12 ms·

Gitea Is Joining the Fediverse

169 points by nafnlj 5y ago

hunterb123 5y ago
This is actually a great idea. Github is a social site foremost, a repo host second. Makes a lot of sense for competitors to be in the Fediverse.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > Github is a social site foremost, a repo host second. 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-adopts-regulation-targeting-internet-giants/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/eu-parliament-...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- turminal 5y ago
  > Makes a lot of sense for competitors to be in the Fediverse. 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
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    "Becoming a social site" is easily taken the wrong way, it doesn't mean "becoming like facebook." 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.
  - indigochill 5y ago
    Maybe cooperability is already a solved problem? As I understand, Linux kernel changes are managed entirely by text-only email, and email is of course entirely forge-agnostic.
    - dachary 5y ago
      Yes, it is solved in this particular context: Linux kernel, Qemu and all Free Software projects that have a mail based workflow. But there are other contexts where Free Software developers chose a different workflow such as using a forge. Whatever the reasons, this is where we are now. There are two paths forward: a) convince people using forges to switch to a mail based workflow, b) federate forges. I believe SourceHut and many other do a fine job trying to convince people to switch to a mail based workflow. The https://forgefriends.org https://forgefriends.org and https://gitea.io https://gitea.io projects chose to try to federate forges. It's not a competition, there is value in both approaches and they will apparently move forward in parallel for the foreseeable future.
Brian_K_White 5y ago
Does this mean you will be able to fork, pr, browse history/diffs, and network graph across sites? 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)
grouphugs 5y ago
traspler 5y ago
This will only provide user accounts that work over all gitea instances, right? Or is there something else a federated git can provide?
- riffic 5y ago
  I believe this is being hashed out by the Forgefriends working group: https://forgefriends.org/blog/2021/11/22/what-is-forgefriends/ https://forgefriends.org/blog/2021/11/22/what-is-forgefriend...
  - bluefox 5y ago
    This sounds good, but what about discoverability? 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?
    - dachary 5y ago
      Federating software projects so they can be interacted with from any forge frontend is the main focus. But federating the search engines internal to each forge is another important aspect. When federated search becomes a reality, looking for a project B on forge A will give an answer even when it is hosted on forge B. 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.
      - streamofdigits 5y ago
        imho the fediverse will have to come to be much more than social media type exchange of messages via activitypub. federated search is a major additional pillar that is currently largely absent (and is technically very different)
gnabgib 5y ago
This seriously needs some content. They were accepted to a funding round for an unspecified reason, with a link to a page with the statement "The project summary for this project is not yet available. Please come back soon!"
- southerntofu 5y ago
  You should probably check out forgefriends.org. There's detailed monthly reports on what they're doing and why. They started cooperating with gitea because the maintainers were open to the idea of federation (most other forges were not interested) and some french FLOSS NGO (chapril.org [0]) was happy to let them experiment in exchange for maintenance for their forging infra (already based on gitea). 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.
  - recursive 5y ago
    Feels a bit like trying to unravel web3 or category theory. I went to forgefriends.org. It's all about forges. Forge-this, forge-that. So like, what's a forge?
    - sjtindell 5y ago
      I went to the site and the second line on the page says “Because most Free Software projects are hosted on proprietary forges (for example GitHub)”. So code storage and collaboration.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      Github is a forge. Sourceforge is a forge. 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.
southerntofu 5y ago
That's amazing! The forgefriends community (previously fedeproxy) is doing a tremendous job to push for federated forging and break the Github monopoly. Shameless plug for a lengthy read on why that's an important issue: https://staticadventures.netlib.re/blog/decentralized-forge/ https://staticadventures.netlib.re/blog/decentralized-forge/ EDIT: Apparently there's a "forge federation webinar" coming up soon: https://forum.forgefriends.org/t/forge-federation-webinar-january-19th-2022-10am-noon-utc-1/538 https://forum.forgefriends.org/t/forge-federation-webinar-ja...
rkagerer 5y ago
Can someone describe the lingo 'fediverse'? I can hazard a guess but don't want to make assumptions.
- remram 5y ago
  It refers to the domains federating via the ActivityPub protocol. Software or deployments of software able to talk to each other via ActivityPub are referred to as the Fediverse.
- miduil 5y ago
  Just to quote Wikipedia as it reflects what fediverse means quite well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse 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).
  - boardwaalk 5y ago
    I honestly thought it had something to do with a fetish community up until now. Which I suppose it not entirely wrong when considering some of the stuff on Mastodon. It's still a bad name though.
    - zksmk 5y ago
      I was honestly confused for a second why would you think the name had anything to do with a fetish (minus some mastodon content) until I realized you saw it as fe-diverse and not fedi-verse. I never saw it that way because I pronounce the "i" in it as "ee", not as "ay". I wonder what's more common now. Is this another gif/jif situation?
    - mariusor 5y ago
      Apologies for the negativity, I'm feeling excessively bitchy at the moment, but how about you improve your reading comprehension instead of having bad takes at other people's naming efforts?
wrnr 5y ago
Good for them, but I (as a EU citizen) don't care about projects like this. It is a soulless copy-cat of a much more famous, profitable, free and useful project. Just look at the logo, what is that line in the middle and why is its stroke with bigger then the other stock icon embedded in the icon. I know I'm knitpicking but it says something about the character of the project and NLnet. This is woke IT, as long as it is decentralised it is somehow better than other software no matter how crapy the UX. 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.
- smbv 5y ago
  Is it really soulless? It seems like it solves a real problem: many Gitea instances are very small. The devs are passionate about their work and they are all working toward improving the software. So what if it's a copycat? GitHub could be argued to be a copycat of SourceForge. Gitea/forgefriends offers new features and improvements over GitHub. Gitea is as useful as GitHub for hosting a git repo with a web interface, but the federation aspect makes Gitea also a social site (much like GitHub). 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.
  - wrnr 5y ago
    This is miss allocation of resources, complaining about it is the least and only I can do.
    - 5y ago
Barrin92 5y ago
Worth pointing out that activitypub, the fediverse etc are the actual 'web3' decentralized systems people seem to be so hyped about, with the added advantage that they run on normal, fast computers and not on the equivalent of a car driving with the breaks pulled so someone can mine coins.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  Well, not quite. They're definitely an improvement to centralized silos, and there's a prominent place for AP in the future of the web. But a big problem with the spec IMO is that it relies on domain names to identify servers. 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).
  - rtpg 5y ago
    how is ipv6 addressing not worse than DNSes? Like you move to a different house and suddenly your ipv6 address gets lost? 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!
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      Domain names are very, very useful. But with regard to activitypub, if a server wants to change its name the federation and social graph is broken entirely. Even if your server goes down and needs to be rebuilt, federation gets broken due to this design decision, because other servers don't know you're offline and new status messages get lost. It is a brittle point of failure in activitypub.
ahelwer 5y ago
I’ve been looking at putting my next open source project on a non-github site, anyone have experience with gitea vs sourcehut vs some other provider?
- akkartik 5y ago
  The way I see it, the choice is pretty risk-free. I currently mirror repos on repo.or.cz (the original git host), codeberg.org, tildegit.org and sr.ht. (Feel free to suggest more!) I use pushurl extensively to transparently keep them all in sync: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14290113/git-pushing-code-to-two-remotes/14290145#14290145 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14290113/git-pushing-cod... 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 :)
- xRyen 5y ago
  I've been using Gitea for a while now, and have had no issues. I self-host it for personal projects, and also use it at work. I would absolutely recommend it.
- busterarm 5y ago
  I don't have comparisons between the two but I'm a sourcehut early adopter paying at the $100/yr level and I'm more than satisfied for my personal projects. Drew's head is in the right place and nowadays that matters to me for service providers more than anything.
- junon 5y ago
  Gitea is self hosted. Sourcehut can be but also has an official site. I recommend the latter, heavily, having used both quite heavily.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  +1 for gitea. I've messed with codeberg, sourcehut, gitlab, even fossil (non git version control system, fantastic software but unfortunately everyone uses git) and I've got to say gitea is where it's at. It's the right combination of light and feature dense, could be lighter IMO but it's great. 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.
candiddevmike 5y ago
Any activitypub experts out there? I have some interesting use cases with adding activitypub support to allow an app I built[1] to communicate across instances. Would adding activitypub support allow it to integrate easier with other activitypub apps too? Thinking Nextcloud etc. Can it replace OAuth possibly? 1 - https://homechart.app https://homechart.app
- mariusor 5y ago
  This thread seems to bring out the worst in me, but what point is there to a "federated" closed source app? 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.
  - candiddevmike 5y ago
    That's a fair point and I can't argue with it. Can you email me (contact in profile) sometime? I have some questions for you about closed source and what would make it a better deal.
    - mariusor 5y ago
      Sorry but I'm plenty busy with my own projects (you can see them in my profile). The ActivityPub packages have a mailing list, feel free to ask questions there if you see anything relevant for you.
- riffic 5y ago
  join the socialhub group - it's a forum for implementors: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks
- dgudkov 5y ago
  Your app is a nice idea!
maxwell_xander 5y ago
I wish web 3 referred to the new trend towards federated, decentralized services, instead of blockchain stuff
- streamofdigits 5y ago
  history will be written by the winners 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"
- i_am_proteus 5y ago
  It does. Just start calling federated and decentralized services web 3. This stuff is actually useful so it'll out live the block chain pyramid schemes.
  - Groxx 5y ago
    as much as I truly despise the current "web 3 is blockchain" trend, I do kinda think "web 3" as "decentralized" works. blockchains are just in vogue (in a big way, to web 3's significant loss) because of a couple unicorns. maybe this is "web 2.5"? federation brings significant advantages from both centralized and decentralized, while not being fully either.
    - afiori 5y ago
      federation and decentralization are very different; (even if you probably could implement federation on decentralized smart contracts)
      - Groxx 5y ago
        Which is why I don't think it fits with "web 3 as decentralization", yeah. It's fundamentally different from either, but we lack integers between 2 and 3, and I doubt web 4 would take off.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
Not really sure. They call it funding. But they received a 50k grant to implement zero trust. https://forum.forgefriends.org/t/nlnet-grant-application-for-federation-in-gitea-deadline-october-1st-2021/354 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?
pabs3 5y ago
I hope SourceHut and other forges also adopt this new stuff.
- monade 5y ago
  It's free software, so you can contribute. I note that they are also funded by NLnet: https://nlnet.nl/project/SourcehutGraphQL https://nlnet.nl/project/SourcehutGraphQL
mro_name 5y ago
please publish DOAP records, so as anybody can see where things reside. It's easy and launchpad has done it decades ago already. Now federation would complete. What an awesome search-engine food that could be.

169 points by nafnlj 5y ago

This is actually a great idea. Github is a social site foremost, a repo host second. Makes a lot of sense for competitors to be in the Fediverse.

dane-pgp 5y ago
> Github is a social site foremost, a repo host second. 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-adopts-regulation-targeting-internet-giants/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/eu-parliament-...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
turminal 5y ago
> Makes a lot of sense for competitors to be in the Fediverse. 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
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  "Becoming a social site" is easily taken the wrong way, it doesn't mean "becoming like facebook." 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.
- indigochill 5y ago
  Maybe cooperability is already a solved problem? As I understand, Linux kernel changes are managed entirely by text-only email, and email is of course entirely forge-agnostic.
  - dachary 5y ago
    Yes, it is solved in this particular context: Linux kernel, Qemu and all Free Software projects that have a mail based workflow. But there are other contexts where Free Software developers chose a different workflow such as using a forge. Whatever the reasons, this is where we are now. There are two paths forward: a) convince people using forges to switch to a mail based workflow, b) federate forges. I believe SourceHut and many other do a fine job trying to convince people to switch to a mail based workflow. The https://forgefriends.org https://forgefriends.org and https://gitea.io https://gitea.io projects chose to try to federate forges. It's not a competition, there is value in both approaches and they will apparently move forward in parallel for the foreseeable future.

Brian_K_White 5y ago

Does this mean you will be able to fork, pr, browse history/diffs, and network graph across sites? 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)

grouphugs 5y ago

traspler 5y ago

This will only provide user accounts that work over all gitea instances, right? Or is there something else a federated git can provide?

riffic 5y ago
I believe this is being hashed out by the Forgefriends working group: https://forgefriends.org/blog/2021/11/22/what-is-forgefriends/ https://forgefriends.org/blog/2021/11/22/what-is-forgefriend...
- bluefox 5y ago
  This sounds good, but what about discoverability? 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?
  - dachary 5y ago
    Federating software projects so they can be interacted with from any forge frontend is the main focus. But federating the search engines internal to each forge is another important aspect. When federated search becomes a reality, looking for a project B on forge A will give an answer even when it is hosted on forge B. 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.
    - streamofdigits 5y ago
      imho the fediverse will have to come to be much more than social media type exchange of messages via activitypub. federated search is a major additional pillar that is currently largely absent (and is technically very different)

gnabgib 5y ago

This seriously needs some content. They were accepted to a funding round for an unspecified reason, with a link to a page with the statement "The project summary for this project is not yet available. Please come back soon!"

southerntofu 5y ago
You should probably check out forgefriends.org. There's detailed monthly reports on what they're doing and why. They started cooperating with gitea because the maintainers were open to the idea of federation (most other forges were not interested) and some french FLOSS NGO (chapril.org [0]) was happy to let them experiment in exchange for maintenance for their forging infra (already based on gitea). 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.
- recursive 5y ago
  Feels a bit like trying to unravel web3 or category theory. I went to forgefriends.org. It's all about forges. Forge-this, forge-that. So like, what's a forge?
  - sjtindell 5y ago
    I went to the site and the second line on the page says “Because most Free Software projects are hosted on proprietary forges (for example GitHub)”. So code storage and collaboration.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    Github is a forge. Sourceforge is a forge. 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.

southerntofu 5y ago

That's amazing! The forgefriends community (previously fedeproxy) is doing a tremendous job to push for federated forging and break the Github monopoly. Shameless plug for a lengthy read on why that's an important issue: https://staticadventures.netlib.re/blog/decentralized-forge/ https://staticadventures.netlib.re/blog/decentralized-forge/ EDIT: Apparently there's a "forge federation webinar" coming up soon: https://forum.forgefriends.org/t/forge-federation-webinar-january-19th-2022-10am-noon-utc-1/538 https://forum.forgefriends.org/t/forge-federation-webinar-ja...

rkagerer 5y ago

Can someone describe the lingo 'fediverse'? I can hazard a guess but don't want to make assumptions.

remram 5y ago
It refers to the domains federating via the ActivityPub protocol. Software or deployments of software able to talk to each other via ActivityPub are referred to as the Fediverse.
miduil 5y ago
Just to quote Wikipedia as it reflects what fediverse means quite well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse 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).
- boardwaalk 5y ago
  I honestly thought it had something to do with a fetish community up until now. Which I suppose it not entirely wrong when considering some of the stuff on Mastodon. It's still a bad name though.
  - zksmk 5y ago
    I was honestly confused for a second why would you think the name had anything to do with a fetish (minus some mastodon content) until I realized you saw it as fe-diverse and not fedi-verse. I never saw it that way because I pronounce the "i" in it as "ee", not as "ay". I wonder what's more common now. Is this another gif/jif situation?
  - mariusor 5y ago
    Apologies for the negativity, I'm feeling excessively bitchy at the moment, but how about you improve your reading comprehension instead of having bad takes at other people's naming efforts?

wrnr 5y ago

Good for them, but I (as a EU citizen) don't care about projects like this. It is a soulless copy-cat of a much more famous, profitable, free and useful project. Just look at the logo, what is that line in the middle and why is its stroke with bigger then the other stock icon embedded in the icon. I know I'm knitpicking but it says something about the character of the project and NLnet. This is woke IT, as long as it is decentralised it is somehow better than other software no matter how crapy the UX. 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.

smbv 5y ago
Is it really soulless? It seems like it solves a real problem: many Gitea instances are very small. The devs are passionate about their work and they are all working toward improving the software. So what if it's a copycat? GitHub could be argued to be a copycat of SourceForge. Gitea/forgefriends offers new features and improvements over GitHub. Gitea is as useful as GitHub for hosting a git repo with a web interface, but the federation aspect makes Gitea also a social site (much like GitHub). 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.
- wrnr 5y ago
  This is miss allocation of resources, complaining about it is the least and only I can do.
  - 5y ago

Barrin92 5y ago

Worth pointing out that activitypub, the fediverse etc are the actual 'web3' decentralized systems people seem to be so hyped about, with the added advantage that they run on normal, fast computers and not on the equivalent of a car driving with the breaks pulled so someone can mine coins.

betwixthewires 5y ago
Well, not quite. They're definitely an improvement to centralized silos, and there's a prominent place for AP in the future of the web. But a big problem with the spec IMO is that it relies on domain names to identify servers. 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).
- rtpg 5y ago
  how is ipv6 addressing not worse than DNSes? Like you move to a different house and suddenly your ipv6 address gets lost? 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!
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    Domain names are very, very useful. But with regard to activitypub, if a server wants to change its name the federation and social graph is broken entirely. Even if your server goes down and needs to be rebuilt, federation gets broken due to this design decision, because other servers don't know you're offline and new status messages get lost. It is a brittle point of failure in activitypub.

ahelwer 5y ago

I’ve been looking at putting my next open source project on a non-github site, anyone have experience with gitea vs sourcehut vs some other provider?

akkartik 5y ago
The way I see it, the choice is pretty risk-free. I currently mirror repos on repo.or.cz (the original git host), codeberg.org, tildegit.org and sr.ht. (Feel free to suggest more!) I use pushurl extensively to transparently keep them all in sync: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14290113/git-pushing-code-to-two-remotes/14290145#14290145 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14290113/git-pushing-cod... 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 :)
xRyen 5y ago
I've been using Gitea for a while now, and have had no issues. I self-host it for personal projects, and also use it at work. I would absolutely recommend it.
busterarm 5y ago
I don't have comparisons between the two but I'm a sourcehut early adopter paying at the $100/yr level and I'm more than satisfied for my personal projects. Drew's head is in the right place and nowadays that matters to me for service providers more than anything.
junon 5y ago
Gitea is self hosted. Sourcehut can be but also has an official site. I recommend the latter, heavily, having used both quite heavily.
betwixthewires 5y ago
+1 for gitea. I've messed with codeberg, sourcehut, gitlab, even fossil (non git version control system, fantastic software but unfortunately everyone uses git) and I've got to say gitea is where it's at. It's the right combination of light and feature dense, could be lighter IMO but it's great. 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.

candiddevmike 5y ago

Any activitypub experts out there? I have some interesting use cases with adding activitypub support to allow an app I built[1] to communicate across instances. Would adding activitypub support allow it to integrate easier with other activitypub apps too? Thinking Nextcloud etc. Can it replace OAuth possibly? 1 - https://homechart.app https://homechart.app

mariusor 5y ago
This thread seems to bring out the worst in me, but what point is there to a "federated" closed source app? 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.
- candiddevmike 5y ago
  That's a fair point and I can't argue with it. Can you email me (contact in profile) sometime? I have some questions for you about closed source and what would make it a better deal.
  - mariusor 5y ago
    Sorry but I'm plenty busy with my own projects (you can see them in my profile). The ActivityPub packages have a mailing list, feel free to ask questions there if you see anything relevant for you.
riffic 5y ago
join the socialhub group - it's a forum for implementors: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks
dgudkov 5y ago
Your app is a nice idea!

maxwell_xander 5y ago

I wish web 3 referred to the new trend towards federated, decentralized services, instead of blockchain stuff

streamofdigits 5y ago
history will be written by the winners 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"
i_am_proteus 5y ago
It does. Just start calling federated and decentralized services web 3. This stuff is actually useful so it'll out live the block chain pyramid schemes.
- Groxx 5y ago
  as much as I truly despise the current "web 3 is blockchain" trend, I do kinda think "web 3" as "decentralized" works. blockchains are just in vogue (in a big way, to web 3's significant loss) because of a couple unicorns. maybe this is "web 2.5"? federation brings significant advantages from both centralized and decentralized, while not being fully either.
  - afiori 5y ago
    federation and decentralization are very different; (even if you probably could implement federation on decentralized smart contracts)
    - Groxx 5y ago
      Which is why I don't think it fits with "web 3 as decentralization", yeah. It's fundamentally different from either, but we lack integers between 2 and 3, and I doubt web 4 would take off.

NicoJuicy 5y ago

Not really sure. They call it funding. But they received a 50k grant to implement zero trust. https://forum.forgefriends.org/t/nlnet-grant-application-for-federation-in-gitea-deadline-october-1st-2021/354 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?

pabs3 5y ago

I hope SourceHut and other forges also adopt this new stuff.

monade 5y ago
It's free software, so you can contribute. I note that they are also funded by NLnet: https://nlnet.nl/project/SourcehutGraphQL https://nlnet.nl/project/SourcehutGraphQL

mro_name 5y ago

please publish DOAP records, so as anybody can see where things reside. It's easy and launchpad has done it decades ago already. Now federation would complete. What an awesome search-engine food that could be.