the approach and the goal of forgefriends are worth pursuing
the people involved have the necessary skills and motivations to succeed
It would make a difference if you post a comment saying so. Not only will it be a motivation but it would also help when applying for grants (you are welcome to check the details of the grant approved in March 2021).
If you think the project looks interesting from a distance but you don’t have an informed opinion about it, don’t hesitate to say so: every bit of moral support counts
In 2018 I closed my GitHub account for ethical reasons and have since been unable to participate in Free Software projects hosted there. The federation of forges would allow me to reconnect with these projects. Not only do I support fedeproxy: I need it
I sent a description of the forge federation project to Richard Stallman. I worked with him back in 2001 to create https://savannah.gnu.org and trust his advice on the matter. He explained an aspect that I overlooked: when the acceptance of a software project is moderated on a forge, projects created via the federation protocol should also be moderated. Since the forge Savannah has requirements about licensing and substance, to support the free software movement, it shouldn’t automatically allow projects to federate from other forges which don’t have the same requirements.
Hi, as a forge developer myself (being the maintainer of heptapod, I find this project interesting.
I’ve skimmed the project and have been impressed by the care about the human / social aspect in the description. Exploring strategies for fostering user adoption looks to be a first class member of the project itself, and that’s a very good thing.
On the technical side, I expect the biggest challenge to be that the data to be exchanged have (usually) not been designed to do so, by contrast with the source code itself, now that distributed version control has become the norm.
About the moderation thing, we’d have that need with https://foss.heptapod.net
since that is a foss-only hosting
(not yet though, as we also require for now that people host the authoritative code base, but that won’t probably last for long)
I like this project both from the perspective of a FOSS / AP / Fediverse advocate, and as an end-user once it is in production (having numerouse forge accounts to juggle).
To highlight the importance of this project wrt the Fediverse aspect I have created this topic:
John Sullivan, executive director of the Free Software Foundation answered the following questions in a private email and gave me his permission to reuse them to show grant applications reviewers that independent third parties support fedeproxy:
Do you think the approach and the goal of the project are worth pursuing?
“We also hope that in the future we’ll be able to see decentralized, federated collaboration platforms that meet most needs. We will continue to be interested in that direction, but we think the need for this freedom-respecting forge is time sensitive, so we’re going to do it with the free software we have available right now. Allowing issues and other data to be imported and exported is a feature that we want in our new forge, because that will at least ensure that users can move to another instance of the same platform.”
I think this is an amazing project, and one that I see as forging a novel and extremely useful use-case for the ActivityPub protocol (beyond social media types of applications). I have some projects in mind that I would like to be free software, but choosing one forge over another, and experiencing the associated lock-in and poor ethical implications, is demoralizing.
The project leads appear competent and have considered the issue from many important angles, not just the technical, which is heartening when evaluating the likely success and health of the project.
