Federation

[shazow]

Would be fun to setup message relaying between ssh-chat instances (not unlike what IRC federation tried to do, but probably closer to Matrix's approach). If #151 is a thing, federation could be on a per-room basis.

The idea here is that people can create "trusted" micro-groups. E.g. I have a digital ocean node with a whitelist of pubkeys of all my friends, no one else can access it. I can take my "trusted group" and connect it to your "trusted group" without contaminating each other (in an isolated room that both groups can access).

[anarcat]

note that the irc folks are working on a major overhaul and extension of the protocol, including authentication, backlogs and federation. your input would be very welcome here:

http://ircv3.net/

it seems to me that reinventing the federation wheel again here would be a waste of time, to say the least. ;)

[shazow]

@anarcat ssh-chat is all about reinventing wheels, but I'm very aware of the IRC protocol (I've even implemented my own IRC server but haven't gotten around to v3 extensions yet). Thanks. :)

[shazow]

Recently, some people put together a relay bot to connect multiple ssh-chat services: https://sourceforge.net/projects/sshout/

It's kinda neat, but can get noisy sometimes. (The endpoint is ssh://beijing.rivoreo.tk:6666)

Some issues that we should consider resolving natively:

• Federation opt-in (if we end up having rooms/channels, maybe on a per-room/channel level)
• A more native display of the federated messages perhaps? Maybe we need an IRC-style federated message type which renders as [email protected].
• A federation-aware tab-complete?

Neat tricks/side effects:

• Users can /ignore the federation bot which works nicely on a per-user basis (but maybe not a great default)
• You can run commands on the federation bot over PM
• Federation allows us to do low-latency SSH edge nodes, too!

[Low-power]

Recently, some people put together a relay bot to connect multiple ssh-chat services: https://sourceforge.net/projects/sshout/

Well, SSHOUT is another implementation of SSH chatroom; the relay program itself is available at https://gist.github.com/Low-power/94d2b33fc3350ef5945489b63a74651f