Federated Network
What this page covers
Stigmem federation is pull-based: each node periodically fetches new facts from registered peers using an HLC cursor. Peering is established via mutual PeerDeclaration exchange, and replication respects scope boundaries.
Audience: engineers implementing federation, deploying multi-node clusters, or reviewing Spec-05-Federation-Trust.
Network topology
Peering is pair-wise and explicit.
Node A federates with Node B, and Node B federates with Node C, but A and C have no direct peering. Facts flow A→B→C only if B's pull from A and C's pull from B both cover the relevant scope.
Handshake sequence
Scope enforcement on federation
Nodes enforce scope on both sides:
Outbound
Facts whose scope exceeds the PeerDeclaration's allowed_scopes are silently dropped.
Inbound
Facts whose scope exceeds what the peer is authorized to write are rejected and logged to the federation audit table.
Conflict on reunion
When two nodes write divergent values during a partition, both facts survive.
On reunion the receiving node detects the contradiction and creates
a conflict record (Spec-15-Fact-Semantics). Resolution is explicit
via POST /v1/conflicts/:id/resolve.