Question about federation

[hdkw]

Hello and thank you for your great job.
Are you considering federation for your project? In my opinion, federation is the next big step for carpooling and many other open source projects in order to stand up against the giants of the sharing economy..

[tagliala]

Hi, could you please clarify what a federation is?

[hdkw]

Hi sorry, I'm talking about having different instances of carpooling servers that are synchronized together. The social network diaspora* works that way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28social_network%29

For example, a company installs a carpooling software on its servers for its employees' commuting. A county government does the same to support carpooling in the county. If the 2 instances of the carpooling software are federated, that means they can merge and synchronize their databases together (if users wish to..).
In the end you could have a decentralized network of many instances that serve both specific needs (eg one instance is a platform dedicated to carpooling with dogs) and in total have a very large number of users.

In my opinion, without federation there is no way to escape from the centralized giants such as blablacar in europe..

[hbruch]

+1 for federation support. However, that would require a common protocol used by various ridematching providers. To my knowledge, no standard like this yet exists.

[hdkw]

Well let's hope Icare will want to be the start of such protocol! :)
No need for different providers, the mass effect would come from many different institutions, groups.. using Icare and merging some of their databases together..