Federation

[ArtificialOwl]

How to manage federation ?

• Admin add federated instance of Nextcloud to a list
• every one can federated and share
• both with option

[MorrisJobke]

cc @rullzer @schiessle

[rullzer]

This is different from the default federation right?

I would say: trusted servers for federation of nextcloud things should be trusted by default. For the rest just a whitelist I guess?

Or does it have some kind of protocol to exchange secrets as well?

[ArtificialOwl]

Once your nextcloud is compatible with ActivityPub, anyone with an ActivityPub account can send you a message: there is no need to be on the same social network or to create any link between instances. Also, the spreading of your new instance is fast enough when you start following people on other instance of a social network.
If someone you're following is posting on @mastoson.social, it will be displayed in your account @rullzer@cloud.nextcloud.com. Your local public post can also end-up on the federated timeline of Mastodon.

I don't know yet if you can encrypt message, but because you're using a pair of keys to authenticate your activity, you might be able to encrypt content too.

So, should we stay public or filter the incoming/outgoing message ? My guess is that an option to setup your Social app from Public to Private-with-a-list-of-federated-cloud would be the best. Now it's true we could use/merge the list from federated share.

[jancborchardt]

This should be possible without specific allowing. If I want to follow @anne@testcloud.com then I should be able to do that and not have it vetted by the admin.

But yes, we could have a default allowlist which is basically populated by the "trusted servers" in federation, which could make the contacts from there load quicker. And a denylist which could be filled by an admin to block specific instances.

[juliusknorr]

Right now we allow every remote server, right @daita

@jancborchardt I guess we should move that to 0.2, so we add a proper setting for whitelisting servers there.

[jancborchardt]

Yup, allowlist and blocklist for 0.2 seems good.

[schiessle]

I think by default we should allow to follow everyone on every server. But imho there should be a admin setting to limit it to users on the server only so that you can also use it as an internal social network for your organization only.

[jancborchardt]

@schiessle yes, that's the simple first step setting. But it is also necessary to have the ability to be part of the federation while still having a blocklist for specific servers, e.g. if they carry hateful or illegal content.

[ArtificialOwl]

done in alpha 2.0