If anything starts with "we need" I just laugh.
We need more humor in the world
We need a federation of forges
151–160 of 424 posts
Re: We need a federation of forges
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has it ever worked?
Mastodon, Discord?
Is Mastodon successful enough to be called "the future" of its niche? MAU is 1/3rd what it was at the peak, and bluesky + mastodon MAU combined is microscopic compared to twitter (I use none of these services, no dog in this fight, just looking at numbers).
Discord is not federated.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#153The problem I feel with federated solutions is basically the 'cold start' problem. When you are wanting to join a federated network, you have two choices: join a pre-existing server thereby creating the exact same problem you are escaping, ie: a giant server that holds you to its whims, BUT you do get a big network to begin with. Or you start your own server but your network is zero, discoverability is zero, your fee…
I think the gain sits in the middle: if the giant server starts to get iffy (moderation, content, policy, technical issues), people can leave it somewhat easily and form or grow another decently sized server which will have enough reputation from day one.
We already have other decently sized GH alternatives such as Gitlab, Codeberg and various OSS forge instances (freedesktop, Fedora, Debian, etc) which could be federated and become a safe harbor if we were able to maintained project visibility and discoverability.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#154Lots of negativity in the comments and while I'm as distrusting of VC funding as the next guy I think competition in this space is something we should encourage, and bootstrapping that is hard if not impossible at this point. Obviously this post was timed well with the 2-3 GitHub-hating posts that made it to the top of HN yesterday, but I commend the attempt here. I hope it takes off in a meaningful way.
The thing with VC-founded projects is that there's some kind of rug-pull, ads, privacy violation or "feature enhancing" subscription likely coming and as users we should know.
I don't really like services that stress how idealistic they are when this is the upcoming reality.
Better charge money for services or if you're truly idealistic start it as a non-profit. At the very least communicate what's the monetization plan.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#155"There are 4 standards that try to solve this problem, its too many, we need one that finally unifies it all and solves the problem once and for all" "There are 5 standards that..." Jokes aside, I think we need stronger arguments as to why something like activity pub is not good enough to solve the problem instead of trying to come up a new way of solving the "decentralized comms" problem.
ActivityPub and atproto are differently shaped. Pitting them against each other is like asking “why need web when we have email”. ActivityPub is email-shaped. Servers are inboxes sending messages to each other. atproto is web-shaped. User repositories host data (like personal sites or git/RSS), while apps aggregate from repositories (like Google Reader). Different topologies lead to different properties. Eg atproto l…
Calling AP services a bunch of small "centralized" services in this context removes all the meaning from that term. You might as well call any web server centralized while comparing them to clouds.
Proper federation is exactly such bunch of small services messaging each other. On the hand, what ATProto leads to is at most a handful of large-scale providers each running the own portion of the network.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#156I'd like to preface I'm pretty active in atprotocol ecosystem, so my experience is more than likely a bit more biased, but thought I'd share some of my thoughts as a big fan of tangled. I've really enjoyed Tangled. It has so far been what I've wanted from a GitHub replacement, is simpler and does not have as many features, but it has been the main social/git provider I've been using for personal open source projects…
I'm afraid that atproto will suffer from Bluesky's irrelevance. Not sure if that's a valid fear.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#157I'm confused on what exactly we need to add to decentralized git to get where we want to be - if it's identities, why aren't we using what git itself supports (gpg keys; if someone has your private key, they are you no matter where)?
Or in other words, what specifically does GitHub "do" that can't be done by using git as a backing store?
Re: We need a federation of forges
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
You frame the symptom as the problem though. Others seem to be attributing this to Azure migration and Copilot overhead tightly coupled to GitHub infrastructure.
No the problem is that github has to stem exponential usage increase and prepare 30x of their capacity, that's not symptom, that's problem.
It's both and, it's a symptom of exponential usage and a problem with infrastructure. The question you aren't asking is "Why is it a problem with GitHub's infrastructure?" the answer to that lies somewhere in between: Microsoft + Azure + Copilot. Now tell me which of those have anything to do with GitHub as we know it?
Re: We need a federation of forges
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a lot more to GitHub than just the git part. Issues, PRs, etc.
Why does issues and prs need to be federated? I can't think of any part of Github that benefits from federation. Just set up your own instance.
Because we are headed into a world where attacks on project hosting are more common, and loss of issues/PRs can halt a project while setting up an alternative and attempting to restore archived information.
The attacks span from forged DMCA takedowns, to national blocking orders, to suspicion that a contributor is from a sanctioned country (whether they still live there or not), to rogue project admins, and some other more creative attacks.
Project infrastructure should be distributed, with copies of data in as many computers as possible, across as many jurisdictions as possible.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#160I'm confused on what exactly we need to add to decentralized git to get where we want to be - if it's identities, why aren't we using what git itself supports (gpg keys; if someone has your private key, they are you no matter where )? Or in other words, what specifically does GitHub "do" that can't be done by using git as a backing store?
> gpg keys; if someone has your private key, they are you no matter where
how would you rotate such a key and still convince everybody that you are still you?
> Or in other words, what specifically does GitHub "do" that can't be done by using git as a backing store?
how would you build a social graph of follows/stars and what not using user-owned git repos as a backing store?