Fediverse

This is exciting. I think code forges are one of the biggest opportunities for ActivityPub to really go mainstream and change the internet. Not only because it'll make working with open source way easier since you can work with any compatible forge, but developers will be more exposed to ActivityPub just by working with the software and so more likely to participate in AP dev. It will be interesting to see what effect this has on the fediverse. There's been a lot of talk from various organizations/companies but this will be the first large project adopting AP. I'm interested to see how development goes for them and for other fediverse projects.

I wonder what changes it will force on Mastodon. Masto won't be the biggest project anymore and won't be able to throw its weight around as much. Just like the recent influx of users forced the implementation of full text search and has reenergized conversations about quote posts, I think federated gitlab would force masto to rethink some things.

On a side note: Gitea/Forgejo are also working on this and will probably get there first. Interoperability with Gitlab would be nice for sure.

Finally some good news from GitLab! I switched when MS bought GitHub but all the news from GitLab since that point has been some form of "we've severely nerfed our offerings for open source projects". This, however, will make GitLab better for FOSS as people from across other platforms can contribute. If Gitea and others also support this then GitLab may start to crack. If GitHub also implements this then we won't need accounts there to contribute.

Well shit. Way to surprise in a good way, for the first time in a long-time, GitLab. Welcome back.

I thought it'd be issue/MR discussions because that'd be a fairly obvious application of AP but it's actually for MRs themselves? Wow.

Git forges are the only remaining non-federated social platforms that I still heavily use.

With AP, we might finally be able to build a forge network that could become a viable public hosting alternative to GitHub.

Yeah interesting idea. I can see it being useful for private enterprise implementations of gitlab to contribute to upstream projects.. I don't think it's possible to fork a public github.com repo to a self hosted github enterprise instance but it's been a while since I've run that and I don't remember ever actually trying.

It might make tooling easier.. I can see it being pretty easy to setup bi-directional comms with non-gitlab CI/CD pipelines doing this.

Really it might entirely eliminate the need for service accounts or whatever the gitlab equivalent of Github Apps is too which would be wonderful.

As someone who hasn't worked on open source projects, can someone please explain what this means? I know what ActivityPub is and I know what Git pull requests are, but I don't understand what they have to do with each other. Is the idea that this lets you view GitLab pull requests from outside of the GitLab website?

This is huge and excellent news. I can't wait to welcome all of the gitlab users to our beautiful fediverse.

Great news!