At least 2 separate Haveno networks have launched as of today. One is called Reto and the other is called HardenedSteel. Those are the only ones I’m aware of right now, and things are happening pretty fast.
The haveno software was designed with the assumption that only a single network would be operated. People could fork it and run their own networks, but they wouldn’t interact directly at all. But it looks to me as of this moment this is not how it is going to play out.
The client has the network info hard coded. So to use more than one, you need two copies of the client. This means that for most people they have to pick one. And, users might not understand this, just google “haveno” and pull the first git repo they see. This has significant, fast moving and quickly ossifying network effects with big repercussions.
We need to be very vigilant right now, as we are about to witness the very swift rise of a major power broker in our community. We don’t want to start using a Haveno network run by scammers or authoritarians. Each network is it’s arbitrators, and soon, the merchants on each one.
I think it’s probably a good idea to figure out a way to connect to multiple networks, and to show listings with details about which network/arbitrator set a user is trusting when taking up a listing.
I’m cautiously optimistic, Monero has gotten rid of powerful people without a hitch before. But it is a bigger community now and that will be much harder to do. If we are vigilant during this time and we get through this successfully I think we become unbeatable, but the road directly ahead of us is treacherous, the next few days are going to move very fast.
It’s peer to peer, no servers, so federation isn’t an option, nor is it something you need here.
Federation in general is a bad idea. It is prone to network fragmentation and is not censorship resistant.
What you’re looking for is simply the ability to communicate on multiple configured networks. They’re still peer to peer, but each has their own listings and arbitrator set. That’s something I think is a good idea, although I’d defer to Haveno developers if that’s a good idea because I’m not all that familiar with the network architecture.