Thread

Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS

1021 points · 583 comments · fjfaase

ricardobeat · 1790328018 · focus · HN ↗
A note to the developers in the project, if anyone is reading: your repositories are in violation of the new Codeberg policy that forbids AI-generated code [1].
[1] <a href="https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
1. gagik_co · 1790328456 · focus · HN ↗
  It’d make the most sense for the Dutch government (or DAWO) to have their own Forgejo instance if the goal is data sovereignty.
  edit: looks like this was originally the case and then they moved?
  1. utopiah · 1790328771 · focus · HN ↗
    clearly shows the need for federated forges, where you get to decide on your own rules but you still benefit from interacting with a broader set of collaborators.
    embedding-shape · 1790329782 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, waiting for this too, feels like the final piece of the puzzle. Tracking issue from Codeberg + more general information about the effort around the the ecosystem:
    - <a href="https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59" rel="nofollow">https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59 ("[FEAT] implement federation")
    - <a href="https://forgefed.org/" rel="nofollow">https://forgefed.org/
    athrowaway3z · 1790330568 · focus · HN ↗
    Final piece of what puzzle?
    We can do big federated/distributed development with git at the project level. See the linux kernel.
    If the goal is fancy UI then there are alternatives.
    If the goal is to do a big multi-git with cross repo issue tracker, then that implies either:
    - you're a public site for random repos like codeberg
    - you're a special purpose forge and identity management is a big issue you want full control over.
    IMO - For this to work, they should go with the latter and not try to offload identity into some federated scheme.
    xvilka · 1790345015 · focus · HN ↗
    Given how slowly it progresses in Forgejo, there are better alternatives - Radicle[1] (full decentralization, not a federation) and Tangled[2] (federation).
    [1] <a href="https://radicle.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://radicle.dev/
    [2] <a href="https://tangled.org/" rel="nofollow">https://tangled.org/
    embedding-shape · 1790347544 · focus · HN ↗
    Man I was so excited about Tangled, until they announced they sought and got VC investments, which makes it not even worth looking into for long-term projects. I still wish them luck and hope they'll be the lonely 0.1% that can resist enshittification even during pressure from investors, but realistically my hope is fairly close to the bottom.
    Radicle seems better in that regards, but instead is on top of their own cryptocurrency, which comes with its own issues.
    Personally my best hope is still "real" federation across centralized services, ala ForgeFed, but ideally we can make all these approaches interoperate in the future, that would be really awesome.
    iamnothere · 1790349143 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    embedding-shape · 1790357840 · focus · HN ↗
    Personally I don't find the incentives of the only developer team working on something to be irrelevant to me as a user, if I'm looking for a long-term solution. Self-hosting/on-prem still seems like the only sensible solution here.
    I think the notion persists because they are seemingly still using a DAO as the governance structure, so the organization sits on top of a cryptocurrency (is the idea of DAOs at least, in practice it isn't always so).
    iamnothere · 1790379515 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    poulpy123 · 1790329965 · focus · HN ↗
    That's a recipe for drama as shown with mastodon when they got publicity few years ago
    amiga386 · 1790330448 · focus · HN ↗
    That's likely to end up Balkanized like the fediverse, where every instance has a list of other instances they refuse to federate with, often because politics or petty drama. Though to be fair to the fediverse, sometimes it's because those other instances are full of child porn and most people just don't want to see that.
    It amuses me that Mastodon Central uses corpo-friendly labels for the sites they won't federate with, e.g. (<a href="https://mastodon.social/about" rel="nofollow">https://mastodon.social/about)
    tsundere.love Suspended (Hate speech) you**.**ve Suspended (Inappropriate content)
    Whereas the more free-wheeling sites, like the ones Mastodon Central blocks, tell it exactly how it is: (<a href="https://tsundere.love/about" rel="nofollow">https://tsundere.love/about)
    nadeko.pw CP mk.fedcast.ch Spam youjo.love hosts at least one admitted pedo
    fc417fc802 · 1790333561 · focus · HN ↗
    A lot of such issues could likely be resolved by a better thought out protocol. There are certainly plenty of self righteous people who would refuse to federate purely on principle but more typically the issue is simply that one does not wish to be exposed to or traffic in any way the content in question. A well thought out self categorization system could largely address that need - you'd only need to refuse to peer with those who failed to apply it. AI also makes any such effort easier than ever.
    numpad0 · 1790340255 · focus · HN ↗
    Doesn't work. People from different geographical areas just can't agree on categories. So even correctly applied labels are useless.
    You'd think "no lolis" would be reasonable. It falls apart when people look 14 into 50s, to you and your local police, but not to themselves.
    Akronymus · 1790335242 · focus · HN ↗
    weirdly enough that reminds me of wattpad and ao3, where wattpad uses much nicer sounding terms while ao3 uses as accurate terms as possible. (which makes ao3 seem more "degenerate")
    mitxela · 1790339993 · focus · HN ↗
    If you want to follow some CP poster on nadeko.pw then you can ask your admin on tsundere.love to unblock it and he will probably just ban you for admitting you like CP.
    Where did we get this idea that federated instances should never block anything? Even warez sites have rules.
    amiga386 · 1790345753 · focus · HN ↗
    > Where did we get this idea that federated instances should never block anything?
    I'm not sure, but the OP was postulating that Forgejo instances could federate to solve the problem that the Dutch government runs its own instance to develop its software (including using AI extensively) but wants to engage with the wider community so is currently hosting things on Codeberg's centralised instance of Forgejo, and Codeberg's administrators hate AI.
    Adding federation doesn't solve that problem, it just moves it one level up. To collaborate with the Dutch government, you either need to directly register on their site, or set up an entire copy of Forgejo, publicly hosted, so you can federate your one-user instance with them, or you need to find a different instance that someone else hosts, and be at the mercy of that instance's admins, who may be even more cruel and capricious than Codeberg's.
    What I predict is a future codeberg.org/about saying
    code.overheid.nl Suspended (slopfondlers)
    And a future code.overheid.nl/about being full of dodgy Forgejo instances that host porn games
    mitxela · 1790347269 · focus · HN ↗
    Codeberg's AI position was about resource waste. Single-user AI projects were spamming their CI/CD as if they were KDE or the kernel.
    They don't care if someone wastes their own resources.
    amiga386 · 1790349599 · focus · HN ↗
    Federation is a people-problem, not so much the resource problem.
    Mastodon servers defederate because the people (or rather, the admins) of instance A don't want anything to do with the people (who toot at the discretion and policies of the admins) of instance B.
    Codeberg's AI position, as stated and voted upon, does not mention resource usage at all. That's completely invisible from the discussion. It is exclusively argued against on accord of 1) unclear copyright ownership, and 2) users have no idea what's in the code, therefore it could be full of security flaws or harmful code.
    <a href="https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253" rel="nofollow">https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253
    So they would not want to federate with another host that used a lot of AI-generated code, even if it claimed an open license, even if that federation caused little-to-no usage of their CI. They would fundamentally disagree with any other instance that allowed mostly-AI-generated projects. They would therefore block such instances, if federation was a thing.
    mitxela · 1790357727 · focus · HN ↗
    Those are all problems codeberg doesn't want on its system. Allowing a codeberg user to comment on someone else's system wouldn't bring those problems to codeberg.
    iamnothere · 1790348689 · focus · HN ↗
    Why should a fallible, biased human “admin” be able to block an individual from communicating with another individual or group of individuals? This just creates weird social silos and echo chambers. It’s made worse because the people who choose to be jannies are often deeply broken people.
    The Fediverse has the whole model backwards as a result of its design. Either individuals need to run their own instances, or identity needs to be completely ephemeral and flow through many servers as it does in Nostr. A Nostr admin can choose not to host data from a given identity, they could even use an identity whitelist, but users normally subscribe to multiple relays. In the end, the data gets through, while the relay admin can keep their own hands clean if they have a problem with the data.
    Note that having this freedom does not preclude you from voluntarily signing up for blocklists. But this is an active choice, and it can’t be suddenly imposed on a set of users.
    mitxela · 1790357679 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you have an email account without a spam filter?
    iamnothere · 1790379554 · focus · HN ↗
    I have one with a spam filter that I control myself, not some BS like GMail who wants to decide for me. It’s well-tuned at this point and hasn’t given me problems.
    If I want to, I can opt in to any number of spam blocklists. That’s kind of the point—it’s opt in.

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