decentraland / decentraland/catalyst
[Discussion] Support non allow-listed catalysts
- Dominant language
- TypeScript
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Description
## The situation today
As of today, there is a list of catalyst servers that is allow-listed by the DAO. Content servers sync with other servers on that list and only those. When a non allow-listed server starts, it will sync with whitelisted servers, but any deployments made to them will not be picked up by any other servers.
## The proposal
We could potentially change this by changing this DAO maintained list with a more dynamic list of known servers. This would imply:
1. Allowing servers to register with each other
2. Make each server expose a list of other known servers
By doing this, any new server could use the whitelisted list as a starting point to know all active servers and register with them, therefore becoming a part of the network. Then each server would sync with all servers on the network.
## The consequences
This approach would require a lot of changes to how DCL works today, but mainly:
1. We would need to change the way that the synchronization works:
A. We would probably want to announce new deployments, instead of asking for them to each known server
B. We would need to handle the lifecycle of the list of known servers
1. The explorer relies on the fact that catalyst servers all run the same version, that will no longer be possible to ensure
1. We need to enable the explorer to easily connect to other servers
1. Right now malicious servers can be simply removed from the whitelist and no client will connect to them. Maybe we would need to create a way to report servers, as a way to keep all users safe
1. We would need to have a good communication channel to announce updates, and provide support
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