Yay! Yes! We need this so much! Someone willing to work on GitLab federation! I’m excited!
I’m not a software project diplomacy expert, but I believe it would be beneficial to get the federation code into GitLab itself. Maintaining a fork is the less preferred option, but it’s possible if the community and the GitLab company fail to cooperate.
I guess the 1st step would be to assess the general structure / architecture for adding federation to the GitLab codebase? Which may involve steps such as:
- Find out which tech GitLab is planning to use for its GitLab-to-GitLab “internal federation” feature
- Find out which DB schema changes GitLab is going to do for that - can they be the basis for ActivityPub-based federation as well?
- Figure out a high-level plan for adding actors, inboxes, outboxes, following, delivery, to GitLab’s backend, while trying to reuse existing implementations (e.g. Mastodon is in Ruby as well)
- Talk with people from the GitLab company about these items, and see how they feel about the plan - can we all work together? Would they be willing to review your PRs? Would they be willing to expand their internal federation roadmap, to include “open” fediverse federation as well?
I suppose you can apply for NLNet funding; the application form doesn’t require you to fill in the exact work plan yet. So you’d have time to explore the situation and come up with a plan by the time NLNet asks for it.