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We need a federation of forges

blog.tangled.org

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Re: We need a federation of forges

#211

Post by knotbin »

rafram wrote: post #209

How will this end up going any better than Mastodon has? Near inevitabilities: - All the small instances defederating from the largest due to politics/spam/annoying noobs/whatever, effectively killing the easiest path to entry into the community - Pointless debates about whether it’s OK to federate with instances that host pirated content, disagreeable politics, furry VNs, etc., which everyone has to take a side (the…

ATproto federates in a very different way than Mastodon. There is no concept of "instances" on ATproto.

Your account is hosted on a PDS and you sign into the app with your PDS sign-in and records go to your PDS, but everything on the app is from what's called an "AppView" which provides a centralized view of all data in all PDSes so it feels just like you're using a regular centralized app. But there can be multiple AppViews and AppViews can be self-hosted.

So unlike with Mastodon, it doesn't matter what PDS "instance" you're on because the app layer is completely separate from it.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#212

Post by danabramov »

rafram wrote: post #209

How will this end up going any better than Mastodon has? Near inevitabilities: - All the small instances defederating from the largest due to politics/spam/annoying noobs/whatever, effectively killing the easiest path to entry into the community - Pointless debates about whether it’s OK to federate with instances that host pirated content, disagreeable politics, furry VNs, etc., which everyone has to take a side (the…

Atproto isn’t “many servers sending messages to each other”. It’s structured more like RSS:

1) there’s an app-agnostic hosting layer (and anyone can run a host, a bit like personal site with RSS)

2) then there’s apps, which aggregate over data from all hosts (a bit like Google Reader or Feedly)

So there’s no such thing as “defederating”. You don’t have many copies of Tangled beefing with each other. It’s more like you can run your own hosting for your own data (if you want), and anyone can build an app that aggregates from everyone’s data (Tangled is one such app).

If this got you curious, I have two longreads: https://overreacted.io/open-social/ (conceptual) and https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/ (diving into the data model).

Re: We need a federation of forges

#213

Post by Scaled »

nightpool wrote: post #208

I'm a huge supporter of federation, but I've never understood the use-case for a "federation of forges". What data are the forges exchanging? Why should the forge for Blender have any connection to the forge for Ubuntu? Most of the value I get from Github is having a single login that I can take from project to project. Independent forges can get the same value simply by supporting social login, without needing the c…

The biggest problem IMO is discoverability. I need an easy way to find open source projects that are on scattered servers. GitHub project search is limited to GitHub.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#214

Post by knotbin »

jonstaab wrote: post #181

I don't know how new Tangled is, but there is a fairly mature github alternative being built on Nostr: https://gitworkshop.dev/ The basic idea is that you can put your repository on multiple GRASP-compatible nostr relays (GRASP is a sub-protocol that glues nostr and git together), so even if one server goes down you can transparently sync using the others. This means in effect 100% uptime if you choose reliable serve…

Correct me if I'm wrong but the project you're referring to appears to be closed source.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#215

Post by rileymichael »

jonstaab wrote: post #181

I don't know how new Tangled is, but there is a fairly mature github alternative being built on Nostr: https://gitworkshop.dev/ The basic idea is that you can put your repository on multiple GRASP-compatible nostr relays (GRASP is a sub-protocol that glues nostr and git together), so even if one server goes down you can transparently sync using the others. This means in effect 100% uptime if you choose reliable serve…

not that mature — its name violates git’s trademark policy

https://git-scm.com/about/trademark

Re: We need a federation of forges

#216

Post by kajman »

rafram wrote: post #209

How will this end up going any better than Mastodon has? Near inevitabilities: - All the small instances defederating from the largest due to politics/spam/annoying noobs/whatever, effectively killing the easiest path to entry into the community - Pointless debates about whether it’s OK to federate with instances that host pirated content, disagreeable politics, furry VNs, etc., which everyone has to take a side (the…

Not in expert in either but ATProto services (what they call AppViews) are substantially different from the fediverse because they rely on a shared relay instead of explicit federation.

I'm conflicted about the costs of what is currently effectively global discovery, but it's not just another Mastodon.

E: I think its funny multiple other people said the same thing in the time it took me to write this

Re: We need a federation of forges

#217

Post by hirako2000 »

nightpool wrote: post #208

I'm a huge supporter of federation, but I've never understood the use-case for a "federation of forges". What data are the forges exchanging? Why should the forge for Blender have any connection to the forge for Ubuntu? Most of the value I get from Github is having a single login that I can take from project to project. Independent forges can get the same value simply by supporting social login, without needing the c…

Git is decentralized by design. It can support federation, it just happens that GitHub solved the UI, issues, PR so that even new comer can come in and do git stuff and track issues on the screen. But centralized it.

Federation would be closer to git, but not so decentralized that when one node goes offline you may not have any upstream to pull from, or not be able to find them.

Git doesn't solve availability. Federation may solve it, by staying closer to the decentralized philosophy. That's my read.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#218

Post by malicka »

nightpool wrote: post #208

I'm a huge supporter of federation, but I've never understood the use-case for a "federation of forges". What data are the forges exchanging? Why should the forge for Blender have any connection to the forge for Ubuntu? Most of the value I get from Github is having a single login that I can take from project to project. Independent forges can get the same value simply by supporting social login, without needing the c…

If people want to find software, they search GitHub. If you self-host a forge, no one will ever find your software unless you’re a preestablished big name (like Blender). To avoid throwing your code into the void, you’re pretty much forced to mirror with GitHub, at least.

To avoid this and make smaller forges as a block a viable competitor, there needs to be a singular network that solves discoverability and lets you find software from any host – like ForgeFed would.

There’s also the concern with the friction created by requiring newbies to log-into a dedicated forge for contributions (which ForgeFed solves), but I reckon that’s a secondary and related concern.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#219

Post by danabramov »

kajman wrote: post #216
rafram wrote: post #209

How will this end up going any better than Mastodon has? Near inevitabilities: - All the small instances defederating from the largest due to politics/spam/annoying noobs/whatever, effectively killing the easiest path to entry into the community - Pointless debates about whether it’s OK to federate with instances that host pirated content, disagreeable politics, furry VNs, etc., which everyone has to take a side (the…

Not in expert in either but ATProto services (what they call AppViews) are substantially different from the fediverse because they rely on a shared relay instead of explicit federation. I'm conflicted about the costs of what is currently effectively global discovery, but it's not just another Mastodon. E: I think its funny multiple other people said the same thing in the time it took me to write this

Note a relay is a perf optimization and doesn’t have to be a single shared chokepoint.

These days running a relay is fairly cheap (~$30/mo?), there’s maybe a dozen of them, and some apps don’t use one at all (instead relying on services like https://constellation.microcosm.blue/ for querying backlinks).

Re: We need a federation of forges

#220

Post by malicka »

ecshafer wrote: post #53

Why? I really don't see the purpose of a federation of git repos. Git is already totally decentralized. 99% of projects only have a small list of committers. Tangled just doesn't solve an actual problem. Github was used because it was an easy to set up, free, place to store code and share it, and it had source viewing which was a step up from sourceforge. With multiple solutions available that makes this easy, its ju…

Discoverability. Without federation, people are pretty much dependant on GitHub to make sure their software gets out there.
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