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   Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 01:51:45 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

   Hey, all. Thanks so much for replying. These are interesting results. Here are my thoughts.

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 01:55:17 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     Federation is a technique that can give network effects to coalitions of small platforms and thus make them competitive with big platforms (we think). It typically manifests in making users and content on one platform visible and interactable from other platforms.

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 01:55:19 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     One of my new favourite sites, https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/ , shows how grossly centralised code forges are. HHI is a metric for how concentrated a market is; this one is off the charts.

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 01:58:36 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     Git itself is federated. You can have two repositories on two different servers and share content between them. The user identity namespace is just email addresses.

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 02:04:01 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     The challenging part with code forges is all the features that aren't implemented in Git. For example, issue and project tracking, and pull request review.

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 02:04:45 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     One way to manage this is to implement these features as objects in Git. For example, have a separate branch called `issues` with e.g. one Markdown file per issue, and either separate or embedded comments and tracking metadata. There are projects like git-bug https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug that do this much better and at scale.

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 02:07:30 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     The other option is to use a general purpose data decentralisation protocol. Tangled is built on ATProto, and apparently is dogfooded by a number of ATProto projects, which is a good sign:

     https://tangled.org

     Tiago F repeated this.
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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 02:09:47 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     Forgejo is a project running with ActivityPub:

     https://forgejo.org

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 02:16:52 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     I haven't been using Forgejo. The name annoys me to no end -- by changing Esperanto forĝejo (a forge) into forgejo to drop the difficult ĝ letter that doesn't appear on a lot of keyboards, it looks like, "For, gejo!" or in English, "Gay person, begone!" I realize it's an unintentional error, but I don't like it anyway; I would have probably gone for a more literal anglicization, like "forjayo" or even "4JO".

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 02:19:53 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • Blort™ 🐀Ⓥ🥋☣️

     @Blort ActivityPub is extensible; we can add new content types and activity types that are appropriate for code.

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     Blort™ 🐀Ⓥ🥋☣️ (blort@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 02:19:54 JST Blort™ 🐀Ⓥ🥋☣️

     in reply to

     @evan

     And in Activitypub I'm sure there are a lot of features specific to code handling that likely aren't supported. That's why it seems to me that unless either protocol has a major rewrite with this specific usecase in mind, that we're going to have to Frankenstein this.

     #Activitypub #Git #Coding #Decentralization #Fediverse

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 02:25:37 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     That said, I'm supportive of the project and I'd love to see it thrive. Coding is a social activity and it makes sense to use social networking protocols to do it.

     My response: ActivityPub.

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 02:37:53 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • om mohamed

     @linamahmoud Donated and shared. بالتوفيق

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     om mohamed (linamahmoud@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 02:37:55 JST om mohamed

     in reply to

     @evan Hello friend, could you please share my post? I haven't received any help in a long time 💔🥹🙏

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 02:42:11 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • xlv

     @xlv Are you using a Nostr bridge?

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     xlv (xlv@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 02:42:12 JST xlv

     in reply to

     @evan I'm on a protocol called Nostr and I witnessed you can see git pull requests on Nostr it's pretty cool

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 03:50:02 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • klml

     @klml maybe! I'll look.

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     klml (klml@chaos.social)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 03:50:04 JST klml

     in reply to

     @evan have you seen https://forgefed.org/

     > ForgeFed is an ActivityPub extension.

     Is this what you desire?

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     M. Grégoire (mpjgregoire@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 09:17:04 JST M. Grégoire

     in reply to

     @evan I had no idea that name was from Esperanto.

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 10:42:53 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • M. Grégoire

     @mpjgregoire ĉu ne?

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     M. Grégoire (mpjgregoire@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 03-Aug-2026 13:38:10 JST M. Grégoire

     in reply to

     @evan Si on cherche une langue internationale, le français est toujours une option...

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Aug-2026 07:44:23 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • Timo Tijhof
     • Rob Ricci

     @krinkle @ricci thoughts?

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     Timo Tijhof (krinkle@fosstodon.org)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Aug-2026 07:44:24 JST Timo Tijhof

     in reply to

     @evan

     This site probably shouldn't measure via Software Heritage. They aim to preserve full histories of repos. Limited mainly to GitHub, plus some approved others.

     It's not an attempting to discover/crawl every self hosted repo. You can move to Forejo, and delete your GH, they'll still have a copy of your GH, no deduping, and never find your Forejo.

     It includes thousands of mirrors and former repos under github/wikimedia. Harmless for preservation. But as a metric?

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Aug-2026 07:58:11 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • Timo Tijhof
     • Rob Ricci

     @krinkle @ricci Another option could be using a package repository like npm or PyPI. There's a pretty cool package for npm that does a lot of the heavy lifting (but doesn't calculate the HHI):

     https://github.com/nice-registry/all-the-package-repos

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Aug-2026 08:04:03 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • Timo Tijhof
     • Rob Ricci

     @krinkle @ricci https://ecosyste.ms/ has data on the other package ecosystems, and they seem to also have a shitload of data on Git repositories. So... also interesting?

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Aug-2026 01:09:18 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • Timo Tijhof
     • Rob Ricci

     @ricci @krinkle I did a quick calculation with npm and got an HHI of 9600 something.

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     Rob Ricci (ricci@discuss.systems)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Aug-2026 01:09:19 JST Rob Ricci

     in reply to

     • Timo Tijhof

     @evan @krinkle It seems to have information on fewer repos than software heritage ... which could be a good thing, if it doesn't count deleted or archival ones as Timo pointed out. I will give it a look. My intuition here is that these are going to be in the noise compared to the 400M+ repos getting tracked right now, but it's worth trying.

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     Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Aug-2026 01:15:27 JST Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • Timo Tijhof
     • Rob Ricci

     @ricci @krinkle neat!

     Honestly, I'm dubious about the metric changing much.

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     Timo Tijhof (krinkle@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Aug-2026 01:15:28 JST Timo Tijhof

     in reply to

     • Rob Ricci

     @evan @ricci

     I like that! npm, Composer, PyPi, Homebrew.

     It will be much smaller, but far more representative. Complete view of any given ecosystem there, and all repo/hosts used within it, unbiased by what software/hosts you know, and with no incentive to limit discovery (eg cost of preserving full repos, would be out of scope).

     There'll be some hosts where you probably can't determine the software used or where the host is down, but that's a good problem to have!

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     Rob Ricci (ricci@discuss.systems)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Aug-2026 01:15:28 JST Rob Ricci

     in reply to

     • Timo Tijhof

     @krinkle @evan I'm actually not keen on the idea of looking at only repos referenced in package managers, as the set of repos that contain software that gets packaged is, I'm pretty sure, a pretty small subset of all public git repos - this feels a bit, in comparing to the social networks, a bit like only including "users who are verified" or something. Yes, this is a certain kind of useful, but it's likely to be skewed compared to the general population. My hypothesis is that these are going to be even more centralized on github, but we can test this! :)

     I'm currently trying to extract this information from nixpkgs, which has about 140k packages in it, as a first test, we'll see how it goes!