Submitted 8 months ago by erlend@writing.exchange to fediversenews@venera.social
Several years in the making, GitLab is now very actively implementing #ActivityPub! 🙌
https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/11247
The end-goal is to support AP for merge requests (aka pull requests), meaning git.alice.dev can send an MR to gitlab.com/Bob/project.git
First bite-sized todo on the implementation path there is ‘subscribe to project releases’.
Smart move by GitLab; through ActivityPub they’re getting a distributed version of GitHub’s social layer.
@erlend @fediversenews A good opportunity to self host a gitlab again
@erlend @fediversenews @carl what a good idea, seems like a great next step for a git solution in general. The decentralisation open such possibilities. And got already support signed commits to ensure the commit is from the correct sender.
@erlend @fediversenews
Est-ce que c'est #Cloudflare
🔔 Cloudflare: `gitlab.com`
@erlend Also good news is that they're aware of #ForgeFed and are considering to implement it for the more forge-specific activities, after getting a baseline of social updates of discussions and activities via AP. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/21582#note_1470201114
@erlend @fediversenews hmm...not just forgejo...
@erlend @smallcircles @fediversenews Can you explain that end goal a bit more for the only partly technical like myself? Does that mean if a project is open to PR/MRs that anyone on AP anywhere can remotely send them an MR without having to log in to Gitlab and make the MR there?
@Brendanjones the Why and How sections of that issue are highly instructive.
Your understanding seems correct: 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-hostess of GitLab who currently don’t benefit from the internal interop of the GitLab.com network.
@Brendanjones also 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.
@Brendanjones @erlend @fediversenews
A good site for background is https://forgefed.org where a specification for an AP extension is crafted. Implementers of the spec can exchange merge requests between code forge softwares. Another forge that has received @NGIZero funding to add federation support is Gitea. It's downstream fork Forgejo is also working on that.
On the Gitlab epic the question was asked whether @forgefed support is planned.
@erlend @fediversenews Awesome! I read the thread and saw no mention of @forgefed either, do you folks know anything about these efforts?
@erlend@writing.exchange Ooo finally, this is exciting! I'm immediately slightly worried it doesn't mention ForgeFed or Codeberg in anyway - I hope it doesn't mean there are no interop discussions heavily going in the background. Using ActivityPub doesn't automatically mean interop.
kik@techhub.social 8 months ago
@erlend Hi Erlend 👋 Now I'm officially around. :)
erlend@writing.exchange 8 months ago
@kik yay, welcome! 🤗
kik@techhub.social 8 months ago
@erlend Thanks!