I just found the news that @Gargron wants to move their community discussions to Github, and leave Discourse behind. It is a pity because Discourse will be joining the Fediverse and also Github is least likely to ever become a Forgefriend, while the code forge Gitea already made their first steps and added federation-related commits to their codebase. In other words: Gitea is a true forge friend.
It would be absolutely wonderful if both Discourse and Gitea joined the Fediverse. This is by no means certain, and they need help from us fedizens to get there. But it would be a counterweight to other software moving towards Big Tech walled gardens.
Very nice that you are a Gitea contributor as well.
I think that Gitea has an absolutely unique opportunity right now, and I donāt know if they fully realize what federation could bring to the project. The social features that could be built might set Gitea apart from Github, which is more of a ātoolset for techiesā rather than an inclusive free software community facilitator. In forgefriends community we are discussing on campaigning to increase that awareness. (PS. Just saw your GH comment. For others: It looks like they did not get a NLNet grant for federation support).
Awesome! Iāll be working on federating my own self-hosted instance of gitea, starting with the profile, and will compare notes
Itās slightly unfortunate that git users (ie as in git config user) are keyed off name and email. I asked about 8 years ago if another field could be added for a url/profile page, but I dont think it was taken up
Otherwise you could today beautifully link together, commits, pull requests, profiles, followers, inboxes etc.
Our biggest setback as a federation was keying identity off email addresses, which creates a bottleneck with the big email providers. Thatās not to be confused with logging in with a user@host type identity, or following someone with a @user@host type nick. Nicks can be tied to a profile, and used for login etc.
Nevertheless I agree that git federation would bring enormous utility. Iāll leave it there to avoid going off-topic from thread title
Read your original sources. It is Pavilion the plugin developer that intends to write federation support in them. First mentioned by @how and I followed up on the Discourse forum yesterday to ask what the grant rejection would do for their plans:
Well, then continue to ignore official votings; for example that this official forum should be federated.
The group did this 3 years ago (!)
And if it will be continued to be ignored probably all will leave this walled garden.
No worries.
The EU parliament voted for mandatory interoperability anyway.
It is entirely unclear what your beef is. Groups and projects express an interest for the fediverse. We try to help them by giving feedback and show that we would love them become part of fedi to encourage them to make that step. It is that simple.
Ah. I see.
That is not āDiscourse will federateā, this is āDiscourse got rejected againā.
And everybody was told when asking nlnet.
We wanted to do the work with 8 people and got a ānoā response with various strange reasons like
Obviously, it was not a priority to them if there is external money on the
table and it still doesnāt happen. A scalable forum application with the
modern features people expect would take a long time to buildā¦
Otherwise we would have done immediately
Anyway - all I am saying is:
If the fact derives
Person X applied for Y
then let us not write it as
Software Z will do magic ā¦
Well, thatās only if you never use git with a .mailmap.
The way I use git for my projects, I always just put a bogus email address into commits so it will never be current one day and then outdated another day. Then I put my ārealā email address in the .mailmap.
So if I wanted to connect my git identities to the fediverse, I would have a couple options:
start consistently entering in my git identity as valenoern@codeberg.org or something directly based on a fediverse instance
using some weird improved counterpart of .mailmap, connect whatever git identities Iām using locally (those might look like valenoern@pinebook, valenoern@server, etc) into a particular fediverse identity like valenoern@codeberg.org
I may be misunderstanding what the problem is here, but if we assumed codeberg.org collected user email addresses during registration and could forward emails to its users if absolutely necessary, then wouldnāt fediverse handles on it like valenoern@codeberg.org become about the same as a ārealā email address for the purposes of git?
The process of emailing patches might even be a bit improved, because you could email a patch to valenoern@codeberg.org out of git and have it show up as a pull request in my inbox.
(Hopefully with the patch file annotated with what project itās for so it would be grouped with the correct project. Maybe the most simple and future-proof way would be something like, you email to valenoern+bopwiki@codeberg.org to send a pull request for Valenoern/bopwiki?)
Or, who knows, maybe upgrading the emailing capabilities gitea servers already have would be too much and weād be extending git to be able to directly send ActivityPub.
I guess it depends on whether weāre counting on most contributors being able to install things like git, or assuming entire software communities are going to shift further toward platform computing where codeberg.org does all the technical work for a big category of completely ānon-technicalā users that just sign on and advise all the platforms they use on what direction they should go.
(I have my own biases against some forms of platform computing, but I also donāt want to make the assumption it couldnāt lead to interesting new forms of governance where, say, a bunch of non-programmers elect a new leader to a stagnating project that keeps wilfully ignoring issues, and this eventually leads to a real plan to get them fixed.)
I see. I do not like alternative facts, cause I fight misinformation.
For a reason.
It is explained here Mastodon intends to move from Discourse forum to Github Discussions - #11 by Sebastian and because I was told āforum software is to complicated to fundā and if we pretend that such projects are funded, then things like I fight for on an EU level, might be considered as not needed just cause of false facts. The same maybe for Sovereign Tech Fund and the new stipends my public broadcaster is creating.
We need to be honest about the state of funding, I think ā¦
Especially since I see the nice rejected projects in meetings frequently and I know and see how hard some people are coding.
Argh - repeating false facts, I get crazy !!! waybackmachine is your friend.
Person X applied for Y is NOT Discourse will be joining the Fediverse ā¦
It is not.
It is not !!! (!)
Apart from that:
We wanted to pick it up with 8 people. It was just one round before. nlnet simply does not seem to want to fund it. One person withdraw, but 3 different applicants were then rejected 3 times.
How often should I repeat cites?
Anyway:
We had several group decisions and I do not think, you can change decisions by 60 people.
When I payed the events in 2017-2020, when nlnet did not give a penny, I co-organised both conferences:
And >60 people travelled to Prague and agreed to a federated forum.
And I respect the majority, cause democracy.
And I am really fed up with the complaints about not federating, cause I canāt change it.
Several teams tried to get funding over the last two years to implement some kind of ActivityPub support in Discourse. As you well know, all such attempts failed so far.
