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In the architecture for supporting friendly name lookups, the federation docs use tunde_adebayo*your_org.com as the example of the friendly name followed by the url for the server containing the user.

How would one find the relevant url for the federation server they would be looking for? Is there a list of relevant federation servers for specific groups of people?

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The sender would first lookup for the FEDERATION_SERVER address in the stellar.toml file.

This file is hosted by the providing service and should be available for any federation server via https://YOUR_DOMAIN/.well-known/stellar.toml by protocol convention.

So in your example at https://your_org.com/.well-known/stellar.toml. The next step is the call to resolve the accountID for the address.

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  • Thanks for the response alpe, my main question is how would someone know what YOUR_DOMAIN is needed. If I want to find someone by phone number, one of many financial service providers may have the information for that specific user. It might be Chase, Bank of America, A Mobile wallet, how would a user find the right domain based on the unique identifier?
    – Brutus123
    Apr 9, 2018 at 18:24
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    You should more think of it like email. There is no central email registry. The receiver needs to tell the sender the address in some way. Either directly or by publishing it on their web page for example. Federation is like DNS for IPs but to resolve the Public Key for the given address.
    – alpe1
    Apr 9, 2018 at 20:25
  • Got it, I was hoping that there was a way to make the user experience as easy as sending an SMS message. Having to know both the unique friendly ID and the URL seem like a much worse user experience. For ubiquity, I would imagine a system that can do user lookups on a single UUID like a cell phone number would be more effective.
    – Brutus123
    Apr 10, 2018 at 1:24
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    It would not be hard to set up a federation server where you can register phone numbers for accounts. Then you can have an address with the phone number like "491712345678*myfed.com". The problem comes how to motivate people to register at this service, how to trust them that they own that number and most importantly how to trust the service owner to operate this service scalable, reliable and secure.
    – alpe1
    Apr 10, 2018 at 5:36
  • This would probably require a curated list of trust third parties. Those who are trusted to validate the identity of users. Then one could iterate through each third party and check whether or not that phone number exists there. Maybe individuals could trust a curated list in a similar fashion to how trust is distributed for consensus on the Stellar Network.
    – Brutus123
    Apr 10, 2018 at 17:47

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