This seriously needs some content. They were accepted to a funding round for an unspecified reason, with a link to a page with the statement "The project summary for this project is not yet available. Please come back soon!"
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You should probably check out forgefriends.org. There's detailed monthly reports on what they're doing and why. They started cooperating with gitea because the maintainers were open to the idea of federation (most other forges were not interested) and some french FLOSS NGO (chapril.org [0]) was happy to let them experiment in exchange for maintenance for their forging infra (already based on gitea).
Huge shout out to the forgefriends people! I've never interacted with them personally, but from reading their blog and forums, they seem to take a great care to build a human community before all and to achieve consensus with everyone involved.
[0] It's a pun because it's pushed by the APRIL non-profit, and CHATONS is a campaign started by Framasoft to deframasoftize the Internet (after their degooglize the Internet campaign had "too much" success) to promote hosting cooperatives. The contraction of the two forms "CHAPRIL", a joke a person who is not familiar with the french-speaking FLOSS/selfhosting ecosystem cannot appreciate without context.
Feels a bit like trying to unravel web3 or category theory. I went to forgefriends.org. It's all about forges. Forge-this, forge-that. So like, what's a forge?
Github is a forge. Sourceforge is a forge.
Every independent codeberg, gitlab and gitea server (and there are more) that is running is a forge. Right now, you have to have an account on one to open issues, make pull requests, contribute in any way to code hosted on it and only it, and you need an account on each and every server you want to contribute to, even provide a bug report. This is no good, because people who like to host their own code can only frictionlessly contribute to their own code, or code hosted on their forge, or the forge they put their code on. How many people are going to create an account on gitea.bobsserver.biz just to put a bug report in for an annoyance in some app they use?
This is why github has a near monopoly in this space, everyone can contribute with a github account. To decentralize this, I need to be able to put a PR in your project hosted on your forge using the account I have on my forge. This is what ForgeFed does, it is an extension of ActivityPub to enable federation of forges.
Sourcehut's and a more traditional approach is decentralized by using decentralized technology like git send mail, mailing lists, and IRC.
However I'm still happy to see this decentralized identity and ActivityPub integration. I hope it catches on more.
Thank you!
Please put this explanation on one of the webpages explaining the aims this project.
Documentation continues to be the most undervalued and underappreciated part of open source while being absolutely essential for any project that cares about adoption.
Isn't the problem of having universal accounts across servers independent of git and hosting code? I don't see how the two are related.
It's a good goal, b/c at the moment you only have "Login with Google" or "Login with Github (ie. M$)". But I hope the ultimate solution isn't compartmentalized to source code management
Maybe I'm not seeing some aspect which ties the two together?
At present, you can move a repo between forges by cloning it locally and pushing it back up. However, you lose the issues/milestones/PR comments etc.
Federation is useful since it defines a portable standard for those things.
If you have an account on federated forge site A, you can use it to file bugs (via the forge A UI) against a project on federated forge site B.
Both websites UI will show the bug and any comments on it - data will be replicated.
In practice, there'll likely be complexities around EG moderation (particularly for larger projects making controversial decisions), replication occasionally losing data due to intermittent faults, etc. IMO those technical reasons are less likely to sink the project than inertia is; people are already using github.
I don't think inertia is really a problem. People are already using these self hosted options, and particularly in FOSS, people value the option to be independent. Maybe it won't sink github, but it will probably end the practice of people mirroring there and running their own canonical repo elsewhere.
I went to the site and the second line on the page says “Because most Free Software projects are hosted on proprietary forges (for example GitHub)”. So code storage and collaboration.
A forge is a location people meet to build tools. Except we don't melt metal parts in a big fire on Gitea/Gitlab/Sourcehut so the analogy runs dry pretty quickly.
You're right.
What's basically going on is that a project to extend ActivityPub (the protocol that Mastodon, Pleroma, Peertube, Lemmy, etc use to federate with one another) has a proposed extension called ForgeFed to enable more interaction types so as to allow code forges to federate with one another. There have been a few projects slated to implement it once the spec is finalized, gitea being one of those projects.