Several years in the making, GitLab is now very actively implementing ActivityPub! 🙌
The end-goal is to support AP for merge requests (aka pull requests), meaning git.alice.dev can send a merge request to gitlab.com/Bob/project.git
In the most expansive version of this vision, anyone running an AP-enabled git instance (with one or more repos) can send MRs to another instance’s repo, without having to sign up there.
For starters this will be GitLab-specific, but that’s already huge for self-hosters of GitLab who currently don’t benefit from the internal interop of the GitLab.com network.
First bite-sized todo on the implementation path there is ‘subscribe to project releases’. And yes, they are aware of ForgeFed and will likely make use of that spec for the advanced features of this epic.
Smart move by GitLab; through ActivityPub they’re getting a distributed version of GitHub’s social layer.
Hugely impactful as a way around GitHub’s moat as the de-facto social network of open source development. I follow hundreds of developers on GitHub, though mainly just to keep track of who I’ve interacted with, effectively adding them to a dev-specific address book.
I have a much harder time keeping track of non-GitHub devs on alt platforms, but if I could follow them on the fediverse that’s actually preferable over GitHub’s proprietary follow list.
Cross-posted to Mastodon:
https://writing.exchange/@erlend/110949168258462158
Yeah interesting idea. I can see it being useful for private enterprise implementations of gitlab to contribute to upstream projects.. I don't think it's possible to fork a public github.com repo to a self hosted github enterprise instance but it's been a while since I've run that and I don't remember ever actually trying.
It might make tooling easier.. I can see it being pretty easy to setup bi-directional comms with non-gitlab CI/CD pipelines doing this.
Really it might entirely eliminate the need for service accounts or whatever the gitlab equivalent of Github Apps is too which would be wonderful.
Sure it is. Copy the repo, re-init, publish as a new project. Forked.
It's all git, after all. You init a new repo, its a new project under all eyes but perhaps copyright.