Comment by rqs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rqs | Hacker News Reader

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Yes yes yes, federation is needed.

People on GitHub is not just to sharing codes, but also to get in touch with each others. GitHub succeed because it's not only just a free online Git repo services, but also a developer + user community where you can put your code on, share it, and 'earn' stars & forks as feedback. And stars + forks can help you stand out in a job interview and many other occasions.

Bitbucket is another Git repo service, but it sort of failed to build it's community. Result? It received less attentions compare GitHub.

So, while GitLab is also trying to be 'yet-another' Git repo + you can host it on your own, the benefits of become community can't be ignored. And federation can help that by connecting all the GitLab instances together to form a bigger and global community.

Even better, the federation protocol itself can be an open-sourced public standard, so all the other Git repo software can implement that in their product. The potential is huge.

Unlike GitHub though Atlassian isn't just working on GitHub but many other tools for developers. This includes JIRA, Confluence and so on. GitHub is mostly focused on repositories. This is why devs had to write a letter to GitHub to tell them hey can you guys seriously work on the Issues system? With the resources of Microsoft it will not surprise me to see a much more open and capable GitHub.

Except that Atlassian aren't really working on Bitbucket any more. There's lots of issues with the system that are not being resolved. Last time I had a problem with Bitbucket I found they had known about it for months and done nothing, with no plan to do anything either.

But then, as I understand it, Bitbucket was an acquisition rather than a brainchild of the Atlassian team, so you can expect a certain amount of neglect.

An omen for github?

Atlassian has a lot of people working hard on Bitbucket. They shipped pipelines, deployments, code aware search, new UI, git lfs, embedded Trello and a lot more while improving uptime and performance, getting soc2 type 2 certified and a massive amount of other stuff.

They might not be working on the bits you care about, but they're definitely working on it. I agree, a few more resources should be invested by companies to fixing bugs and not just adding new features instead.

> With the resources of Microsoft it will not surprise me to see a much more open and capable GitHub.

Devil's advocate: why would Microsoft invest in improving, say, the issues functionality of GitHub when it could instead integrate and push users towards its existing products and tools for project management, like SharePoint?

Because they develop some of their core open source products right on top of GitHub. Visual Studio Code, .NET Core (and dozens of core libraries for .NET / .NET Core) as well as the less popular things they work on in the open.

See their GitHub for more:

https://github.com/Microsoft

Also their focus is now on developers. They made VS Code completely free, MIT Licensed and not for themselves, but for developers.

Yes, beacuse they we're losing out as web development exploded, and realized no one wanted to pay for an editor when there we so many great free alternatives. They did it out of necessity, not out of innovation. Just like everything they do when it comes to their "open source movement"

I think this needs to go even further. If federation is done using an open standard like ActivityPub, then any services using the protocol would be able to federate. At that point it wouldn't matter what people are running, they'd all be able to talk to each other.

I've been reading into Activity Pub over the last week, and I don't think this would really be the case, (but I'm happy to be wrong).

For example, if a Gitlab instance posts a Pull Request object over to a Mastodon instance, what is the latter supposed to do with that? presumably it won't have any UI widgets to display the content, and no way of acting on it semantically.

As far as I can tell, Activity Pub is a way of federating instances of the same application, with the same semantics. But on the internet I'm seeing some dialogue which seems to presume that AP would make it possible to federate instances of all sorts of different applications and have them all Just Work™

(Apologies if I've misunderstood your post, I'm kinda rambling at this point)

ActivityPub is a very loose spec, and obviously it doesn't just magically work across random services. You would have to implement support for the specific types of notifications for them to be meaningful. An example of this is PeerTube federation with Mastdon as seen here https://peertube.cpy.re/videos/watch/da2b08d4-a242-4170-b32a...

For example, GitLab projects could publish their activity feed to Mastdon. You could follow it to see what commits they make, issue discussions, and so on. Meanwhile, federating things like pull requests would happen across Git based services. So, if Gogs decides to implement compatible ActivityPub protocol, then it could integrate into the federation of GitLab servers.

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