The end goal of this proposal is to build interoperability features into GitLab so that it’s possible on one instance of GitLab to open a merge request to a project hosted on an other instance, merging all willing instances in a global network.
To achieve that, we propose to use ActivityPub, the w3c standard used by the Fediverse. This will allow us to build upon a robust and battle-tested protocol, and it will open GitLab to a wider community.
Hold on, are we trying to decentralize an intentionally-centralized point for an already decentralized source versioning system? 😅
Not quite.
A project’s repo would still be in one centralized location, like gitlab.com. But you’d no longer need an account on gitlab.com to make a pull request.
He’s saying Git is already decentralized, GitLab isn’t.
A project using mailing lists for development can already receive patches from (pretty much) any mail server (while still having a central Git repo).
It’s kinda surprising it took this long for this to come to Git “forges” TBH.
afaik, PRs arent decentralized as they arent git features, as such so far you need an account on the same git-platform e.g. github to be able to use such features.
Having such features decentralized would be huge.
I don’t think of GitLab as super centralized (compared to GitHub) because you can run your own instance. Communication between GitLab instances would be huge