matrix-org / matrix-org/matrix-spec

Ability for servers (not users) to join rooms over federation (SPEC-300)

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A-S2S feature p4
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Description

Can't find the bug for this so opening one just in case it's never been filed.

There are many places we've seen where it could be useful for servers to participate in a room's federation even if none of their users are joined to the room:
- Non-member access to remote servers (peeking at message history) (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/1559)
- ~~Hyperlinking to message IDs ([ORG-26](https://matrix.org/jira/browse/ORG-26))~~ (This requires a room id anyway)
- ASes which are subscribed to events from 'remote' rooms
- Replication of rooms for HA between different homeserver clusters
- ...and probably many more.

(Imported from https://matrix.org/jira/browse/SPEC-300)

(Reported by @ara4n)

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Research direction

Start by reviewing the Matrix federation specification and the linked non-member-access issue (1559), then compare the other listed use cases, including application services and high-availability replication. Done would require an agreed specification for server participation in rooms without joined users, including the affected federation behavior and scope.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
backend-api-design, distributed-systems, networking
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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