Federated server

Trusted Codes does not have to run on one company’s servers. An organisation can run its own — a node — on its own machine, under its own domain, and the people with accounts on it hold their identity there.

A node is the complete backend: the database, the sign-in service, the business logic, the storage. It carries the same schema and the same code as the servers trusted.codes Inc. runs. It is backend-only. The clients are the mobile app, the desktop companion and MCP; there is no separate web client to install.

Nodes that trust each other form a mesh. Somebody on your node can connect to, invite and verify somebody on another node, and neither person has to move.

Why Run One

You run a node when where the data sits matters more than convenience.

Everything your members do stays on your machine: their accounts, their connections, their codewords, their vaults. You choose the country. You choose the backup. Nobody else can read the database, because nobody else has it.

You also decide who may hold an account there. A node can be open, invitation only, or closed to new accounts altogether.

What It Changes for Your Members

Very little, and that is deliberate.

They use the same mobile app. They sign in against your domain instead of app.trusted.codes. Connections, codewords, groups and verification work the way they do everywhere else — including with people whose accounts live on a different server.

Their address becomes a handle at your server, in the form name@your-domain. That is how a person on another node finds them.

What It Does Not Change

A node is not a private fork. It runs the same schema and the same handlers, and it is expected to stay current with them.

It also does not make your node an island by default. A node that has been admitted to the mesh answers requests from every other admitted node. If you do not want that, the inbound surfaces can be turned off — see What crosses between servers for what those surfaces are.

Two things do not move to your node: billing, and mobile push credentials. Both stay central. What stays central explains why, and what that means in practice.

Where to Go Next

• What crosses between servers — the data that travels, and the data that never does.
• Trust and admission — how one node comes to accept another.
• Across two servers — what a person on one node can and cannot do with a person on another.
• What stays central — the parts that are not yours to run.

Installing a node is a separate matter. See Installing a node.