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.

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[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 20 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Hold on, are we trying to decentralize an intentionally-centralized point for an already decentralized source versioning system? 😅

[–] HKayn@dormi.zone 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] dsemy@lemm.ee 19 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] Nyfure@kbin.social 13 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] syscall@programming.dev 4 points 9 months ago

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