Context: An external contributor is taking it upon himself to implement ActivityPub and possibly ForgeFed in Gitlab after Gitlab ignored the issue for more than 7 years
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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Whoa! I didn’t even know I could wish for such a future.
Having this feature would be very useful. Many big open source projects run their own gitlab instance, which add extra frictions for contributing because you need yet another gitlab account just for those projects.
Exactly, I think I have ~5 gitlab accounts and ~4 Gitea/Forgejo accounts.
Now another 7 years and 24 "please rebase this old code" requests before it's merged
My experience with contributing to gitlab has actually not been as you describe. Fairly fast responses, obviously targeted releases so I knew when to try and finish any Mr adjustments, bots that provided excellent aid and even ability to ask for subsystem specialist help, when CI shot out confusing errors that appeared unrelated. Frankly, I was impressed. I understand not every feature or bug would go this way, but if you follow their guidelines, get product road map positioning, it works. The amount of commits going in to main are incredible. The number of MRs they handle is equally impressive.
All of that said, I've still got issues in gitlab that are seven+ years old, without any movement. But I get it that they have to prioritize and contributions are a different story.
Alright, I haven't contributed to Gitlab so should not generalize. Just general experience of contributing to larger projects.
GitLab don't have the monetary incentive to implement federation. Most of their revenue is coming from big companies which are mostly using private GitLab instance and won't want their projects federated.
That being said, hope this changes can get merge as somebody already done the dirty work for them. The beauty of open source.
How can more instances not lead to more money? Look at the explosion of mastodon and other federated software. There's a lot of good will in the community and being a viable competitor to Github is definitely not worth nothing. If Gitlab could offload the majority of users from their main instance, I bet it would actually save them money. And more users, probably also means more contributors since they'll have experience hosting the instance and fixing issues they run into.
IMO, it's short-term thinking to say "federation is of no value to us".
video by Brodie Robertson about activitypub on gitlab (YouTube link)
He presented the issue with gitlab very well. Setting up an entire new account is the major reason (besides time) I don't contribute to projects on other gitlab instances. For some reason Gitlab management didn't think it important at all (maybe even considered it a feature).
Actually, Librewolf team set up recently a poll "should we move to Codeberg?". And this was one of the reasons for migrating.
P.S. other privacy/convenience issues with gitlab:
- gitlab.com seems to require credit card information for new users signing up, which is not really great if people just want to report bugs.
- gitlab.com uses Cloudflare, which for a few weeks locked out LibreWolf users from accessing gitlab.com in the past.
- GitLab requires Javascript even to just look at issues, which is not the case for Codeberg
P.P.S. They did move their codebase to Codeberg as a result.
Not true, I just tried to sign up:
Appears to be optional, if you don't want to use a phone number.
From what I remember, they require a credit card info for people outside of US. Here's my sign up screen with Netherlands VPN:
Yeah, been using GitLab semi-professionally for a while and have accounts on multiple instances, it never asked me to have a credit card on file, and I just don't put in a phone number. Saying that it requires it is sensationalism.
It requires it in countries other than the US
I'm Canadian
I guess Canada also doesn't need credit cards. But as you can see from this comment, there are countries in which credit cards are required: https://lemmy.one/comment/3041845
Their documentation has been frustratingly outdated at times too. But since GitHub is MS owned there are better options. I prefer codeberg for having an actual account on.