I think the federation was more about interacting with other instances. Like creating issues and pull-requests without needing to create a new account for every instance.

I think this would be useful, as reporting bugs on GitLabs can be annoying if you have to create an account first.

What advantage does a “fediverse” frontend have?

Github's dominance comes from the network effects. Everyone's on github, so if you have your project on a different repo, you won't get as many visibility. If your project is on gitlab only and someone wants to report a bug, they need to:

• Find your instance.
• Create an account.
• Deal with an unfamiliar interface
• Create the ticket
• Hope it gets seen.
• Potentially forget about it, unless they set up notifications.

A Federated forge solves all of that.

• You follow remote projects without having to create an account in the remote instance.
• You open an issue on the remote forge without having to open in an account in the remote instance, and you do it from your local server.
• If you have a PR ready, the remote instance gets notified.
• It makes a lot easier to separate CI/CD from source management.
• It makes a lot easier to separate source management from issue tracking.
• etc
• etc
• etc

I always assumed it was more or less targeting the federation of issues/MRs.

The git side of things is already distributed as you said, but if you decide to host your random project on your own GitLab instance you'll miss out on people submitting issues/MRs because they won't want to sign up for an account on your random instance (or sign in with another IdP).

This is where a lot of the reliance of GitHub comes from, in my opinion.

Every GitLab instance requires you to have an account there to comment and submit PRs. Projects are often hosted on different instances.

Git is already inherently distributed and automagically mirroring to other remotes is generally like three lines in any CI syntax (and there is probably a precommit hook for it too).

Git is, but what about everything else? When you clone a project on gitlab or github, does it come with all the issues, discussions, MRs, and so on?

I can see a LOT of security issues with not having a centralized source of truth on what the commit hashes should be and so forth.

That's what signed commits are for. Also, pull/merge requests and issues are sent to the origin instance, just like in the fediverse. Like now, you made a comment on a post on Fediverse@lemmy.world through your instance lemmy.zip. The same would happen with your comments, pull/merge requests, issue reports, and so on. There's no need for a "central authority".

Anti Commercial-AI license

Oh noo; forgejo is still not connected? I had high hopes. What's the timeline?

(Honestly, but for the wonky CI spec language I may have switched already)

ForgeJo

Tha is true, but the social aspect of sharing and following projects does not itself have distributed protocol. This is were AP makes sense.

My company wouldn’t let me access our GitHub for work projects (different department), so I made a private ForgeJo server at home and can tunnel in via Tailscale when away from home. (Decided not open ports and self-host a proxy for now). It worked perfectly and I believe ForgeJo is fantastic! I think Fedora started using them too.