Federation on Unnamed Website

Forge Federation Design Discussion

Anthony Wang — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 16:22:52 +0000

Since I recently returned to working on forge federation, I’ve slightly forgotten some of the rationales and reasons for the design choices made earlier. This post is mostly written for myself, but if you have any feedback or comments, just let me know.

From a technical point of view (so ignoring aspects like moderation), forge federation is synchronization problem. You have two people who want to collaborate on a project, but without a centralized forge, there will be two copies of the data that must be kept in sync. Sure, you could have a forge with some sort of single sign-on to make it easy to create accounts, but that would basically be a centralized forge.

We're Missing Half ActivityPub's Potential!

Anthony Wang — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 04:35:50 +0000

Recently, I joined a research project at MIT called Graffiti, which conveniently has a broken website right now. Now before I explain the project, I’m going to talk about what I’ve increasingly come to see as the biggest technical problem with ActivityPub.

Unnecessarily building up suspense…

Wait for it…

ActivityPub servers conflate storage with processing.

Blah blah blah, what does that even mean? Basically, ActivityPub servers currently do way too many things. They handle storage, messages, and forwarding. Pretty reasonable. They can handle streaming and uploading videos, in the case of PeerTube. They can handle code hosting and collaboration, in the case of Forgejo. And on and on. Every server has its own implementation of storage and messaging.

Why Does My Forgejo Instance Have Thousands of Accounts?

Anthony Wang — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 19:46:13 +0000

A few months ago, my Gitea instance for dogfooding federation was mysteriously spammed by hundreds of accounts from banana.dog. Even more strangely, the banana.dog instance itself was gone, and replaced by some weird static website. (Bad pun: maybe banana.dog didn’t like my dogfooding) I wrote a script to clean up the spam, and then promptly forgot about the whole incident.

Fast forward to now, and my Gitea-turned-Forgejo instance now has 1816 users! These aren’t normal users. In fact, most of them don’t even exist! For instance, the lexicographically first account, @0xfr33d@mstdn.social, gives me a 410 error when I try fetching its actor with curl -H 'Accept: application/activity+json' https://mstdn.social/@0xfr33d | jq.

Answering Forgejo Federation Questions

Anthony Wang — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 21:47:26 +0000

Note: Also published on the Forgejo blog

What is federation?

Federation is about creating open protocols so that different servers can communicate with each other. Once Forgejo gains federation support via the ForgeFed protocol, you’ll be able to do things like create issues for projects on other Forgejo instances without creating an account on that instance. But federation doesn’t just solve the problem of having to create many Forgejo accounts. The power of federation comes from building an interoperable ecosystem, since any other code collaboration site or development tool can also add ForgeFed support. Just look at GitHub: it’s the epicenter of a giant ecosystem of apps and integrations and tools that cements GitHub’s position. It’s a textbook example of a walled garden. We want to create something similar, but in an open ecosystem where everything speaks the ForgeFed protocol, so you’re never locked-in by which forge or code collaboration software that you use.

Forge Federation Myths

Anthony Wang — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 13:08:06 -0500

Since I haven’t blogged about forge and Gitea federation in a while, I thought it would be nice to tear down some strawman misconceptions about forge federation.

So first of all, if you’re one of those people that thinks Git and GitHub are the same thing, please exit the premises now. Alright, got that out of the way, now on to the real deal.

Git is already decentralized

If that’s true, then why does everyone use GitHub?

Where are All the Forge Federation Developers?

Anthony Wang — Sun, 10 Jul 2022 14:25:06 -0500

There’s a famous story that during a conversation about flying saucers in 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi blurted out, “But where is everybody?”

This post isn’t about extraterrestrials, but rather forge federation developers. (Fortunately, we do have convincing evidence that forge federation developers do actually exist in the universe) The SFC’s recent #GiveUpGitHub campaign has shined the spotlight on an long-standing problem in the libre software world. So much free, open-source, libre code is hosted on a hostile profit-oriented proprietary platform, and we need solutions now.

Gitea Actually Joins the Fediverse

Anthony Wang — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 21:57:29 -0500

So I don’t know if you remember this or not, but on the first anniversary of the January 6 US Capitol riots, the Gitea Mastodon account made an announcement on the fediverse that changed my life. (Yeah, I know the January 6 riots have nothing to do with Gitea, but with all the news about the January 6 investigation lately, that’s what I think of instantly when I hear that date) Gitea was joining the fediverse! 🎉

Gitea Federation... Coming Soon to an Instance Near You!

Anthony Wang — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 20:48:00 -0500

Alright, so you’ve probably been waiting for years for Gitea federation and are just burning to find out when it’ll be released. After all, it’s been four years since work started on ForgeFed, and federation has proven to be far from trivial. So what’s been done so far and what still needs to be worked on?

If you’ve been following the Gitea federation story recently, you’ve probably heard about the NLnet Gitea grant. The milestones for that were recently published, and it looks pretty doable! Even better, the first two milestones are almost finished, and the third is being worked on at the moment. The others all seem straightforward too, right?