Just googled to see if there was an activitypub git host yet and came across this claiming gitlab are working on it at the moment and that it’s available as an experimental feature
Seems odd to me that people aren’t talking about this more here, has anyone tried it and if so is it any good?
What is the benefit of putting a git repo site on activity pub? It’s not like the underlying git repos are shared that way. I don’t get why this would be a lift for hosted repositories. I’m certainly not storing my code on Jim’s basement server.io
If I’m on one instance, I can send you a pull request, even if you’re on another instance. Then you can review it, and we can go back and forth. I can also comment on, create issues on, clone, star, watch, etc, repos that aren’t on my instance.
I think the general idea is discovery. At the moment if you want to look for a project you go to github and search. If you go to my gitea instance you find only my 10 projects. With federation I could search my own gitea instance and find/easily clone repos from all the federate instances. To me it seems a gamechanger in making codeberg/gitea and also gitlab real competitors to github.
Sharing git repos is the thing I’m interested in. Obviously you wouldn’t store your code on some random’s server, you’d self host or use one you trust and then anyone else could access it with their account from their instance is the dream
Git is already a distributed system. That’s its main advantage over older systems like SVN which used a client-server model. The thing is that a lot of people don’t understand distributed systems and kinda pushed it back into a client-server model with services like Github.
Discovery is the main issue that I think federation would solve. It’s the missing piece of a lot of distributed systems.
Currently I have to make an account on everyone’s personal gitlab (or gitea, or forgejo, etc) instance in order to make an issue or PR of their project. Would be nice if I could just use one account for it.
I wish we could just signed diffs and stop with the whole “make an account literally everywhere” mentality.
the email-list only folks are like 3/4s right; federation isn’t a solution to bring decentralization to an already decentralized system, it’s to just stop thinking that every saas has to “own” your stuff, and keep it behind auth and secrets and a big heavy database.