Federation with other ryot instances

[kaibagley]

Hey, was thinking it would be cool to have federation between instances so that people who prefer to run ryot on their own hardware can still see the reviews etc. of others. I didn't see any other mentions of this in issues, but I still made it a discussion in case it is not within scope of the project.

Thanks!

[IgnisDa]

Wont this require a centralized server that can keep track of other Ryot servers running. THat would defeat the purpose of self hosting, no?

[cairobraga]

federation protocols such as ActivityPub are completely P2P and decentralized, wouldn't something like that (or AP itself) be possible?

[kaibagley]

I don't know how it works, but Nextcloud has a federation feature which doesn't seem like it needs a third party. But yeah if it requires a third party then it would defeat the purpose.

[StoffelCPR]

This is technically possible and a Protocol like ActivityPub wouldn't need a centralized instance. Through a few technical steps they basically find peers and "connect" to share information, this largely creates a danger for accidental DoS since the network might block someone with who doesn't have a powerful server and can't handle a huge amount of Discovery.

In addition there's a few open discovery lists that can be leveraged to find willing peers to share information.

IMHO this is a neat addition but takes EXTREME CAUTION. We are talking about GDPR and Privacy infringements here. This would need careful planning and opt-in features with proper permission setting to decide which information are to be going in and out.

You could also build a "pro" feature and instead of a decentralized network indeed have people opt-in to "share" media reviews through an IgnisDa owned server/cluster.

Both are viable and probably add some good value but would ultimately aim for a Network service to be implemented and maintained rather than being a simple feature.

Another wild idea would be to find review services for specific media e.g. Video Games -> There's an open issue for connecting Video games to "at least" Steam and maybe more to track achievements, progress and reviews. Instead of building a P2P decentralized information sharing (or rather implementing an open standard for it) you could add your ideas for the specific media and add features for that -> Allow importing/exporting (automatically) reviews from Movie databases; Steam; Book websites; Favoured Shops; etc. (Probably more friendly for the maintainer @IgnisDa, as he is mostly stemming the work alone -> More implementers would make an implementation of a decentralized information sharing protocol extremely cool as an opt-in feature but IMHO it's a hell of a lot extra to currently implement)