Mastodawn

There was an article about moving to Codeberg on the orange website yesterday, and out of interest to get an impression of what average programmers think of the idea of moving, I took at look at the comments. (Yeah, I know …)

I’m going to write here my thoughts on a general impression of the comment thread as a whole. (Rather than respond to individuals.)

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Daphne Preston-Kendal 16h ago

(This thread reflects only my own views and not those of the remainder of the Codeberg presidium, board – nor (most importantly) does it reflect the views of the members of Codeberg as a whole, who ultimately make the decisions.)

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Daphne Preston-Kendal 16h ago

To begin by addressing what seemed to be a misconception underlying a lot of the comments:

Codeberg, the website, does not aim to replace GitHub. We poke fun at their recent foibles in our PR sometimes, but we do not want to become them.

We do not want to replace one single point of failure with another! (Admittedly, I think Codeberg.org, run by a non-profit, as SPOF would be better than GitHub.com, run by Microsoft, as an SPOF, but that’s not the goal!)

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Daphne Preston-Kendal 16h ago

We are much more excited by the idea of creating an ecosystem of forges (and different forge software) than in becoming the new one place where absolutely everything is hosted.

I am, for example, very pleased that even while switching to Forgejo, Fedora decided to keep on self-hosting rather than jumping to us.

To be clear, we’re open for everyone who needs us, especially individuals working on their own smaller projects. But other forges are our friends, not our competition

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Daphne Preston-Kendal 16h ago

Forge federation is something we’re actively pushing for because of this. Full federation support is still a few years ahead of us, probably, but you can already set up your own forge in a way that minimizes inconvenience to users by using Codeberg as a single sign-on provider for a self-hosted forge.

https://git.madhouse-project.org/, which hosts the Iocaine project, is a great example of this. If you set up Codeberg as SSO for your own site, almost all of our content rules are irrelevant to you.

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Daniel Gibson 14h ago

@dpk
One thing that would IMHO help for federation without full support would be to allow creating pull requests from any public Git repo.
I *think* it shouldn't be super hard?
Might require an "Update" button to pull in new changes (vs the local ones where pushed changes update the PR automatically), but otherwise I think it could work quite well and, together with the SSO you mentioned, be a very good start until full federation support is done

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Daniel Gibson

@dpk
(To be clear, I don't assume that "just adding a button" is all that needs to be done to make this work, it's just the user-facing thing that would be different vs existing PRs - in addition to specifying git URL + branch name instead of selecting it from a list. When talking about this potential feature people always pointed out that it can't work because Forgejo doesn't know when you push on the remote server and.. yes, but that's not a big issue, just let users update with a button)