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Daeraxa @ Daeraxa @lemmy.ml Posts 4Comments 238Joined 2 yr. ago
Daeraxa @ Daeraxa @lemmy.ml
Posts
4
Comments
238
Joined
2 yr. ago
It kind of went a bit unmaintained and any news on it was a bit silent.
I think the website is having some issues... or is it just me?
I find it very weird and it feels very nationalist/right-wing. In other countries the USA does not bring the concept of "freedom" to mind and, whilst it may be fine to Americans, doesn't really make me want to get involved with them as a potential international customer.
To be fair to Mastodon, most of the things I tend to be interested in with it have at least made it to Fosstodon which is thriving pretty well.
From wikipedia:
The number 76 in the company name is a reference to 1776, the year the American Revolution took place. Richell explained that the company hoped to spark an "open source revolution", giving consumers a choice to not use proprietary software.
I didn't even realise what the '76' in the name was meant to be until that comment, thats really rather cheesy...
I really like matcha. It is just a little go app (17MB) that is configured with a config file. You can use it to display in-terminal or, what you are meant to do, run it and it generates a markdown file as a "digest" of the feeds you configure, easy to trigger it manually or you can set up a cron job/systemd timer to do it on a schedule.
My original Raspberry Pi model B I bought on release day, fighting the latency and downtime of the websites selling them. Never did much with it but was my introduction to SBCs.
What I actually use day to day are a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ which is attached to a 3d printer running Octoprint and a Pi 4 running as a small home server to host my NextCloud and IRC bouncer (amongst a couple of other things).
My favourite toy at the moment is actually my StarFive VisionFive 2 RISCV board, its been fun trying it out and getting applications to compile on it which don't officially support RISC-V.
Which ones? The forges I linked were GitLab, Codeberg and sourcehut. Forgejo is the actual forge software that is powering the forge part of Codeberg, it is a fork of Gitea which itself is a fork of Gogs.
As for the federation things (Forgefriends, ForgeFed and ForgeFlux) I'm not really sure what is going on. Forgeflux doesn't seem to have anything going on and links to the Forgefriends community forum but looks to be entirely API based. ForgeFed looks to be an activitypub implementation that was, until recently, pretty dead and ForgeFriends is an online service to provide federation between different services.
Beyond a very basic idea of what they are attempting to achieve I don't really know the specifics of how each project works, if they are "competing" standards or they plan to work together to a single goal.
Can't remember why I looked into it but my very first experience was using Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04.4) on VirtualBox. At some point I also used Wubi to install either that one or one or two versions later on a desktop PC. Honestly I didn't really "get it", it was difficult to do anything (tar.gz files utterly defeated me), I really didn't understand the concept of the apt package manager. I was curious but ultimately didn't really know why anyone would bother using it.
A few years later I installed one of the versions of Ubuntu when they moved to the Unity DE (again on Virtualbox). I remember really liking it (only later found out how controversial it was) but yet again didn't really understand why I would want to use it instead of Windows.
It wasn't until around maybe 2018 or 2019 that I installed Linux Mint on a spare SSD in my computer and actually began using it. However yet again I still didn't have a reason to use it - that was until I got involved with an open source project and trying to set up a dev environment on Windows completely melted my melon. The instructions to get the dev environment going on Linux looked so much easier, and it was. I've barely looked back since.
Matcha. It isn't really an RSS reader as such but instead what it does is, when run (which you can do in the terminal as well), will create a markdown doc with URLs to each of the stories you have on the feed. The idea is you run it either on a timer or manually when you want to update the list. The reason I like it is because I can easily keep a history of past "digests" for later reading if I don't have time right now.
I think that the largest amount of lock-in is from familiarity with the interface, which applies to pretty much any service or product to some degree.
I think this is somewhat mitigated with some of the alternatives. You have the much more basic/"traditional" UIs of something like sourcehut which can be a bit of a challenge to get used to if you aren't familiar. Then you have the "GitHub-like" UIs - GitLab, Gogs/Gitea/Forgejo/Codeberg where people feel instantly comfortable as it is almost exactly the same experience as what they are used to.
It would be a pain if GitHub exploded, but it’s very much not an insurmountable problem, especially since every dev for a project will have a local copy of the code.
I don't think anyone is particularly worried about losing code, as you say it is all distributed. What isn't distributed is everything else - Issues, PRs, comments, releases. Those are much back up and re-implement if GitHub went belly up tomorrow.
I honestly don’t know what people want from a federated GitHub like service… do you just want like single sign on with OpenID? Because that’s basically the only benefit I can imagine, but maybe I have a shitty imagination.
Well the point is that you can use whatever UI you like and work with other repos. Just as with Lemmy the fact that you stay on your own instance yet can browse and post to other instances as well as non-lemmy instances like Kbin. The whole idea of forge federation is to avoid exactly the problem you describe with having to make a bunch of accounts and needing to work with and monitor different sites which is one of the big reasons people like GitHub - everything is in one place.
So no, it wouldn't be a single sign on because you don't need it, you just have your account on the forge instance you use - could be the big hosted ones like GitLab, Codeberg or sourcehut but could also just be a Gitea instance you run on a Raspberry Pi. From that instance you can still view other repos hosted elsewhere, create issues and PRs et.
So lets say you were interested in a project hosted at https://codeberg.org/blazinglyfasttm/rustything but you were using your own account on a self hosted Gitea you could still interact with the repo without going to the Codeberg website. Instead you would be able to use something like https://myimaginativeforgename.io/blazinglyfasttm@codeberg.org/rustything. No new accounts, no different UIs but you can still interact with the project as if you were on the original site.
How exactly would a federated forge guarantee the safety of your repo? With GitHub/MS you can be relatively confident that your private repos won’t be leaked or that your repos won’t dissappear due to server/backup issues.
Well because the protocols would be completely open and the idea is that the services can operate with eachother it should be rather easy to manually back up your own repos. In fact Forgefriends have the F3 (friendly forge format) which is designed exactly for this - to record all the "non-git" info for purposes of not only federation but backup and portability.
This means that what you might lose in overall stability you gain in actually having a full backup and copy of everything in order to move or restore. In the perfect world you get both but honestly I'd happily take the latter as it means nobody is in control of that data but me.
The project, yes, but not so much the other tools like Discussions, projects, wiki - not to mention all your PRs and issues. Whilst there is the API it isn't exactly "portable" like the source code.
For me the analogy doesn't completely work. It isn't necessarily just about the monopoly but also the ideology. Steam's existance doesn't really come into conflict with the purpose it serves where with GitHub you have a proprietary closed source system acting as the hub of the open source community which just doesn't sit quite right with me.
I think it is somewhat different in that it affects a much smaller community - people outside of the open source world really don't know or care much about GitHub and its alternatives as they won't use any of them, I feel that is a very different story to operating systems which affects an awful lot more people.
The one difference is that there is currently a lot of interest in the fediverse so really I was musing if federation between forges outside of GitHub might be enough alone to kickstart some degree of migration and sharing in the space.
I agree that GitHub has become "the default" but really the question I'm asking is what would need to happen in order for it to no longer become the default, even if only in a minority but significant number of the GitHub population.
I totally understood what you meant in this case I meant "mastodon" referring to the "flagship" mastodon instance - mastodon.social. What I'm saying is that the fosstodon instance is thriving - about 90% of the things I follow comes from there and not mastodon.social. Sure in the general scheme of things it hasn't worked well on the federation front (although there was that period where mastodon.social shut down registrations - not sure if they opened up) but certainly for some groups and interests (in this case FOSS) it worked out just fine.