How does the Fedi app choose my guardians?

When creating a Manifold federation, you choose how many guardians you'd like, and the Fedi app assembles the set. To do so, the app reads the public registry where guardian hosts advertise their available guardian seats – along with what they charge per seat & their trust credentials (signed peer badges).

Only hosts that hold valid credentials – a Trusted level badge signed by a key the app trusts – are considered. In the Fedi app's implementation of Manifold, the only signer keys trusted by the app are those held by the members of the Fedi Order, Fedi's field operations team. You can read more about this here.

The Fedi app also automatically spreads your guardian servers across different hosts, so that no single host is running more than just one guardian server for your federation. The app also favors spreading servers across geographically distributed hosts whose badges are signed by different signer keys.

Among those remaining at this point in the filtering process, the app selects hosts based on lowest price per seat and confirmed spare capacity, alternating between equally favorable candidates vs always choosing the same ones. Once a set is determined, you see the result before paying anything. 

Keep in mind that setup price quotes expire after 2 minutes, and hosts can become unavailable before setup is complete. If that happens, the Fedi app looks for a replacement and asks you to approve the new set before proceeding. Any payments that mistakenly went to unavailable hosts are recovered.

In the event that Fedi cannot fill a desired large guardian set, the app will indicate as such and will suggest trying with a smaller set. As the Manifold protocol gains traction, we expect the network of available & qualified guardian hosts to grow in turn – making larger guardian sets possible over time.