Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We need a federation of forges

blog.tangled.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 424 posts

Re: We need a federation of forges

#261

Post by nightpool »

Scaled wrote: post #213
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.

The OP says that tangled only supports event federation. How does it help with discoverability?

Re: We need a federation of forges

#262

Post by tardedmeme »

tobylane wrote: post #161
bombcar wrote: post #157

I'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?

As a project member, I want users to already be logged in to the bug tracker. The lack of friction, likely from being the network effect winner, is key. I know fossil has this, but people don't have their private keys in fossil, they (I) don't even have fossil installed.

Whatever happened to OpenID, anyway? That was supposed to be federated one-click login. If the problem is login, then only the login needs to be federated, and this approach leaves the rest of the system more flexible as sites can have different bug tracking features without becoming incompatible with the federation.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#263

Post by liveoneggs »

jonahx wrote: post #164
liveoneggs wrote: post #162

It took me a minute to figure out what this was even talking about. Tangles is, apparently, a gitlab-type project where PRs and bug reports and stuff are available on something called "at protocol" which is the bluesky social network "federated protocol". at protocol competes with ActivityPub, which is mastadon -- so you could, in theory, have a little federation of gitlabs peer-to-peering with each other, which is d…

The "some reason" isn't mysterious... it's redundancy and avoiding a single point of failure and ownership.

But the actual git part isn't federated

Re: We need a federation of forges

#264

Post by capitainenemo »

horsawlarway wrote: post #251
steveklabnik wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you cherry pick complicated commands, and remove all context, sure, they look cryptic. I wrote that tutorial, and literally only one of those is relevant to my day to day work: jj new o, which means “make a new change on top of the change named o”. Yes, if you remove the context that “o” is on your screen and highlighted, it looks complex. It’s the same with the other “jj new” command: you’re producing a merge by…

> If you cherry pick complicated commands, and remove all context, sure, they look cryptic. Sure I'm definitely not playing fair, but I am cherry picking from the intro tutorial you put together, so I'm not going crazy either :P I think my primary issue is that jj feels like it wants to control how I work more than git does. Mentally - I just don't want to have to think about changes as often as jj seems to want to t…

So, as a long-time mercurial users, revsets in jujutsu were a major feature for me. And if you don't want to use them, don't. But if you are looking to treat your VCS DAG as a queryable database they are awesome. And, they are great for avoiding having to chain a bunch of commands together, inefficiently, to get the same effect. Although you still can do that if you really want to. Just like you don't have to use jq to query JSON - you can do terrible cursed things with grep and awk and sed and it'll even work for simple cases. But you might want to give jq a spin - and really there are strong parallels in how they work.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#265

Post by 4lx87 »

mikey_p wrote: post #244
4lx87 wrote: post #226

Looks really cool but ATProto means I won't be using it. I'm not going to invest in another network when we already have an open one. We already have the web. The web already has OAuth. OAuth is already widely supported. IndieAuth already offers a very simple and standard approach to personal OAuth servers, if people really want to run their own identity server. "Feeds" are perfectly doable using the web. It's alread…

The web still has other protocols on top of it, like RSS. Just because the "web" exists doesn't mean that solves every problem. Also OAuth only handles auth and permissions and doesn't do anything for provided federated views of disparate data sources. Also this isn't about identity either, you're really misunderstanding what this is about.

You're right. RSS builds on top of the web. ATProto does not. I'd say RSS is a resource format / content type, not a communications protocol. A resource format intended for syndicating updates – exactly what ATProto and ActivityPub do (but decided to invent new formats instead of extending RSS/Atom. JSON all the things!).

It is very much about identity. To use tangled you need to use ATProto and authenticate using ATProto – rather than using the existing open standard for authentication used by pretty much everyone at this point (missed opportunity to login to Tangled using GitHub). What's crazy is people still use the web to interact with tangled anyway.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#266

Post by embedding-shape »

throw5 wrote: post #192
willio58 wrote: post #64

Lots 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.

> Lots 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. What you are calling "negativity" are genuine concerns to me. I was excited at the headline first. But as soon as I found it is VC-funded, it became a complete non-starter for me. Look, I'm go…

I agree with everything you wrote, but wanted to add to:

> The problem with VC-funded projects is that there is definitely going to be some kind of rug-pull. Because the investors need their money.

If you can tell me up front what the rug-pull will be in N years, then I could potentially look past it for certain use cases.

But if all you say is "I know you don't like VC-funded companies, but ours really is different because of X" then that's pretty much a slap in the face to users who've been through the hamster wheel of enshittification before.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#267

Post by embedding-shape »

tardedmeme wrote: post #253
Certhas wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question is (and I don't know the answer, so not rhetorical) whether the protocol being open can be sufficient to prevent the rug-pull from being too bad...

Bluesky proves it can't. So does every proprietary blockchain, e.g. Terra.

When did Bluesky rug-pull? Seemingly they seems hellbent on making it harder for themselves to rug-pull, at least judging by the developments of the protocols and ecosystem so far.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#268

Post by liveoneggs »

mikey_p wrote: post #243
liveoneggs wrote: post #162

It took me a minute to figure out what this was even talking about. Tangles is, apparently, a gitlab-type project where PRs and bug reports and stuff are available on something called "at protocol" which is the bluesky social network "federated protocol". at protocol competes with ActivityPub, which is mastadon -- so you could, in theory, have a little federation of gitlabs peer-to-peering with each other, which is d…

except it isn't at all like ActivityPub and is implemented radically differently to avoid many of the problems with ActivityPub.

I was saying at protocol is to bluesky as activity pub is to mastodon

So it's as if all the github pull requests were tweets, I guess?

Re: We need a federation of forges

#269

Post by rileymichael »

jonstaab wrote: post #236
rileymichael wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not that mature — its name violates git’s trademark policy https://git-scm.com/about/trademark

Do github, gitea, and gitlab not?

i can't speak to gitea, but github and gitlab are explicitly mentioned as having a license in their policy:

> Please be aware that GitHub and GitLab are exceptions to this Policy because they are subject to explicit licensing arrangements that pre-date, and thus take precedence, over this Policy.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#270

Post by fiatjaf »

jonstaab wrote: post #235
nerdypepper wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i am unable to access any repository on that website. for some, it complains that ssh or https URLs are not supported by my browser? and for others its just loading indefinitely with `Failed to load file tree`. maybe its not fairly mature.

Sounds like a misconfigured repository. Try for example https://gitworkshop.dev/danconwaydev.com/relay.ngit.dev/ngit...

That one specifically fails catastrophically for me.
Post reply on HN