Instance Messaging Extension

Misconfigured or buggy instances often have trouble federating with others. This extension enables instances to send simple federation debug messages.

Purpose

Often, federation "fails silently" with no indication of what went wrong, as instances are incapable of communicating with each other outside of administrators manually checking logs.

For example, let's consider the following scenario:

1. joe.social and jane.org are two instances.
2. joe.social tries to fetch a user profile from jane.org, at jane.org/users/nkGEd8eI98 for example.
3. jane.org responds with a User object with a missing or incorrect field, such as an improperly validated username.
4. joe.social is incapable of processing the response and silently fails to fetch the user profile.

In this scenario, jane.org has no way of knowing what went wrong, as joe.social does not provide any feedback.

Sending Messages

To send a federation debug message, instances should make a POST request to the /.versia/v0.6/messaging endpoint with a simple text body containing a helpful message.

No signatures are required (either on the request or response), and no response body is expected.

Validation failed for https://jane.org/users/nkGEd8eI98.
Reasons:
    - `username` must be alphanumeric. Found invalid character `@`.

Do not send useless messages, such as:

Federation failed.