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Comment by john_cogs | Hacker News Reader

Hey there,

I'm on the Community Relations team at GitLab. I'd love to learn more about your experience as a member of the GitLab community.

When you say that opening an issue on GitLab doesn't make you feel part of a community, are you referring issues on one of GitLab's projects (ex: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab) or are you referring to issues on open source projects being hosted on GitLab.com?

Community is very important to us so when there are areas for improvement that feedback is really valued.

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I think he meant just the network effects of a social platform. Github has more people in them so there are more people interacting with repositories hosted on Github.

I wish that somehow people carried identity across Github / Gitlab / Gitea / other services. Like, a federated issue tracker. Or otherwise that the issues themselves were easily movable between platforms, with no lock-in. But the incumbent platforms rarely want something like this.

An alternative is to eschew platform issues entirely, and use decentralized issue comments hosted as Git repositories, like https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue or https://github.com/neithernut/git-dit or https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug - I think that Gitlab should offer integration with one of them. I mean: both allowing to export issues and PRs into a Git branch, and allowing people to comment on issues and PRs by pushing to a Git branch.

> wish that somehow people carried identity across Github / Gitlab / Gitea / other services. Like, a federated issue tracker. Or otherwise that the issues themselves were easily movable between platforms, with no lock-in. But the incumbent platforms rarely want something like this.

This is exactly what FedeProxy is dedicated to.

https://fedeproxy.eu

I haven't seen the projects you shared. I'll take a look. Thanks.

Note that https://fedeproxy.eu is a kind of reverse proxy to cope with forges that do not want to (or don't have yet the ability to) federate issues.

Hey John, I'm sorry for answering this late. I haven't figured out a way to get notified about replies to my comments so here I am, backtracking what I have commented within the last few days. Sorry!

I'm referring to issues on open source projects hosted on GitLab.com so I think what this is about is out of your scope in some way? Also I've noticed that my initial comment is probably biased heavily by the projects I tend to follow on GitHub and GitLab. Gigantic projects (e.g. Inkscape vs. PyTorch) aren't different for me due to the active communities and after a second thought I have to admit that a lot of projects I follow and software I work with (PyTorch, Tensorflow as well as smaller ones like Potree, pyAIS, MIDI2LR) seem to live on GitHub. That's how some projects I did end up being on GitHub as well. On the other side me and my working group believe in Open Source so larger projects tend to end up on GitLab.

I'm not even sure if it helps but I didn't want to leave it "unanswered".

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