Federated software forges with Gitea

Gitea is a self hosted software forge where developers can work together on software projects and users can report bugs or request features. It is very popular with over 100 millions pulls on the Docker Hub. As of Gitea version 1.17, when a project is hosted on a Gitea instance, every developer is expected to create an account on that instance in order to participate. Compared to email, it is as if it was necessary to create an account on gmail.com to send a message to someone with an @gmail.com email address and another on yahoo.fr to send a message to someone with an @yahoo.fr email address. But in 2022 there are two: the W3C ActivityPub protocol published in 2017 and forgefed, an emerging standard (since 2019) to describe activities happening on software forges. They can be used by Gitea instances to communicate with each other and create a federation of forges continuously communicating with one another instead of a constellation of isolated silos. A federated Gitea will enable software developers to work on the same project even when they use different Gitea instances. There will be bridges between isolated Gitea instances that software projects can use to synchronize in real time.