Here we explore the idea of the federation as one big Git Repository. Exploring this notion can help us structure the knowledge represented in wiki, as well as plan for alternative architectures such as IPFS.
# Domains are branches
When we fork a page, we make a version that has the same title, but on another domain. We can conceive this as a version of the same file, but on a branch named after the domain.
In this way the same page may be present in many branches, and we can use the power of Git Merge Workflow to bring together versions of a page from multiple authors in a canonical or root version of the page.
There can of course be many canonical versions, and we can perhaps use tagging of to represent these.
# Hundreds of branches? In this scenario we can conceive of there being many hundred of branches of the same page. Git makes this inexpensive, but current interfaces would struggle to show this information in a presentable way.
This is where Federation Graphing can help us.
# Cloning The Federation
An author may seek to home in on a specific aspect of the federation, or produce a radical take on a region or subgraph of the global interlinked set of pages that constitutes the federation.
Here we can again see the power of git to clone the entire repository, or check out a specific folder, or series of pages (and their branches).
Using Graph Search it would be possible to automatically extract these subgraphs and create a new wiki.
Presumably this would be a clone of the federation, followed by deleting all the pages that did not match the graph search criteria.