i was pointed here because i did a feature request (https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/4851) for exposing the known pods of a Pod via the statistics.json and this obviously needs some discussion first.
I was thinking about giving the podmins the possibility to expose a list of the known pods and to choose wether they want their pod to appear on such a list.
that would create the possibility to compile a list of nearly all pods that are out there.
This would not be realized via a central hub, but everyone that would like to compile and maintain such a list could host it.
So what do you think about it?
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It’s imo not a good idea because podmins can want to hide / show their pod at any time, which means every other pods have to update the list, so it’s technically complicated to do that in a decentralized way. An official list of pods on diasporafoundation where podmins can register / unregister is way more easy to maintain, we would know that the list is always up-to-date and anyway, we only need the list there.
We would need a service that is checking the pods in the list i.e. every 12 hours if there was a change at the “expose_me” flag.
If you get no response from the pod at all -> set it to hidden
This way the information should be propagated throughout the grid in 24hrs. Or am i wrong with that?
While I’m not totally sure about whether the known pods should be in statistics.json, not really against it either.
However about the hiding. It doesn’t make any sense. There is no way a pod can hide itself from the others. It’s just not possible. A pod must be visible to other pods or there will be no communication between them. The only way to hide a pod is never set one up
So if there is a podlist in the statistics, I’d say without any kind of hide option which technically cannot be done.
I think not wanting to be discovered by automatic crawlers is a valid concern, telling other pods to be not listed in their public list of known pods is very well technically possible.
