to federate with?
  • If so, this means we can end up with many silos who choose not to interoperate, and definitely won't interoperate with independent hosts
• How does each user decide who their profile is visible to?
  • What's the point of joining a network dedicated to a specific group who share a social connection if my profile is then made visible to the entire internet and anybody on any of the other network using the same software can find and request to stay with me?

These are just the process topics. How do you make this smooth for users. Then comes the tech challenges.

• If we have 100 networks each containing 1k members, and they all interoperate (ala Matrix) with all other servers
• Then we have a network of 100k users
• How do we manage search?
  • Query forwarding: Whenever somebody searches, their "home" server sends their query to all other servers who all reply
  • User forwarding: Each server sends a copy of some basic user info to all other servers

In the Query Forwarding model, if a server is offline, their users are not visible. Each server has to handle "load" for every user of every site. So to participate in the network hosting a small server with say me and 10 friends, I need to handle the search traffic for 100k users.

In the User Forwarding model each server needs to store all the users of the entire fediverse. In this example that means 100k user profiles. Then each server needs to receive and process a constant stream of updates from each other server. Every time a user changes some aspect of their profile this event is propagated to every single other server.

Maybe there's other models I'm not seeing? I'm curious to understand more about your thinking on this, and happy to contribute some mental power here. I've been down these rabbit holes in many different scenarios over the last decade or so. :-)

[chmac]

Hmm, I see now that the tech approaches are being discussed in OpenHospitalityNetwork/openHospitality.network#3. Is there somewhere that discusses this topic from a larger viewpoint? As in, what are the implications for server admins? Do we want people to be able to run their own servers (like with matrix)? How much control do we want users to have on who can see their profile? Also, from a larger perspective, how do we look at spam in the future? It seems to me like CouchSurfing was great with 1m crazy people on there, but once we had 10m it was too diverse and the freeloading students didn't match well with the original crazies. How will these cases interact in this fediverse version?

[chagai95]

Didn't read everything yet but the link to Trustroots 3 seems to be wrong? I can't find to the tech part there...

[mariha]

@chmac good questions! Honestly, I haven't thought about most of this yet. I'll be happy to do some brainstorming together.

@chagai95 I fixed the link and tried to answer (some of) the questions here, mostly query vs users forwarding one...