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.
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?
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.
ForgeFed has not changed since Forgefriends started. But there is still hope: although one of the authors left, the other is still around.
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.
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).
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?
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…
- 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 
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Is there an official dev or topical related room dedicated to ForgeFriends or ForgeFed? If not, that would be really nice.
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There is already an extant listserv at framalistes - “git-federation”
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ForgeFed was originally called GitPub (According to the GitHub repo, which is merely some spartan docs).
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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?
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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!
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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.
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)
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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”.
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.
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.
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!
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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.
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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.
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10 posts were split to a new topic: Forgefriends Free Software Development Lifecycle: Forge specifications incubator project
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.
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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.
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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:
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For cross reference.
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i just wanted to add to this thread, as it was suggested multiple times that the future of forge-fed or it’s website and other important information could disappear - there are multiple reasons why that is nothing to worry about
i can understand the concern; but i believe that is due only to an unfortunate lack of public communication lately - the only communication from its former lead dev, was in the form of mastodon toots, and most people have not seen them - nothing was done when FENEAS shutdown, because there was already a backup forum setup on the activity-pub forum; though it would have been good to make some statement about that
there are several people who could manage forge-fed if needed - most of them had no idea that it the lead dev stopped working on it though - i learned only this week
the website is in no danger - that server has been running for many years before the forge-fed effort began - the same server also hosts several other peers websites and our email service - it is not going to disappear
the important thing to note regarding the important information, is that neither the website nor the forum has the important details - most everything discussed on the forum, which related to some work needing to be done, was mirrored as tickets on the notabug repo - notabug is no danger of disappearing either - the VCS repo is mirrored on many different hosts; and those notabug tickets are not essential
all of the important discussions regarding which features were desired, how they should/could be implemented, the project organization, the project license, everything, were conducted on a mailing list, which is archived on the frama website
i would suggest to anyone who is interested in implementing forge federation in any form, to read that entire mailing list - those discussion were quite comprehensive; and included developers and users alike - i consider that to be the primary resource, to learn what people generally want forge federation to be - there are few specifics; but most of the common debates that will arise were covered, what is possible while retaining maximal cross-forge and heterogeneous client compatibility, the pros and cons of various protocols, and so on
https://framalistes.org/sympa/info/git-federation
i could publish the raw MBOX, for those who prefer that
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i would like to add an unrelated note about the forgeflux.org website
“ForgeFed was an attempt to bring the best of both worlds together, but it required the forge developers (GitHub, GitLab, etc.) to participate in the development.”
firstly, i would have written that as “ForgeFed is an attempt …” - regardless of the current situation, there is rarely a reason to “throw the baby out with the bath-water” - the CC0 license means that anyone who is interested can continue it - anyone who wants to implement forge federation in any form, would benefit from the requirements collected in the 2018 discussions; and whatever work that forge-fed has produced so far, would be a great start for an activity-pub based solution
there does seem to be some interest from implementers now; so it can continue, and it should continue - if implementers had been more interested in 2018 and retained their interest, there would be no doubts today - the forge developers who were involved at the time, saw it mainly as a nifty curiosity; but had little intention of federating their forges (with the exception of pagure, which was designed from the start, to federate with other instances of pagure) - forge-fed was left mainly in the hands of one person; and that person has laxxed on communicating well with the public recently - nothing dire has happened
secondly, it is not required for upstream forge developers to be interested at all - if that was true, we probably would not have tried so hard to make it a global community effort - at the time, there were plans for two different federated forges, written by peers community members - the same work would have been done; with or without any interest outside the peers group - it is just unfortunate that neither of those forges were completed
but more importantly, even forge-fed as it is, does not require participation from any forge upstream - anyone who is interested could fork the code for any libre forge, implement forge-fed for themselves, and publish the patches, auxiliary service, web-hooks, or whatever, for others to use - the only requirement for it to become a reality, is for interested parties (who ever they are) to decide to use the same protocol, to try avoiding a proliferation incompatible protocols
of course, for github users to benefit from forge-fed, that would require cooperation from it’s developers - but that is only because github is not libre
to be clear, neither of these points are specific to forge-fed - it was only being pedantic - this post is in defense of software freedom in general
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Hello @bill-auger! I’m one of the ForgeFlux developers 
Apologies for the inaccurate description, the CC0 feature is new to me. I’ve created a patch to make the necessary modifications to better describe forgefed. You are welcome to send comments on the PR. If you don’t have a GitHub account, I’ll be more than willing to discuss the patch with you on this forum.
Edit: old patch link is no longer relevant
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its all good - i was not asking anyone to do anything - i appreciate that you took it to heart though
it is only seeing ideas like “it requires the upstream’s cooperation” that strike me the wrong way - i like to remind people that the only thing “required” from the upstream is a libre license - then anything is possible
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