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Add 'One Pager: Managed Groups ( A Roadmap towards Hybrid Groups)'

Sarah Jamie Lewis 2022-04-25 22:19:57 +00:00
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One-Pager%3A-Managed-Groups-%28-A-Roadmap-towards-Hybrid-Groups%29.md Normal file

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# **DRAFT**
The vision for hybrid groups is to allow groups to determine their own infrastructure - whether that is an always-on bot, an untrusted server, or a fully p2p shared experience.
As a bridge between pervasive hybrid groups and the current legacy groups setup we propose a roadmap towards "Managed Groups".
## Goal 1: Prototype Bot Group Management
High level: A Bot that is responsible for maintainence of a group. This includes managing a member list (adding, removing members) and pushing out new keys to members when those members change (or at predetermined points). This has the follow benefits over existing legacy groups:
* forward secrecy
* member management
This does introduce a trust concentration in the bot operator as they do have the power to send different keys to different members, and thus could artificially split the group. This can be counteracted using the existing protections in legacy groups where messages reference the group id which is bound to the current group key and hosting server.
This work can mostly take place outside of Cwtch and only requires a few small integrations to be usable as an initial experiment, namely:
* a new overlay message *group update* to allow clients to automatically process messages from a bot
* a way to hide bots from the contact list
* additional data recorded in the group invite and in the group database entry that associates a bot with the permissions to update certain attributes (like the key)
## Goal 2: Integrated Group Management
Once Goal 1 has been tested we should have a fairly good idea of the UX necessary to bring an integrated experience to group management. This would involve bringing the bot inside of Cwtch and allowing access to its management functions from within the UI. This UI could include screens to:
* view, add and remove memebers
* allocate fine-grained permissions to members (read / write)
* move the group to a different server
This work takes place mostly inside of Cwtch UI building out interfaces for interacting the the flows realized by Goal 1, and integrating the bot code (or reimplementing it in Cwtch itself).
## Goal 3: Bot Hosted Groups
In between or alongside Goal 1 and Goal 2 we also have the option of allowing the entity doing group management to also host the group. This would effectively be a merger of the server code and the group management code - extending the trust of the bot over an entire server.
This server could be permissioned to allow the bot to only store messages from given members (or only show messages to certain members) - allowing for some groups to opt for greater efficiency.
This also necessitates building APIs to realize the ultimate goal of hybrid groups - peer-hosted groups e.g.:
* `FetchNewMessagesForGroup`
* `RelayMessageToGroup`
In designing those APIs we should ensure that they are also suitable for direct p2p interaction with group members, allowing for the next step.
## Goal 4: Shared Peer Hosting
Once the APIs from Goal 3 is in place, there is little reason why the bot should shoulder the complete burden for hosting a group. Peers themselves can take part in relaying messages when they are online.
At some point the line between bot and peer merges and we are left with a large part of hybrid groups.