Comment by kaferoni 3 days ago
This is partially being addressed by projects like https://tangled.org. It's built on the same protocol as bluesky, meaning your identity is preserved across different platforms so that _where_ your git is hosted is unrelated to how you discover and connect with others.
Unfortunately it's most ActivityPub-oriented, right? Which means no name portability. That's a major shortcoming compared to an AT protocol-based thing like Tangled appears to be.
I don't think it's relevant to this specific instance, but AFAIK ActivityPub doesn't inherently prevent name portability. It's just that almost all implementations currently don't allow it (and I wouldn't expect Forgejo's either).
Of course, the practical downside of Tangled is also that it only has network effects within the ATmosphere, i.e. you still can't reach GitHub users.
First of all, non-standard extensions to federated protocols have a pretty rough history. Even when an extension reaches median adoption (rare, I assert), the long-tail adoption is dismal. For something as fundamental as
Second of all, how could this just be an implementation-specific extension? The failure mode (of a client not supporting the extension) would be outright broken. To have name portability, the client needs a two-step to first discover the name's server before then connecting to that server. Whereas now (afaiu), the server is already identified by the name. That's a fundamental change in what identity means at the protocol level.
I'd love to be corrected by someone more intimately familiar with ActivityPub. But until it has mandatory (and mass-adopted) support for something vaguely like SMTP's MX records or whatever the equivalent for ATProto is, name portability is a distant dream.
I don't tend to believe in cryptokey-first protocols like Nostr, where your identity is tightly coupled to a keypair. Human identity doesn't work like that at all, and keypairs as the basis of identity will never be suitable for use by the masses.
Human-readable names are far more suitable as a handle for identity as humans think of it. And DNS names are an okay-ish implementation of that.
I think that a decentralized protocol that provides name portability based on the DNS is a far better protocol than one that relies on keypairs.
If only we could use something like a gpg key as our identity. Maybe if it had a mechanism to share and revoke keys, upgrade them, cross-sign them with others to develop some sort of like trust system that was web-like. I bet we could like build a whole infrastructure around it to maintain developer identities in a completely decentralized way.
Has any detailed comparision been done between tangled, codeberg and github?
FWIW, Forgejo (Codeberg) is also building federation capability [0].
[0]: https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...