Decentralized Social Network
Decentralized Social Network
Nodes can receive notifications about certain events from naming servers and other nodes. Notifications are sent through the REST API of the receiving node.
Some notifications are sent without subscribing to them — for example, the notification about mentioning your name somewhere. But most notifications require subscription.
Special measures are needed to make impossible to use the notification protocol for DoS attacks — when the attacker subscribes someone else’s site to a lot of notifications.
The subscription request must contain the registered name of the receiver and must be signed by its signing key. Only the latest generation of the name is allowed. The name in the subscription request must be node’s primary name, i.e. the name reported by the node itself.
In response to a notification, the receiver may point out that it does not want to receive further notifications about this event. So if a node receives a notification it shouldn’t receive, the node can unsubscribe from it immediately, without a separate request.
The first notification that the subscriber receives is always the subscription notification. Until the subscriber responds to this notification positively, the subscription is not considered confirmed and no other notifications of this type are sent to the subscriber.
To receive notifications, the node must always be online. If a notification cannot be delivered, the sender must put it and further notifications to a queue and retry the delivery for some period of time. If notifications cannot be delivered to the receiver for a long time, the sender may unsubscribe the receiver and remove the queue. When the receiving node comes online again after a long period of downtime, it will require a recovery process to restore the subscriptions and refresh the important data.
Big naming servers and nodes with millions of subscribers might not be able to handle the large volume of notifications they have to send. For this purpose, special notification delivery networks may be developed that use more effective algorithms of delivery.
An active client may use WebSockets to receive notifications about recent updates from the home node and the node it is viewing currently. This allows making the UI more responsive. The node begins to send these notifications when a client opens a connection to it. To handle intermittent connections, the node keeps a short queue of recent events and the client, when reconnects, reports the timestamp of the last notification it has seen.