Friend of a Friend System

Created: 2023-03-14T07:14:40-05:00

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• Ring List
• Whitelist of people who are allowed access to the resource.
• A ring can be annotated as *closed* meaning it cannot issue vouchers for anyone.
• Algorithm
• An incoming ring which is blacklisted is immediately rejected.
• If the ring is *in the ring list* (whitelisted) it is accepted.
• If the ring is not in the ring list or blacklisted then any members of the ring list who are not *closed* are queried if they are willing to vouch for this person.
• Rings decide if they vouch for the incoming ring. They may opt to enforce their own policy here. Meaning the ring has friends in different "circles" to represent friend groups and then a subset of those circles is selected as approved for a particular play space. Your Minecraft friends might not get along with your Supreme Commander friends etc.
• Concerns
• Scaling with larger servers since every ring has to be queried.
• Have all the identity done by a big service (ex. the game author) so the community doesn't have to.
• Let rings post a list of other rings they vouch for so a server can check it locally
• Exposes contact details (though there might be some fancy crypto magic around this)
• Have the person joining pre-arrange the voucher with the ring they are joining through. Offloads the work to just between the rings and can be hidden via an "invite to play" UX.