We need a federation of forges

Posted by icy 16 hours ago

We need a federation of forges(blog.tangled.org)

546 points | 340 commentspage 3

praseodym 12 hours ago|

Forgejo also has a roadmap for federation but it looks like development is progressing rather slowly: https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...

ghc 16 hours ago||

Is there really nothing like BitTorrent for git, or have we just not heard about it because of GitHub's network effects? It feels like this problem was solved long ago for binaries.

icy 16 hours ago||

There is! https://radicle.dev :)

swed420 16 hours ago|||

From today:

HardenedBSD Is Now Officially on Radicle

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47944864

tensegrist 15 hours ago||||

the fact that you, as the creator of a "competitor", post this as-is without a "At $co, we…" run-on is a good look

ghc 16 hours ago||||

Oh, that's pretty cool! Now I can't decide whether that approach or one based on AT is better...

icy 16 hours ago||

Pick whichever. We <3 the Radicle team and they're admittedly solving a much harder problem (gossiping git!) and rather elegantly at that.

pfraze 16 hours ago|||

Yeah I’ve met the Radicle people a couple times. I’ve never given it a thorough review but, for their goals, their designs have always seemed strong, and they’re pleasant people to chat with.

The main difference was atproto wanted to tackle scale, so we went with a servers & aggregation model. Radicle is going for device-to-device networking as a primary goal.

Ericson2314 13 hours ago|||

Do you think it will be possible to use them together? Having some sort of unified distributed system is intriguing to me. (e.g. can the Radical foundation and AT-proto foundation integrate, even?)

majorchord 9 hours ago|||

There is also ForgeFed/vervis

baq 16 hours ago|||

gittorrents were talked about and built at least 15 if not 20 years ago.

the issue isn't mirroring of data, this is a solved problem. everything else that a forge does is a problem - issue tracking, PRs, reviews, CI/CD, authn, authz, secrets, audit trails, ...

ghc 16 hours ago||

BitTorrent also enabled search engines to be built easily, which created discoverability. Unfortunately it's a much harder problem for git repos, especially when competing with GitHub search.

dtj1123 16 hours ago|||

Radicle may be what you're after

PurpleRamen 15 hours ago||

Git is already distributed by itself. The management-part is what's missing (mergerequests, permissions, issues..), and it's disputable whether this is really necessary, or just a nice to have.

bombcar 14 hours ago||

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?

tobylane 14 hours ago||

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.

tardedmeme 11 hours ago||

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.

bombcar 8 hours ago||

Apparently there are two competing ID federation setups, and a bunch of "login with Google/Apple/Facebook/ID.me" and nobody can agree on anything.

necrotic_comp 14 hours ago|||

I think it's just nice to have things in a central place ; no one's really gotten decentralized tech right and things like discoverability, interaction, job running, etc. is really nice to have in one place.

Mastodon and email are the closest I've felt to a distributed system that works, but for oss stuff ... I think we're getting closer, but it's still a very hard problem to solve.

nerdypepper 14 hours ago|||

> gpg keys; if someone has your private key, they are you no matter where

how would you rotate such a key and still convince everybody that you are still you?

> Or in other words, what specifically does GitHub "do" that can't be done by using git as a backing store?

how would you build a social graph of follows/stars and what not using user-owned git repos as a backing store?

bombcar 13 hours ago||

GPG key rotation is a known issue with solutions (hint: it involves multiple keys) - https://danielpecos.com/2019/03/30/how-to-rotate-your-openpg...

> how would you build a social graph of follows/stars and what not using user-owned git repos as a backing store?

I'm just spitballing and depending on how you want to display it, you may need more - but if I want to "follow" you I submit a signed commit to your "follow" repository, similar if I'm staring a repo; and then your system issues a signed commit back to my "followed" repo.

charcircuit 14 hours ago||

People need more than a VCS. A way to search all of open source project's code, issues, and pull requests. A way to distribute software releases for free. A way to share code snippets. A way to discover new projects. A way to see what your friends are working on. An issue tracker and pull request area that is easy for users to submit through.

yodon 15 hours ago||

GitHub is a huge and almost 20 year old company suddenly experiencing massive scale growth as a result of an externality it didn't cause and that no one predicted. That is an incredibly difficult scenario for any long-running, established organization to handle.

Yes, GitHub is temporarily breaking under the increased load, yes, it's likely to still be a thing in 2 months, and no, it's unlikely to still be a thing in 12 months.

It's very unlikely a cool new thing will peel enough developers off GitHub in the next six months to survive long term as GitHub inevitably gets its ability to handle the new normal scale back.

NetOpWibby 16 hours ago||

Last time I tried Tangled they had no concept of private repos. That’s the only thing keeping me on GitHub (oh, and my massive likes collection, I use those as bookmarks).

I’m self-hosting with cgit, maybe I could move my private repos to SourceHut? Idk.

tao_oat 15 hours ago|

There's an AT protocol working group for private data: https://atproto.wiki/en/working-groups/private-data

But you're right, the protocol doesn't currently support this.

altairprime 13 hours ago||

Show HN: Tangled – Git collaboration platform built on atproto (1 year ago, 15 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43234544

Tangled, a Git collaboration platform built on atproto (6 months ago, 86 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45543899

carrja99 15 hours ago||

Crazy... I actually hashed out a plan to begin bulding a successor to github earlier this week and this blog post describes EXACTLY what I was thinking about with atproto+git.

Good validation imho.

hayden_dev 13 hours ago|

If you've got ideas for things Tangled doesn't do, it's all open source too: https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core

So you could theoretically either fork it and use it as a good starting point, or (even better) contribute the ideas you have straight into Tangled itself! :)

bfrog 16 hours ago||

radicle.xyz also does the distributed/seeded forge setup and I think does a nice job of it already.

parentheses 8 hours ago||

This type of thing requires an economic driver to monetize the service.

I'd have a strong inclination to run such software if I knew that I was both helping host repos and getting paid.

evbogue 3 hours ago|

We need git-ssb

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