ForgeFedMar 10, 2021

Excited about #ForgeFed but unsure what the status is? 😅

Want to help but unsure how? 🤔

Wondering what's separating us from having a fediverse of forges? 🤓

How do we, the free software community, stop depending on proprietary centralized tools and switch over to a free, by-the-people, decentralized hosting and collaboration platform?

I have an idea: Let's start doing biweekly/monthly community meetings! What do you think?

Please vote, and also comment and share your thoughts 😊

--fr33

I'd love to participate
29.2%
Ummm maybe...
55.6%
Not interested, thanks
15.3%
Poll ended at .
Show threadthomaskuntzz

@forgefed I think ForgeFed's goal is very important, but ForgeFed as it is imagined right now might not be the best way to reach it: https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/23/Git-is-already-distributed.html

What do you think? 🤔
To me this article makes a fair point and I wondered if you had counter-arguments to this or if you just hadn't though about it this way

Git is already federated & decentralized

Mar 10, 2021 at 4:42pmWeb
Show threadfr33domloverMar 10, 2021

@thomaskuntzz @forgefed yeah, people keep asking this all the time. We had some article about this somewhere but I don't remember where 😅

The bottom line is: Email is common, familiar to many people/devs, has implementations, already supported by git and other VCSs. But email also has a UI problem (the message text is usually the UI, if it's not HTML then it's probably plain text) and it's not obvious how to integrate different servers/services/implementations using it. And almost everyone uses gmai1, it seems (I don't think I know anyone in-person who doesn't).

#ActivityPub is new and evolving, but it uses RDF, flexible structured data, clearly separating between the plain data and the UI. It gives a chance to utilize the state-of-the-art security and privacy related practices between all communicating parties, to create an evolving vocabulary supporting a variety of application types, and to have them all communicate.

I'm not saying either is better than the other, just providing a potential way for Gitea, GitLab, etc. etc. to federate.

Show threadfr33domloverMar 10, 2021

@thomaskuntzz @forgefed I do suspect though, that there's some underlying problem about the email approach.

Some people say email is perfect for this job, and the only missing part is good UI. And they may be right.

But I wonder, why no such UI exists, despite the long time email has been around. And I wonder, what if the problem is that on the bottom line, computers exist to serve us, and we people simply want convenient UIs that are easy to use and communicate well with us. And advanced devs tend to use advanced tools whose UIs don't work for the general population, such as the Mutt email client... and having all their tech knowledge, they can't see anymore, why people keep preferring shiny web UIs over email.

It's really simple, folks. It's because typing plain text into a textbox is way, way less friendly than dedicated buttons and widgets. The plain text stuff requires the user to do more technical thinking.

For email to compete with ActivityPub on UI, ML servers / MUAs would need to start having UI for interacting with the variety of possible email attachment file media types...