Federate private categories via ActivityPub

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A month ago, we (@thoka and @almereyda) tested the bidirectional linking of two Discourse categories via federation and were overwhelmed by how smoothly edits, posts and reactions were synchronized. It almost felt like we were working on the same Discourse. Congratulations @angus :tada:, we owe you a :cake:.

As exciting as this feels for public discussions, we were wondering if federating private categories (for example, through audience targeting) is somewhere on the roadmap?

In our view, the availability of such federated and privacy preserving discoursive infrastructure could be a game changer, enabling a myriad of use cases like shared places for working groups or (paid or unpaid) content subscription models.

Many thanks for this marvelous work.

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I’m sorry to say that this is currently not on the plugins’ roadmap. The security implications are a little bit complicated and we very much err on the side of privacy/security first, federation by definition leans public vs private.

For the next little while, we want to focus on getting the plugin to a stable state and having it be actively used in a number of instances.

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Thank you for describing your very considerable stance and for sketching this idea against your plans.

I understand the difference in complexity between public and private federation is one of orders of magnitude.

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