Hello!
This is a discussion thread for the proposed FEP-67ff: FEDERATION.md.
Please use this thread to discuss the proposed FEP and any potential problems
or improvements that can be addressed.
Summary
FEDERATION.md is a file containing information necessary for achieving interoperability with a federated service. It was originally proposed by Darius Kazemi on SocialHub forum in Documenting federation behavior in a semi-standard way? topic.
Markdown front matter can be used to present data like supported FEPs in a machine-readable format.
Automatic discovery is also possible. NodeInfo 2.1 defines software.repository field. From there, a crawler can discover FEDERATION.md file in a project root.
I think that these suggestions, especially the software.repository usage, would be good to add to the FEP. The machine-readable front matter is nice, but without some standardization of the fields, I don’t know how useful it will be.
I’m also hesitant to recommend frontmatter. NodeInfo’s metadata field is probably a better way to provide machine-readable list of software capabilities. I expect that standardization will be driven by multi-app clients such as Fedilab: Fedilab Apps: "Extra-features (disabled by default) is somewhat …" - Fedilab