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matrix-doc/proposals/3020-private-federations.md

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Support for private federation networks

In an ideal world, Matrix would be one big public network, where everyone is able to communicate with everyone else. In practice, we do not live in an ideal world, and much as the Web and Email are fragmented into private intranets, we're aware of several large Matrix deployments which do not yet federate with the public internet.

Therefore, we need a way to link to content within these private federations without deep-linking to a specific client.

This MSC extends MSC2312 to propose a URI scheme extension to support linking to content within the context of a given private federation network.

Proposal

The matrix: (and matrix.to) URI scheme is extended to support the optional query parameter network. This parameter's value is a reverse-DNS identifier which indicates the private federation in which this URI is valid.

We also add a new capability m.networks to the CS /capabilities endpoint to let the server report which networks it can connect to. The value of the capability gives an array of reverse-DNS identifiers to indicate the available networks. m.internet is defined as a special case to describe the public Internet, and in the absence of the capability, the server should be assumed to support just m.internet.

For example, to indicate that a given server is able to participate in the Tchap network and a hypothetical NATO network (but not the public internet), the capability would be:

'm.networks': [
    "fr.gouv.tchap",
    "int.nato"
]

When a Matrix client consumes a matrix URI with a network parameter, it checks via the capabilities API if its current server is part of the specified network. If it isn't, then the client should handle the matrix URI as if onboarding the user for the first time as described in MSC2312 - i.e. redirecting them to the default_client (or matrix.to, if none is specified).

For instance matrix:u/matthew:somewhere.tchap.gouv.fr?network=fr.gouv.tchap&default_hs=public.tchap.gouv.fr&default_client=https://www.tchap.gouv.fr would be the right shape of uri to link into Tchap.