forgefed VS i3expo-ng

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/

From the comments, Forgejo is also already working on implementing ForgeFed, an ActivityPub extension specifically designed for software forges [0]. Judging from the issue, it looks like they're well on their way [1].

I have to say, I'm not super into the idea of social media, but this is a use for federation I approve of wholeheartedly. The friction of having to create accounts on X forges (where X is the number of projects that self-host GitLab) is a huge moat for GitHub, and federation could solve that very handily and create an environment where FOSS projects can feasibly host their own code away from Microsoft's control without horribly inconveniencing everyone who wants to participate.

[0] https://forgefed.org/

[1] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59

> 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 send as a single email. Developers usually make frequent commits when they develop. Such patches can be confusing and hellish to review. A sane patchset requires the developers to edit the commit history, usually using interactive rebases. Each commit should contain a single feature and shouldn't break the build.

I consider both the above to be good development practices and follow them even on my personal projects. However, this is an additional barrier to entry. In fact, this may be a bigger problem for many than setting up git for email.

Another interesting topic to look into is forge federation. Forgejo [0], the code forge on which Codeberg is based is one forge software that intends to federate their repositories between server instances over the network using ActivityPub protocol extensions such as ForgeFed [1] and F3 [2] specifications.

[0] https://forgejo.org

[1] https://forgefed.org

[2] https://lab.forgefriends.org/friendlyforgeformat

> If you want to look into people who disagree with you: https://forgefed.org/

Was looking for a while but directly after posting I found a tool that might be what I'm after: https://github.com/morrolinux/i3expo-ng

Check out https://github.com/morrolinux/i3expo-ng

I know nothing, but you could try to write something similar to i3expo-ng