Degrade third party lookups instead of failing them¶
- Status: accepted
- Date: 2026-09-06
Context and Problem Statement¶
The bare location and user third-party lookup routes fan out to every
registered application service. Any one of them may time out, refuse the
connection, or return a malformed body.
Considered Options¶
- Skip the failing appservice and aggregate what the others returned
- Turn any single failure into an error for the whole client request
Decision Outcome¶
Chosen option: "Skip the failing appservice and aggregate the rest". Aggregation degrades, never fails. Only when no appservice contributes anything does the route return 404.
A bridge being down must never turn a lookup into a 502.
Negative Consequences¶
- A client cannot distinguish "this identifier does not exist" from "the bridge that knows about it was unreachable". Both are a 404.