Making Federated Networks More Distributed
Alex Auvolat · 2019
Federated networks such as Mastodon or Matrix have seen rising usage thanks to their ability to provide users with good privacy and independence from large service providers, while retaining the familiar model of server-backed websites or mobile apps with its advantages of speed, availability and ease of use. However such systems are fragile since each individual server of the federation is a single point of failure for its users. We argue that new secure distributed algorithms could be conceived and applied without changing the server-backed nature of the system, and that such a configuration would provide systemic resilience and better independence of end users from their service providers, without sacrificing privacy, availability, efficiency or ease of use.