Gitlab/ActivityPub Design Documents by @oelmekki The goal of those documents is...
Several years in the making, GitLab is now very actively implementing ActivityPub! 🙌
The end-goal is to support AP for merge requests (aka pull requests), meaning git.alice.dev can send a merge request to gitlab.com/Bob/project.git
In the most expansive version of this vision, anyone running an AP-enabled git instance (with one or more repos) can send MRs to another instance’s repo, without having to sign up there.
For starters this will be GitLab-specific, but that’s already huge for self-hosters of GitLab who currently don’t benefit from the internal interop of the GitLab.com network.
First bite-sized todo on the implementation path there is ‘subscribe to project releases’. And yes, they are aware of ForgeFed and will likely make use of that spec for the advanced features of this epic.
Smart move by GitLab; through ActivityPub they’re getting a distributed version of GitHub’s social layer.
Hugely impactful as a way around GitHub’s moat as the de-facto social network of open source development. I follow hundreds of developers on GitHub, though mainly just to keep track of who I’ve interacted with, effectively adding them to a dev-specific address book.
I have a much harder time keeping track of non-GitHub devs on alt platforms, but if I could follow them on the fediverse that’s actually preferable over GitHub’s proprietary follow list.
There's lots of talk about "web 3" as regarding some crypto nonsense, but I think activitypub is the next step of the web, where different platforms communicate and you can have your home and you reach out to everywhere you want to be, and it's all integrated at your home.
There’s lots of talk about “web 3” as regarding some crypto nonsense, but I think activitypub is the next step of the web, where different platforms communicate and you can have your home and you reach out to everywhere you want to be, and it’s all integrated at your home.
Exactly. The real web 3 is decentralization, with the conveniences of web 2, but with the decentralization of web 1.
This is a great idea. Gitlab has too many features (bloated) for the average self hoster IMO. I hope forgero/gitea also follow the gitlab to enable activitypub
This feels like such a great step in the right direction. I Selfhost gitea, which also has this planned and is working on it, but it's taking a lot of time. I might consider switching to git lab if they are faster.
This is amazing! Honestly a no brainer feature. Having to create an account just to contribute on one project's instance is not a great experience currently and the reason I mainly stick to Github.
Kind of lame that they’re wasting time on gimmicky features like this rather than stuff people have been asking for (like Conan registry support)
I self host Gitlab because I want to be in control of my private repos. If I wanted to release open source projects and collaborate with people, I would use the SaaS version. Public instances that encourage contributions like Gnome have open registration, but activating federation seems like it would just add a new layer of moderation headaches for very little real benefit.
Am I missing something? Besides marketing for Gitlab, what real benefits could this bring to users?
its very much wanted, I dont want to have to create new accounts on every gitlab instance for all different projects like KDE, GNOME and others when I want to report a bug or something
If you can't be bothered to spend 1 minute to create an account, then you probably can't be bothered to create an actionable bug report or a merge-able PR.
I'm not against federation in general, but gitlab isn't twitter or reddit. It's a utility for doing work, and I don't see how it will do anything but grow the mountain of bloat on which gitlab is sitting.