How many people would even want to host a public Gitlab instance? Gitlab.com is free, works well, and even gives you some free CI minutes.
I’ve been running a private instance for about a year and am absolutely in love with it. Gitlab CI is the killer feature IMO, and self hosting it means I never have to worry about usage limits.
But if all you need is basic git hosting with an issue tracker, I don’t see a reason to use Gitlab over something like Gitea.
I want potential GSoC participants to be able to sign up.
> or require all users to being approved by an administrator, if that works for your instance.
I don't have time to hand separate the Indonesian casino spammers from the potential GSoC participants. And I do mean "by hand"-- the Gitlab UI requires me to click a button to open up a secondary menu, then choose add or delete, then wait for the user screen to reload.
At least when sifting through an email spam folder back in the 90s I could press the delete button multiple times in a row. Even that would be a relatively usable solution.
Thanks for the additional context. Agreed, manually approving and filtering is not efficient here. Spamcheck suggested in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30480296 should be the path.
Hello, do you have any plans/desire to support ActivityPub federation on Gitlab? It's a killer-feature-to-come for Gitea and certainly would help dealing with spam, as admins could allowlist trustworthy instances on an opt-in basis, enabling easy cooperation across related communities.
Yeah i saw that issue two years ago. It's sad nothing has moved on here, whereas the forgefriends project (ex-fedeproxy, not directly related to forgefed) has been super active in the past year (checkout their monthly reports) in this area of forging interop.
EDIT: someone on that issue summarized the issue pretty well:
> Its really annoying how fragmented gitlab is rightnow. I have a dozen accounts on a dozen instances. This feature combined with oauth login to other instances, would make it like there is one big gitlab we all use!
Because once you have federation you can either use an operator/domain web-of-trust, or you can use allow/denylists on your instance. That's how email or XMPP is kept mostly spam-free (on a selfhosted server most spam - if not all - i receive is from gmail addresses, not from selfhosted servers who are easily denylisted if they start sending spam).
In particular, if an instance or specific repository concerns only people from specific projects/instances, it would be easy to allowlist those specific instances and not have to deal with spam at all.
> on a selfhosted server most spam - if not all - i receive is from gmail addresses, not from selfhosted servers who are easily denylisted if they start sending spam
And most - if not all - potential GSoC contributors are from gmail addresses. So again, I don't understand how this could be a general solution to spam.
I think you don't get my point. I'm not advocating for denylisting gmail.com because it produces spam (although this has tempted me on more than one occasion), i'm saying fighting spam in federated environments has decades of experience of various techniques that work well. Open nodes (eg. remailers) have terrible reputation and are denylisted pretty much everywhere, but specific communities/servers can maintain a decent reputation as long as they have some form of moderation/cooptation. By opting into the federation, Gitlab could support various advanced workflows depending on your threat model:
- a new organization using your project? maybe grant their whole gitlab instance "issues" read/write access to the project
- publishing FLOSS in a "community" setting where random people submitting contribution is not expected? maybe we can check the PGP WoT before deciding whether to accept that PR
- running a federation of organizations, some of whom may run their own instance? allowlist all the instances so they can interact across instances
- running a public forge like gitlab.com, codeberg.org, or chapril.org? maybe maintain an allowlist of servers who ask for it and pledge to fight spam
- feel adventurous? setup an entirely public instance and help catch spam and reporting it to denylists
All this is already possible on email level, but pointless as you pointed out as trustworthiness of the mail server is not correlated to trustworthiness of the forge.
Wait a sec... this is from the feature request[1]:
> Just because I don't think I said it explicitly anywhere above: Because we are using an obfuscated, non-free component (the preprocessor), we can't include spamcheck in CE (users of CE expect no proprietary code to be included in the pacakge), but only in EE.
So... is it available in the current version of gitlab-ce or not? I don't want to waste time trying to get it running only to find out you've only made it available for enterprise editions and gitlab.com.
If I didn't care about the open source license I'd simply use github. (Which, unfortunately, may be the only solution that doesn't continue eating more and more of my time.)
Anyhow, this sounds like a death knell for gitlab-ce. My GSoC use case isn't fringe (there are 100s of GSoC orgs), and Gitlab wouldn't have spent money on the ML approach for EE if it weren't generally important.
I’ve been running a private instance for about a year and am absolutely in love with it. Gitlab CI is the killer feature IMO, and self hosting it means I never have to worry about usage limits.
But if all you need is basic git hosting with an issue tracker, I don’t see a reason to use Gitlab over something like Gitea.