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This is incredible. Thanks.
We need a federation of forges
281–290 of 424 posts
Re: We need a federation of forges
#282I don't think we need a federation of forges. What we need instead is just richer git repos.
Fossil gets 90% there with integrating tickets (issues), forums and wikis as part of the repo itself. When you clone a fossil repo, those are also part of the clone, and can be browsed offline on an airplane. Replies can also be written offline and, permissions willing, synced back up to the remote, either immediately or when the internet connection is regained.
I think this is the direction we should go in, but without hardcoding any specific artifact kind as part of the VCS. Instead, repos should be able to contain apps, which would define policies on what artifacts are acceptable, what rules they must follow, and who's allowed to upload and download them and at what times. The job of the forge would then be to execute those policies and render the artifacts for web users in whatever way the app desires.
With such a setup, moving to a different forge would entail nothing more than pushing the repo there.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
On Mastodon, if you take the wrong side, those on the correct side will defederate from you. Not merely because you host (or don't host) the content they like (or dislike), but because you merely enable (or discriminate against) those who host that content. Of course, all sides are wrong in somebody's eyes; so no matter what you do, you will be defederated from by at least somebody. The way Mastodon works, defederati…
> On Mastodon, if you take the wrong side, those on the correct side will defederate from you. Not merely because you host (or don't host) the content they like (or dislike), but because you merely enable (or discriminate against) those who host that content. Ok, so? People block you all the time because they don't agree with you, why is that a problem? If people don't want to hear what you say, shouldn't they be all…
No, because this happens on a per-admin level, not on a per-user level.
You go on a cruise for two weeks and there's a disagreement about whether to federate with Meta or not. Your admin takes a side, whatever that side might be. Two weeks later, you come back and lose 10% of followers, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm afraid that atproto will suffer from Bluesky's irrelevance. Not sure if that's a valid fear.
In what sense is bluesky irrelevant in this context? It's obviously not Twitter scale, but no alternative to GitHub will be GitHub scale for a long time to come either... And it does seem to have the right feature set. Not sure which other social graph/network you could reasonably build a GitHub alternative around that would be less irrelevant....
It's largely perceived to be an ideological site. Obviously every community has its own biases and tastes, but I think Bluesky has just captured the imagination as the "left-leaning social platform." When the NYT was talking about a potential link between the WHCD shooter and Bluesky posts, that's what they referred to Bluesky as.
Obviously Tangled can live completely separate from Bluesky, it doesn't even need to share branding. Protocols are just protocols and people who don't understand how email works often don't even realize that Outlook and GMail use the same protocols. I'm hoping for this future personally where ATProto is only something the nerds care about (and write code for.)
(Please don't respond to this post with ideological argument. I'm just trying to talk about Bluesky and ATProto.)
Re: We need a federation of forges
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On Mastodon, if you take the wrong side, those on the correct side will defederate from you. Not merely because you host (or don't host) the content they like (or dislike), but because you merely enable (or discriminate against) those who host that content. Ok, so? People block you all the time because they don't agree with you, why is that a problem? If people don't want to hear what you say, shouldn't they be all…
No, because this happens on a per-admin level, not on a per-user level. You go on a cruise for two weeks and there's a disagreement about whether to federate with Meta or not. Your admin takes a side, whatever that side might be. Two weeks later, you come back and lose 10% of followers, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Yeah, that kind of makes sense to me, you chose that instance because you're OK with that admin making choices for you. Just like how I choose to post comments on HN, and if the admins/moderators tell me to stop something, or that now half my comments are gone for reason X, I can't really cry about it, all I can do is follow what admins do/say or jump ship.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#286Tangled is VC sponsored. It doesn't scream stability to me, but rather "we need to grow at all cost". I don't see the appeal. Even though it's federated, when development stops, who will be there to fix bugs and maintain it?
> who will be there to fix bugs and maintain it? Those of us who use it. Tangled is a neat project and architecturally it makes a lot of interesting choices but code-wise it's relatively simple and from my personal forays in it I'd say pretty easy to maintain. The majority of the codebase is loosely related go modules. Then some static HTML+CSS. And finally a small sprinkle of typescript to tie things together. And o…
I don't think that will work. How many of us did contribute a simple patch to LibreOffice, Firefox, or GNOME?
At least this statement doesn't hold for LibreOffice. Their Online version, including "simple" HTML/CSS components, was archived because of a lack of maintainers. For their main project, the vast majority of contributions in the last release were made by former ecosystem partners (Collabora) or TDF staff. Volunteers only did a fraction of the work [1].
[1]: https://www.collaboraonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/L...
Re: We need a federation of forges
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
ATProto simply ignores the need for decentralizing incentives on a human/community level. What we get is a sort of a "top-down" federation rather than a grass-roots one. Whoever invests in the infra ends up running a domain. I mean, practically no one is aware of any other ATPROTO provider other than Bluesky whereas the issue with AP is merely the lack of better implementations, so mastodon.social got the most attent…
There’s no such thing as “running a domain” or “atproto provider” in atproto. You’re approaching it with a Mastodon/AP mindset and it doesn’t match that. In atproto, there’s two axes. One is hosting. Bluesky offers hosting but some people host on their own (it’s just a Docker container with sqlite), some on Cloudflare, some on community-hosted nodes like https://npmx.dev and https://selfhosted.social . From app persp…
So does Bluesky app have control over what data it aggregates and can decide (without checking with a user) not to aggregate data from a host? I am trying to understand what are the implications for a user, and a bad scenario where one would disagree with an action of the app.
And if the answer is "yes" then at least when someone "makes their own app" can they easily use "Bluesky hosts list" + add special extra hosts (or remove specific hosts) so that the app relies on the platform, with the exception the disagreement point?
Re: We need a federation of forges
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - 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 correct side) on Why do you have to take a side / take the correct side? Can't you either just not take any side or take whatever side you feel like and go with that?
On Mastodon, if you take the wrong side, those on the correct side will defederate from you. Not merely because you host (or don't host) the content they like (or dislike), but because you merely enable (or discriminate against) those who host that content. Of course, all sides are wrong in somebody's eyes; so no matter what you do, you will be defederated from by at least somebody. The way Mastodon works, defederati…
> there's no way to answer the question of "who am I going to lose if I migrate from x to y."
Ahckchually, once you create an account you can use the API endpoint for remote lookup to test in an automated manner which nodes are and aren't reachable.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#289I'm hesitant to build anything load-bearing on AT Protocol given its PQ exposure: https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/
I'm not sure it says much, but I met the person who wrote the post you linked to at ATmosphere this year. To me that says that maybe they're not as worried as you about ATProto's PQ exposure. I overheard lots of discussions about the topic, but I'm not an expert so I can't give much more insight than that.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure I understand, you're talking about mirroring git repo data between multiple different nodes? That seems unrelated to what's proposed in the OP--maybe you're seeing something I'm not?
if I fork a repository to my forge, I expect my forge to have an independent copy of the repo
How does that fix "when one node goes offline you may not have any upstream to pull from"? You'd still have your own local copy—just like git—but you wouldn't be able to access any sense of "upstream"