Welcome ForgeFed as part of Forge Friends?

[dachary]

It would make sense for me to move this discussion to the idea category instead of the governance and decisions category. For the following reasons:

• It is unclear what the decision is about at this point in time
• The forgefriends community does not have the power to unilaterally make a decision that has an impact on the forgefed community

It is quite possible that some action within the forgefriends community will be the outcome of this discussion. And it is also possible that this action will require a decision to be made. But it looks like we’re not there yet.

What do you think?

[aschrijver]

Ah yes, it was unclear and I adjusted the title. This is about the intent to welcome ForgeFed and preparedness to facilitate it on this forum.

With that nuance it should be a clear decision, and with consent everything is up to ForgeFed folks to also agree with it.

[dachary]

I’m sorry, I still have trouble understanding what this decision is about. What action will be carried out exactly?

[aschrijver]

The following is the situation:

• ForgeFed is unfinished and no longer maintained.
• Feneas may stop in January and then forum full of ForgeFed info may disappear. It is not on archive.org
• ForgeFed website may disappear any time. Probably archived, but still… not nice if it happens

Then on the other hand:

• Forgefriends builds on top of (the vision and/or protocol) of ForgeFed.
• ForgeFed is a natural part of a broader forge friends movement / open community.
• Forgefriends may want to finish what ForgeFed started, make an open standard, bring specs to 1.0

BUT:

• ForgeFed being unmaintained will not come by itself. The initiative of getting it to forge friends is on Forgefriends side.
• Decision is whether forgefriends wants to get this going, see if it is possible, and facilitate ForgeFed within the community.

[dachary]

@aschrijver

Forgefriends may want to finish what ForgeFed started, make an open standard, bring specs to 1.0

I understand that this is the action for which you would like to come to a decision. But I don’t see how a decision can be taken if nobody is committed to do the work.

[aschrijver]

Maybe we should start thinking about what ForgeFed means to Forgefriends as a whole. I might take some action to approach the ForgeFed folks and try to get their consent and any help they might provide. But I am not involved with nitty gritty parts of forgefriends where it comes to establishing forge federation. So, besides I already have so many things going, I won’t be a ‘maintainer’ (or whatever we call the custodian role). Although the custodian, as I see it, will be a shared responsibility for the entire community, after a move of ForgeFed. A common commitment.

Suppose ForgeFed would suddenly disappear? Is that a risk to Forgefriends? Is Forgefriends dedicated to delivering an open standard specification for the federation of forges? Or does it just build code to do so?

[dachary]

@aschrijver

Although the custodian, as I see it, will be a shared responsibility for the entire community, after a move of ForgeFed. A common commitment.

In a hierarchical community that would work. The top level (board of a non-profit for instance) would decide to take on such a common commitment and it would then be its responsibility to do whatever is necessary for the lower levels of the hierarchy to followup. In a horizontal community it is the other way around: individual commitments become common commitments when more than one community member work on the same thing. But even when that happens, it does not mean that the community, as a whole, has a responsibility to continue… because it is up to each individual member to decide what they devote their time on.

@aschrijver

Suppose ForgeFed would suddenly disappear? Is that a risk to Forgefriends?

ForgeFed has not changed since Forgefriends started. But there is still hope: although one of the authors left, the other is still around.

@aschrijver

Is Forgefriends dedicated to delivering an open standard specification for the federation of forges? Or does it just build code to do so?

In 2022 I think most of my time will be dedicated to working on a JSON format to export/import issues/pull requests/…, i.e. the continuation of the fedeproxy format. I don’t know if it will lead to an open standard. But it is very close to what forgefed needs and it may help whoever continues the work. This is all very blurry at the moment but I hope it will become clearer as the implementation progresses.

[aschrijver]

@dachary

@aschrijver

Although the custodian, as I see it, will be a shared responsibility for the entire community, after a move of ForgeFed. A common commitment.

In a hierarchical community that would work. The top level (board of a non-profit for instance) would decide to take on such a common commitment and it would then be its responsibility to do whatever is necessary for the lower levels of the hierarchy to followup. In a horizontal community it is the other way around: individual commitments become common commitments when more than one community member work on the same thing. But even when that happens, it does not mean that the community, as a whole, has a responsibility to continue… because it is up to each individual member to decide what they devote their time on.

This is sort of what I meant with that text. A flat community in any case.

Maybe the community governance needs to be further refined. If someone perceives an urgent opportunity or threat that involves the future of the community as a whole, then there should be a way to clearly inform on the urgency and have a “call to action” on “who will pick this up?”. It should not be by definition the person that was so kind to inform on the urgent matter.

An outcome of such call might be that no one is willing to take a full commitment, but that members will share the burden collectively until someone does. I feel that any member being part of forgefriends should have the future of forgefriends - as a whole - in the back of their minds, and high-level positioning, strategy, objectives, etc. to then make their own actions such that they fit best with that.

In any case, urgent matters need to be brought to attention to the community is some way or other. Some forum title formatting, categories and labels to use might be in order (probably not discussed within this topic).

[dachary]

@aschrijver

If someone perceives an urgent opportunity or threat that involves the future of the community as a whole, then there should be a way to clearly inform on the urgency and have a “call to action” on “who will pick this up?”.

This is what you have done, a number of times on various topics, and it had an impact (name, communication strategy, etc.). I think that when you wrote “clearly inform” you mean there should be a way for to increase the odds that someone will answer such calls. Is that right?

@aschrijver

An outcome of such call might be that no one is willing to take a full commitment, but that members will share the burden collectively until someone does.

If two or more members are willing to take action that will work, yes. But it won’t mean that other members are committed to take action at a later time.

[tallship]

@dachary

If two or more members are willing to take action that will work, yes. But it won’t mean that other members are committed to take action at a later time.

Okay so how many members are there? I see six admins listed.

Is this a community of interested volunteers or a structured organization that has legal purview over the community assets (i.e., this Discourse or Flarem or whatev).

The rules mention “the company” several times in the ToS, so is there a registered company encompassing the community and it’s actions, etc.?

The AUP section of the ToS has an odd rule, IMO…

8. 1. You may not hyperlink to images or other non-hypertext content on the forum on other webpages.

I can understand a desire to control spam, but links are kinda more than just useful, when the intent is for collaborative discussion, especially when surrounding development based, topics. There are several hyperlinks in this thread, but those links are not to “non-hypertext content”, so that’'s at least a little vague from my perspective. Maybe that’s just a convoluted way to say “upload images - don’t link to them externally”?

Further, there are adequate ranking spam controls that can be implemented, say, level n00b cannot post links, level non-noob does not have such an account level moderation restriction placed on the user accounts - so such anti-spam measures are able to be implemented at the administration level of the forumware.

Okay 'nuff from me about constraints. Nice cut and paste, but http://forum.fedeproxy.eu prolly needs to be changed at the top of the ToS.

I can’t really recall how I landed here. I know that either the topic of ForgeFriends or ForgeFed was casually brought up in a Matrix room, but I’m not sure which one, eventually, after following bread crumbs due to my interest in seeing this implemented in Gitea I wound up here and registered

• Is there an official dev or topical related room dedicated to ForgeFriends or ForgeFed? If not, that would be really nice.

• There is already an extant listserv at framalistes - “git-federation”

• ForgeFed was originally called GitPub (According to the GitHub repo, which is merely some spartan docs).

• There’s currently about a dozen repos, mostly mirrors of the “notabug” repo, and mostly position papers/roadmaps/doc related, like the one at notabug, except for the zPlus repo, which has some semblance of code I’ve been unable to find an acual code repo, however - is there one?

• ForgeFed exists on the Fedi at: @ForgeFed@Floss.Social - Does this community’s “company” control that account?

I remember stumbling across Feneas, as I wanted to use the logo on my sites (free, FOSS based, online public access services), but was informed that said organization was all but defunct.

It doesn’t appear that there’s any sort of shortage of infra, but I can also provide some machinery as well.

• What is preventing the simple forking of the project and working on a particular branch of the software by renaming it GitFed, or something else, in case the original devs resume work.

That’s a lot of pondering laced with questions,I know, but obtaining many of those answers can assist in my understanding and hopefully being able to contribute something meaningful to the community.

Thanks!

[aschrijver]

Hi there @tallship. Welcome, nice to see you here

This community is still but small. There are 36 members registered. I only became admin 2 days ago, and that was because I’ll manage a subsection of the site, #socialcoding for an upcoming initiative I’m involved with. Other than that the forgefriends community is as flat and open as can be, and I’m just a member like any other. The forgefriends (then FedeProxy) initiative was launched by @dachary and @pilou along some (I think) challenging governance guidelines, that are still being refined.

The Terms of Service you are referring to, are the standard ones that come with any Discourse installation, and I think they may not be the ones that @dachary would like to see. They are things-to-be-improved, like many other parts of this community and organization can be.

Here’s the Forgefriends Code of Conduct and the Forgefriends Community Manifesto that are the relevant docs. Forgefriends has a Mattermost channel, I think (though I’d prefer Matrix myself).

ForgeFed

As said ForgeFed is not actively worked on. The main developer fr33domlover has said they’ll not continue the work. The other dev Bill Haugen is still around on the web, but not active on it either. That Github repo was abandoned (literally) a long time ago, with the maintainer disappearing and there was not even the opportunity to update the README with a new location. Feneas is indeed in a bad state… I keep the SocialHub informed on that here. Both devs weren’t very responsive at the time ForgeFed was still active, and I think one or both of them also manage the fedi account at floss.social.

All this is in a nutshell why I created this topic. It would be super is someone dedicated to continuing the great work that was done before.

@tallship

What is preventing the simple forking of the project and working on a particular branch of the software by renaming it GitFed, or something else, in case the original devs resume work.

Nothing really, except that there should be volunteers willing to do so. In terms of renaming… that is something to think about, yes. Independently of ForgeFed another project at Github started working on ForgeFed.io and :drumroll: … they are also part of forgefriends now. See: ForgeFed.io (different from ForgeFed)

[dachary]

@tallship

@dachary

If two or more members are willing to take action that will work, yes. But it won’t mean that other members are committed to take action at a later time.

Okay so how many members are there? I see six admins listed.

As @aschrijver said, this is a tiny community and my guess is that less than five people would currently answer yes to the question: “do you feel like you’re a member of the forgefriends community”.

@tallship

The rules mention “the company” several times in the ToS, so is there a registered company encompassing the community and it’s actions, etc.?..

The about page linked to pages that were standard discourse template. They should have been updated when the forum was setup but they were not which is a mistake. To avoid further confusion I edited them to point to existing pages with accurate information. Sorry about that.

@tallship

Is there an official dev or topical related room dedicated to ForgeFriends or ForgeFed? If not, that would be really nice.

The development category is for all software development discussions and this is where discussions happen. There are no chatroom discussions at the moment.

The forgefed category has a few messages related to how forgefriends relies on forgefed but nothing more than that.

@tallship

…except for the zPlus repo, which has some semblance of code I’ve been unable to find an acual code repo, however - is there one?

I would ask zPlus about this but they are not registered in this forum. I’ve had success getting in touch a few months ago on the irc.libera.chat#peers room.

To complement what @aschrijver wrote regarding Feneas, I would on contributing to this conversation.

Thanks a lot for showing up and helping to fix the inaccurate ToS/FAQ links!

[dachary]

@aschrijver

Independently of ForgeFed another project at Github started working on ForgeFed.io and :drumroll: … they are also part of forgefriends now. See: ForgeFed.io (different from ForgeFed)

My understanding is that forgefed.io will use a dedicated forum category but I don’t recall that the members of forgefed.io said it was part of forgefriends. I think it is fine if the project uses this category without being part of forgefriends.

[aschrijver]

@dachary

My understanding is that forgefed.io will use a dedicated forum category but I don’t recall that the members of forgefed.io said it was part of forgefriends. I think it is fine if the project uses this category without being part of forgefriends.

Ah yes, good that you mention. I think they may benefit from participating in our positioning brainstorm. See my last comment here: Redefining and positioning the forgefriends project - #7 by aschrijver I will post a heads-up in their Matrix room.

[realaravinth]

ForgeFlux is interested in adopting ForgeFed since it only makes sense after our decision to base our protocol on Activity Pub.

I feel that the ForgeFed spec requires some changes but apart from that, it’s a fantastic and the authors have done a fine job at modelling forge-workflows into Activity Pub.

That said, if Gitea will be interested in co-adopting and/or taking part in completing the spec.

[aschrijver]

FYI See: Mapping Code Forge specifications to Social Coding FSDL - #11 by aschrijver

The Free Software Development Lifecycle has been made part of the Discuss Social Coding and - depending how the ForgeFed specification project continues - the specs can be made part of that, and documentation added to the crowdsourced Social Coding website.

[aschrijver]

There are projects on fedi that excite me more than others, because they have a potential and opportunity that is tremendous when we act on the vision of what they could bring. All projects of course need to start with very modest beginnings. But also very often these beginnings steer the project direction such that the full potential is entirely overlooked. A kind of myopia sets in, and day-to-day technical struggles absorb all time to reconsider the broader context.

Such is the case too imho with ForgeFed, forgefriends community, and maybe the - not yet really started, but funded - Gitea federation project of the core team.

I transferred my comment from Forge Federation General chatroom to a Social Coding FSDL forum topic:

World of Opportunity: Expanding from ForgeFed to FSDL

[dachary]

For cross reference.

Fr33domlover - January 2022 toot considering continuing work on forgefed

This an agreement for me to maintain forgefed. This is a green light to get forgefed moving forward, very happen about it