Federate and export

Federation lets one community depend on, extend, bridge, or fork another without assigning a global authority over both.

Relationship and mapping are separate

Each dependency records:

  • the peer community record or DID;
  • follows, extends, bridges, or forked-from;
  • an optional exact release or version requirement;
  • review, follow-compatible, or pinned update policy;
  • zero or more published mapping or lens URIs.

An empty mapping list is valid. It says that a social, operational, or lineage relationship exists without claiming semantic interoperability. doctor reports this as information so operators do not confuse recognition with a working bridge.

Update policies

review brings every peer update through the local change process. follow-compatible may automate updates that the local compatibility policy accepts, though it should still record the imported release and evidence. pinned keeps an exact peer release until the community changes the manifest.

Release dependencies

Community releases copy federation dependency metadata into the signed bundle. Thus a consumer can reconstruct which peer state the release assumed. Prefer an exact digest for reproducible builds; a version range is useful for policy but does not by itself identify bytes.

Portable export

idiolect export copies material according to [exit] and writes two guideposts:

  • README.md names the community DID and the first diagnostic command;
  • export-inventory.json maps each copied relative path to a SHA-256 digest.

The inventory omits its own digest because including it would be self-referential. A selected current release may also be written as community-release.json at the export root.

Exports do not follow symbolic links, and they refuse to write into a non-empty destination. These rules prevent an apparently narrow export from reading outside the workspace or mixing new evidence with an older export.

Forking

To fork, copy the export, change the community DID and authorities, set a forked-from federation entry, and run idiolect doctor. Preserve the source release and change history unless participants have a documented reason to omit them. The new community may adopt different governance without rewriting the evidence that preceded the fork.