Gitea Is Joining the Fediverse
social.gitea.io
social.gitea.io
EDIT: Apparently there's a "forge federation webinar" coming up soon: https://forum.forgefriends.org/t/forge-federation-webinar-ja...
maybe this is "web 2.5"? federation brings significant advantages from both centralized and decentralized, while not being fully either.
And even then, with federated services you still usually aren't hosting your content, that's really closer to what web 1.0 was, imo.
I guess the term is still nascent enough for it's meaning to be in flux. Hopefully good people are pushing it to align with the best tendencies
https://youtube.com/watch?v=l44z35vabvA
"turning centralized apps into decentralized protocols"
Web3 is an ethos, not a set of discrete technologies.
web 3 will come to mean whatever the next phase of the connected digital computing experience comes to be defined by
the money seems to be overwhelmingly on the "web3" cryptopia
money buys you brainpower so I would not underestimate that juggernaut
but at some point all this speculative money will seek an exit out of its zero-interest rate supersized echo chamber and into the "real economy"
Huge shout out to the forgefriends people! I've never interacted with them personally, but from reading their blog and forums, they seem to take a great care to build a human community before all and to achieve consensus with everyone involved.
[0] It's a pun because it's pushed by the APRIL non-profit, and CHATONS is a campaign started by Framasoft to deframasoftize the Internet (after their degooglize the Internet campaign had "too much" success) to promote hosting cooperatives. The contraction of the two forms "CHAPRIL", a joke a person who is not familiar with the french-speaking FLOSS/selfhosting ecosystem cannot appreciate without context.
Every independent codeberg, gitlab and gitea server (and there are more) that is running is a forge. Right now, you have to have an account on one to open issues, make pull requests, contribute in any way to code hosted on it and only it, and you need an account on each and every server you want to contribute to, even provide a bug report. This is no good, because people who like to host their own code can only frictionlessly contribute to their own code, or code hosted on their forge, or the forge they put their code on. How many people are going to create an account on gitea.bobsserver.biz just to put a bug report in for an annoyance in some app they use?
This is why github has a near monopoly in this space, everyone can contribute with a github account. To decentralize this, I need to be able to put a PR in your project hosted on your forge using the account I have on my forge. This is what ForgeFed does, it is an extension of ActivityPub to enable federation of forges.
However I'm still happy to see this decentralized identity and ActivityPub integration. I hope it catches on more.
Please put this explanation on one of the webpages explaining the aims this project.
It's a good goal, b/c at the moment you only have "Login with Google" or "Login with Github (ie. M$)". But I hope the ultimate solution isn't compartmentalized to source code management
Maybe I'm not seeing some aspect which ties the two together?
Federation is useful since it defines a portable standard for those things.
If you have an account on federated forge site A, you can use it to file bugs (via the forge A UI) against a project on federated forge site B.
Both websites UI will show the bug and any comments on it - data will be replicated.
In practice, there'll likely be complexities around EG moderation (particularly for larger projects making controversial decisions), replication occasionally losing data due to intermittent faults, etc. IMO those technical reasons are less likely to sink the project than inertia is; people are already using github.
What's basically going on is that a project to extend ActivityPub (the protocol that Mastodon, Pleroma, Peertube, Lemmy, etc use to federate with one another) has a proposed extension called ForgeFed to enable more interaction types so as to allow code forges to federate with one another. There have been a few projects slated to implement it once the spec is finalized, gitea being one of those projects.
What a closed source application implies is: I want to get access to all these people in the fediverse, yet I am not willing to do anything to give back for that. To me that sounds like a bad deal, for any self-titled "experts" out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
> The Fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other.
Usually they talk about ActivityPub, as a growing number of services are based on this (or similar).
Which I suppose it not entirely wrong when considering some of the stuff on Mastodon.
It's still a bad name though.
It's a shame because I'm really, really excited about a Renaissance of the federated web.
I'll chalk it up to poor understanding of social power structures.
That's not a better/worse value judgment -- just pointing out that some folks make the mistake of believing otherwise.
As far as value judgments go though, I've long been saying that the current model for the internet is crushing us; that collectively as a society we should get together and abolish the use and creation of social networking sites (the same way qualuudes don't exist today); and that "skin in the game" should be required for online services -- no more "free" stuff where the product is actually the user. I will gladly pay for an email account that isn't mining my data, or a search engine that's actually useful, etc.
at least it sounds good in French.
MS/github may successfully keep this from gaining popularity through the usual means, but to me this is huge and should be huge.
If the interoperability mechanism is open, maybe gitlab can join it. That might have some decent effect.
3d printing needs this same thing. Or rather than some new federated thingiverse, existing git front-ends in general really only need just a little bit extra and they could support open hardware as well as they currently support software and even better than current hardware design sites. It's really just down to presentation. You can almost do it now in existing github. It has a 3d model renderer that can be embedded in your readme and even a stl diff viewer.
(Though, I consider stl's as compiled output and placed in release assets, not source, so an stl diff viewer essentially doesn't apply. I guess that exposes the problem right there. A code diff viewer is practical because the code itself is directly viewable and meaningful to a human. The source files of most cad and pcb apps is not, so you'd need 100 different renderers of 100 different commercial products to display meaningful diffs)
Github is a social site foremost, a repo host second.
Makes a lot of sense for competitors to be in the Fediverse.
Hopefully EU regulators will take the same view if the Digital Markets Act becomes law.
"Interoperability measures were another major addition to the Parliament’s text, requiring social media and messaging apps to communicate with each other."
https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/eu-parliament-...
Or maybe not. Maybe code hosts and forges should just be code hosts and forges and I don't think embracing github's model is a good idea.
Edit: I wish cooperability between forges was easier, I just don't like the "becoming a social site" part of the idea
A big part of FOSS is community contribution. This is social in nature, fundamentally. So forges are already social in the sense that many people can contribute with bug reports, PRs, comments on issues, forking, merges, etc. These forges wouldn't be becoming more social, they're already social, all that's changing is they won't be islands anymore.
They're not providers, although gitlab and sourcehut do offer code hosting services, and I'm sure some people are offering paid access to services they host with some of this software.
Over time it'll become clear if some are unreliable or have other issues. When that happens you'll be glad for the diversification.
This whole evolution reminds me of the early web, which was often a thin veneer for multiple ftp mirror sites. This makes me happy :)
Drew's head is in the right place and nowadays that matters to me for service providers more than anything.
But they received a 50k grant to implement zero trust.
https://forum.forgefriends.org/t/nlnet-grant-application-for...
Is that the same? ( Funding = grant?). From my POV it's money to do something, in this case implement zero trust, no?
https://forgefriends.org/blog/2021/11/22/what-is-forgefriend...
There should probably be a way to merge project lists on various forges into a potentially huge index that can be browsed and searched, independently of each particular forge. Maybe it already exists?
Nowadays, with over 90% of the search run by Google, it does not matter much. Discoverability is whatever Google decides it is. But this is not desirable and more importantly it should not considered to be a solution to the discoverability problem. On the contrary dominance of Google is the main problem of discoverability and the only way to solve it is to provide sound alternatives.
What an awesome search-engine food that could be.
To really rake things to the next step, we need public key addressing. Ubiquitous adoption of IPv6 would suffice, but public key addressing would be better. Either way, using a domain as a permanent identifier is a fragile and brittle.
Another big problem with AP is that the spec is extensible in ill defined ways while being designed with current social UX in mind, thus counterintuitively making it needlessly restrictive. So there are interoperation problems with different server software that implement the spec differently (look at federating servers like peertube, Lemmy and mastodon, while possible, it is clanky), meanwhile it has to be modified to support ForgeFed (which is what gitea will be using to federate forges).
Perhaps your argument is around DNS spoofing or something but domain names feel pretty non-controversial for most usecases, especially for the fediverse, which is about federation. There's an expectation of multiple multi-user services being the norm!
It is a brittle point of failure in activitypub.
I think I understand better what you’re saying though
And please don't tell me it is open source software and I can contribute something, like I have time for that. Just take my money and shut up instead of, you know, using my tax money for stuff I don't care about. Thanks for listing to my TED talk.
As for the logo, the line in the middle is the "string" for the tea bag. It is a different size because the actual logo is not part of the string, so the distinction must be made.
> This is woke IT, as long as it is decentralised it is somehow better than other software no matter how crapy the UX.
As someone who has used Gitea in the past, it is wonderful for it's goal of running a Git server with a webUI. Don't knock it until you've tried it.
> And please don't tell me it is open source software and I can contribute something, like I have time for that. Just take my money and shut up instead of, you know, using my tax money for stuff I don't care about. Thanks for listing to my TED talk.
If you're not willing to work toward fixing something, then stop complaining about it.
TENACIOUS: Trustworthy sEmaNtic Aware marketplaCe for Interoperable clOUd Services
What does that to do with the rest of your message?
If anything as a EU citizen you should want to have alternatives that aren't chained to big non-EU companies.
> as long as it is decentralised it is somehow better than other software
It is like Free Software, for many the fact that it is Free/decentralized is what makes it better.
This also sounds like a misallocation of resources - because you know, we won't