- a backlink is a dictionary (that could be represented as JSON to be human-readable) containing a key
target
with the hash of the object it is about. Other fields are not necessarily fixed. The object size must be small enough (to fit in a UDP packet). - to publish a link, the author must regularly send an advertise message to all nodes that store the target. Nodes are supposed to accept or refuse to store the link. But if they refuse to store a link to a specific object, they must also refuse all other links for this object. If the link is malformed (they don't have the object referenced by
target
), nodes can reject it safely. - to query a link about a target, a node must query the owner of the target for links about it. If no links are returned, the node must query other nodes having the target until one node having a link is found. Then the search can then stop.
Notes:
- when querying links about an object we