Federated systems

Examples

Gmail
- A centralized service
- But if you use a different provider you can still communicate with anyone with an email address.

Protocol defining a set of “social network” interactions
Any entity implementing this protocol can communicate with the rest of the network.
The entire constellation of instances that can interoperate is called the “Fediverse”.

“restful + linked data” stack
- ActivityPub + Linked Data Notifications
- Using ActivityStreams as its core vocabulary

Protocol designed more for chat than for social networks
An open standard for real time communication, like chat and video.
For proprietary stuff, there are gateway services which allow Matrix to communicate with existing services but these do have limited functionality.
How Matrix does identity is interesting
- Users have a Matrix user id
- But can also use 3rd party ids.
- A Matrix account links to ids such as email addresses, social accounts, and phone numbers.
- A globally federated cluster of trusted identity servers verify and replicate the mappings.
They now have a P2P implementation too: Introducing P2P Matrix
FAQ | Matrix.org
What happens when a Matrix server disappears?
why not matrix? – Telegraph