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by kelnos 53 days ago
Yeah, federation is really the sticky bit. It's very frustrating for people to have to create yet another account in order to file an issue or submit a pull request.

And on top of that, spam is a huge issue. We've progressively further and further locked down new accounts on gitlab.xfce.org because the spam situation has just gotten so bad. We actually don't allow new "native" account creation at this point, and ask people to come to our Matrix channel to ask for an account. We do allow SSO from Github and gitlab.com, but some spam still sneaks through that way too.

I have my own personal Gitea instance that just doesn't allow outside users at all. I'd love to move all my personal projects to it, but at some point I would actually like to try to start a community around one or two of them, and I don't want to have to deal with spam.
3 comments
account42 52 days ago
We already had federation for decentralized forges: Email

But that wasn't hip enough so everyone moved to GitHub.

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kelnos 51 days ago
If you really think the UX of email is the same as the UX of a web-based forge, I'm not sure what to tell you.

You may prefer email over the latter, but I think these days you're in the minority. Your level of derision at this fact doesn't really change anything.

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divbzero 52 days ago
I really like the idea of distributed forges, but am not familiar with viable solutions for federation. Are there good options available right now? Or at least a not-terrible option?

(Edit: Turns out there’s a very obvious and widely used option. git format-patch + git send-email is used to develop major open source software such as Linux, GCC, and Git itself.)

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kelnos 51 days ago
> Turns out there’s a very obvious and widely used option. git format-patch + git send-email

That's fine for pull requests, perhaps, depending on your preferred UX, but what about a bug tracker? CI? Release artifacts?

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tardedmeme 52 days ago
Another way is to host your own fork on your own server, and send an email saying "hey please pull from this URL and merge if you like the changes"
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prima-facie 53 days ago
Oh we have a neat solution for that. Just give us your government issued id! I'm joking of course.

Thank you for maintaining Xfce! It's the best de around.

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