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We need a federation of forges

blog.tangled.org

341–350 of 424 posts

Re: We need a federation of forges

#341
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…

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Re: We need a federation of forges

#342
post #54

Why do we need to stick to Git? We need better tooling around the Patch Theory-based VCS which are better for decentralized working to begin with.

Immutable commits seem like a pretty good base for a decentralized VCS for me. In fact, Git was designed for this use case in the first place.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#343

If only git was a distributed system!

People tend to focus a bit to much on the Git part of Github. Git is already relatively fine. It's nice to have a web view into the repo, users can just clone the repo, but many seems hesitant to do so as if it's some major operation (it can be for large repos, but normally it's not). The tricky part is the bugtracker and pull-requests. I don't really know how I feel about the Github issue tracker. In theory it's a g…

Personally, I prefer mailing lists. The tooling is there, it's consistent, and it's powerful. And if it adds a higher bar of entry, in this day and age that seems like a plus to me.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the actual git part isn't federated

Git itself is already federated. Every clone is a repo. That's not the bit that needs fixing.

so you would consider fossil a fully realized version of this?

Re: We need a federation of forges

#345
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…

To be fair, Mastodon is actually surviving.

Comparing open source social to algorithmically based social is never going to work, that's like saying the Light Phone isn't as popular as the iPhone, so its a failure.

The question is, does it work for you ? If over time open social gets a toehold then it will be an option people know about and can choose.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The jargon is just naming the free-standing components after rope/string related things. i.e. tangle, knot, spindle, etc.

Just call them what they are. Federations/networks, servers, repositories...

You got pretty much none of the names right.

Tangle: the appview server of the tangled network.

Knot: the git server that holds an arbitrary quantity of git repos.

Spindle: CI servers/runners/nodes.

Each one is the name of a component and the name for those components is pretty arbitrary.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How do you discover new software using GitHub? Let's say I want an RSS reader for Linux - how does GitHub help me find one? I must have never used this part of GitHub.

Github has search functionality and grouping of repos by topic, etc. So you can browse repos related to a specific topic. Or you can click on someone's profile and see the projects they've worked on and maybe one of them is interesting.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#348
Oh! Posted some replies here, but: I forgot to mention one other incredibly awesome atproto based social coding decentralization system! Jeremie Miller's v-it, which lets folks share "caps" changes, "vouch" for each others caps, share skills. https://v-it.org/

It's so so so early. But I love how it moves from a world of maintainers & pull requests to a more ambient "this is what is working for me". I think this really is a next kind of leap. I don't know if we can keep relying on maintainer folks to guide each project forward like we have, if our agentic selves can be bandwidth limited & still go where we need to, channeling all our energy through individuals.

We need a federation of maintainers. A distributed of maintainers. Maintain ought be social. Tangled is great and I hope we can go beyond federation to many tangled, to widely widely tangled. And I hope we can go past maintainers too, past pressuring single people to have to decide it all. I think v-it really preceeda such an interesting agentic leaping off point that we are at, so interestingly.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#349
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Events in atproto speak are changes to metadata/records, i.e. repo/MST events on a PDS.

So for tangled that means federation of issues, PRs, comments, follows, stars, and anything defined in an atproto lexicon. i.e. everything except the actual git repo itself. Those repos are singularly hosted on a given knot for the time being.

Now it's not a huge leap to imagine extending functionality to support cross-knot mirrors but that's not a supported feature yet. And of course you can always just fork a repo instead.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#350
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no concept of "instances" on ATproto. Regardless of name and precise technical details, there are central service components that can ban you. If a proper ecosystem of those ever springs up then the equivalent of fediblock (ie guilt by association) oriented at individual accounts or PDS is the next logical step. At present (last I checked) there's only (approximately) one primary provider plus blacksky mak…

Don’t they already have extensive block lists that you can “subscribe” to? I think some official blue sky account was added to some and they got super mad?

That's an additional (but closely related) issue. AFAIK those lists work at the user level to filter what you see, so while they aren't a network breaking "guilt by association" practice they're a form of centralized, lazy, delegated moderation that has outsized impacts on any borderline cases or false positives.
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