ForgeFed

This is something federation could help with: you would be able to use your account on, say, Codeberg to make issues on all self-hosted instances. Sadly, it’s still not in a great shape: https://forgefed.org/ (As a fallback, why not email the maintainers instead?)

Yes, my first thought is - doesn't this allow other sites to interoperate with Gitlab without asking Gitlab? Like Gitea can implement this and now we can do PRs back and forth? That's fantastic, exactly what the internet is for and the sort of thing we need more of. edit - learned about https://forgefed.org/ from a sibling thread, great stuff.

Going through that link... that sounds great, thanks! In the discussion I also read about ForgeFed[0], also ActivityPub based, and which Forego is apparently implementing[1]. [0]: https://forgefed.org [1]: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59

If you don't mind me asking since you're here: will you be implementing ForgeFed in Gitness [0]? My sense is that federation is our best hope for breaking GitHub's network effects, and I'd love to see more projects like yours join the protocol. [0] https://forgefed.org/

> I agree that e-mail is not perfect, but... how is GitHub better? Please look at my comment again. I prefer email to locked in forges. > Devs like new shiny toys, and e-mails are old technology There is one aspect where such forges have an advantage over email - a better user experience. Aerc and the likes all good - but Github and others provide a good user experience over a tool that everyone uses - the web browser. > we should have something better than e-mail in 2023 We really should have something better than email. I'm saying this as someone who operates a personal mail server and a bunch of desktop services for it. It's really hard to get the setup correct. In that context, it's worth looking at forgefed (https://forgefed.org/). It's a protocol for federating forges like Gitea and Gitlab. It's built on top of ActivityPub - which behaves a bit like email (it has inboxes and outboxes for every user). From the spec, it seems like pull requests happen by sending patches to the destination forge. > Nobody takes the time to try the e-mail workflow (even though it's really two git commands) Email workflow seems simple. But there are two things that make it complicated: 1. The patches don't specify the commits they apply to. It's simply assumed that they apply to the head of the main branch. The commits have to be carefully rebased on the main branch before sending the patches. It could otherwise lead to conflicts and a lot of wasted time. 2. Each commit/patch is…

I remember there's at least one serious effort for forge federation. But don't know what it's called or how to search for it. Edit: here's one: https://forgefed.org/

Radicle uses its own P2P protocol - Gossip. Indeed, Tangled uses the same protocol as Bluesky - ATProto. https://forgefed.org, on the other hand, is based on the ActivityPub protocol.

Forgejo is mentioned, but its federation goals aren't. I guess the author isn't aware of them. https://forgefed.org/

I'm way more hopeful in a fully decentralized protocol like Forgefed* than some AT still-centralized thing. * https://forgefed.org/

It doesn't even seem to mention federation over/with git and/or ForgeFed (https://forgefed.org/), both efforts predate both atproto and Tangled, and seems like a bigger miss considering the article is literally about git forges.

I really like forgejo. I selfhosted it too, but then I go back to codeberg. Probably I will selfhosted it again. I really want a descentralized internet and https://forgefed.org/ gives me hope.

Forgejo is working on federation powered by ActivityPub and their ForgeFed extension: https://forgefed.org

I think both gitlab and forgejo are working on federation. https://forgefed.org/

afaik Forgejo is working on integrating it: - https://forgejo.org/faq/#is-there-a-roadmap-for-forgejo - https://forgefed.org/

Actually, they want to implement federation using forgefed [1] into forgejo, the underlying software. [1] https://forgefed.org/

There is an ActivityPub protocol extension that is specific to federation of code forges, called ForgeFed. It is an NLnet funded project, that receives funding through EU Next Generation Internet programs. But the project is struggling, because of a lack of community help and implementers giving feedback to help steer and mature the specs. https://forgefed.org

there's https://forgefed.org/ defined by the creators of forgejo. there is no complete implementation of the spec. from the last forgejo changelog, the "star" action has been completely federated. federated PRs and issues are a long way away. https://tangled.sh is the other contender in this space that I know of. uses atproto (same as bluesky) under the hood. fundamentally activitypub is insufficient to define these kind of networks. you'd need to have some sort of object-capability representation. the creators of forgefed are also moving in this direction: https://codeberg.org/Playwright/playwright

Forgejo is implementing ForgeFed [1], which is an AP extension that supports creating PRs, issues, etc. across instances. [1] https://forgefed.org/

not p2p, but federated: https://forgefed.org (ActivityPub extension) I believe Gitea has support for it, not sure to what extent.

Yeah I have to disagree. I even host my own GitLab (because I heavily prefer its CI/CD over GitHub's Actions), but if I wanted to contribute to your project, I'm far more likely to do it on GitHub than to convince myself to create yet another GitLab account on like the sixth instance. Until alternatives finally implement something like ForgeFed (https://forgefed.org/) which would allow me to simply contribute with something like @[email protected], I'm gonna continue preferring GitHub for my public contributions and still use GitLab privately.

One of the problems of self-hosted forges is that spontaneous collaboration is cumbersome, because you need to keep track of your accounts across different self-hosted forges. Some people are working on https://forgefed.org/ to make this less of an issue, but Radicle is a different approach, where the entire repository ecosystem becomes distributed and people identify themselves with cryptographic identifiers to interact with the network as a whole instead of individual forges.

answer to which the standard response that _led_ to "code forge" being a word, is: ok but what about all the stuff that isn't just "git on the network"? Pull requests, basic tickets, eventually some of the CI... Or framed differently: "What category of software would you describe Github as?" For all of this, the answer the community came together to find is ... Code Forge. One extra resource on it: ForgeFed[1], which describes itself as: > ForgeFed is a federation protocol for software forges and code collaboration tools for the software development lifecycle and ecosystem. This includes repository hosting websites, issue trackers, code review applications, and more. ForgeFed provides a common substrate for people to create interoperable code collaboration websites and applications. [1]: https://forgefed.org/

Forgejo is pretty neat. They’re developing https://forgefed.org/ , which is an ActivityPub extension for software forges. If it works, it’ll extend the decentralized nature of git to issues, pull requests, etc.

check out https://forgefed.org/ > ForgeFed is an upcoming federation protocol for enabling interoperability between version control services. It’s built as an extension to the ActivityPub protocol, allowing users of any ForgeFed-compliant service to interact with the repositories hosted on other instances.

A forge run by a nonprofit is better than a forge run by Microsoft or another for-profit corp but I think the ideal would be having projects host their own code with federation between the different hosts to make contributions from "external" users easy. Thankfully there is ongoing work towards that goal: https://forgefed.org/

Of course: https://forgefed.org/

ForgeFed sounds promising: https://forgefed.org/

Surprised no one mentioned ForgeFed [0]: > ForgeFed is a federation protocol for software forges and code collaboration tools for the software development lifecycle and ecosystem. This includes repository hosting websites, issue trackers, code review applications, and more. ForgeFed provides a common substrate for people to create interoperable code collaboration websites and applications. It's based on ActivityPub [1], the same protocol that powers Mastodon [2], Lemmy [3], and Pixelfed [4]. [0] https://forgefed.org/ [1] https://activitypub.rocks/ [2] https://joinmastodon.org/ [3] https://join-lemmy.org/ [4] https://pixelfed.org/

Some alternative forge are built with decentralization in mind: - forgejo [1] is working on ForgeFed [2], an extension of ActivityPub (the protocol made popular by Mastodon) - tangled is built on top of ATproto (the protocol behind Bluesky) [3] - radicle is rolling their own protocol, more peer-to-peer than federated [4] - fossil is a broader all-in-one solution: not only a new Version Control System (a replacement for git), but also a forge (has the features of a forge: issues (bug-tracking), PRs, comments, wikis, ...) [5] The other self-hosted forges such as gitlab, sourcehut, gitea don't have such a high level of decentralization and resilience. It does not make them less good, they are solving different problems, mainly being a easy-to-use self-hosted alternative to proprietary forges. For instance Gitea has Gitea Actions, which is designed to be compatible with GitHub Actions [6], while I don't think running CI/CD workflow in a decentralized way will the priority of projects like tangled or radicle. [1] https://forgejo.org/faq/#is-there-a-roadmap-for-forgejo [2] https://forgefed.org/ [3] https://tangled.org/ [4] https://radicle.dev/guides/protocol#federation-vs-peer-to-peer [5] https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki [6] https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/overview