Comment by kelnos
13 hours 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.
We already had federation for decentralized forges: Email
But that wasn't hip enough so everyone moved to GitHub.
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.
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.)