The things I never wrote about The things I never wrote about

Published Mon Jun 08 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) .

Last updated Tue Jun 09 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) .<br>I have always been sharing my thoughts with the people around me, ask them. And, from time to time, I even enjoy writing them down. I honestly have no idea why I have not gotten to this sooner. At some point, I started sharing some of my thoughts on Mastodon. I really like microblogging, but I use it most of the time to either share random thoughts or to leave comments on other peoples posts. When I actually think of something interesting that I want to share with the world, five hundred characters will not do the trick. So I am starting this, feel free to follow along for the ride. Mastodon will maybe see a note when I post here, and so will the Hacker News front page, at some point. One can have a dream, right?

Anyways, my “Note to Self” chat in Signal is full of ideas that I have thoughts on, things that I noticed at work or in private, and other blog posts that I found really interesting. This post will just be a random collection of things from that chat, do not expect any coherence between any of the following sections .

If you want to learn a few things about me, have a look at torge.rdahl.de. If you want to get to know me, leave me a message somewhere. I will not do any personal introduction for now, this blog is meant as a channel for my thoughts, not for me as a person.

No AI is or will be involved in this or any the following blog posts. If you spot a typo, good for you, I don’t care. If you spot a factual error or something incomprehensible, let me know.

A federated Software Forge

Github has turned from a really helpful platform into an honest risk for open source software and freedom. GitLab is nice, all the companies I have worked with so far have had at least one GitLab instance, usually self-hosted. Having an open source platform to share open source code is the only way. But GitLab is also pushing very hard in the direction of AI, meaning that it is necessarily moving more towards a centralized service. Then, there are new stars on the horizon, the brightest one in my hemisphere seems to be Codeberg / Forgejo. And there is a broad range of other, good and bad, platforms that also play their important roles!

Those forges are all running Git. Moving a repository from Github to Codeberg is quite easy, it took me maybe half an hour total for the maybe 20 active repos that I moved two years ago. That is definitely a good thing. But what it also means is that source code for very nice and important projects is scattered all over the place. The Github feed used to be really nice to follow the development and release cycles of interesting projects, but it has become a lot less useful with more and more projects moving to other forges.

Two ideas I have on this: Either, you federate together those feeds, which might actually possible through a technology as simple as RSS. Have not looked into it, probably will not look into it. Or, you build a full on federated suite of software forges.

How amazing would it be if you could follow users and collaborate with users from other instances of Forgejo, for example? Nobody is forced to stick with Codeberg, you could self-host, but people that are still on Codeberg (or any other platform) could star your repository and receive updates on it, maybe even contribute to that repo without creating a 10th account? If we throw ActivityPub into the mix, maybe it could even be possible to follow discussions or the latest releases from a platform other than this specific Git forge?

Yeah, anyways, I am not willing to build a proof-of-concept, much less a working version of this. I think there is a feature request for this at Forgejo, if you build it, credit them, not me.

A portal for ideas I have had but did not act upon.

I once wanted to create a portal where I could post random ideas for helpful pieces of software and other people could basically “pick” those and then act upon them.

I did not do it and in hindsight, I think it would not have been that helpful / used anyways. Is there a platform where you can post ideas and other people can build them if they think it is useful?

Starred Projects

I would like to have a collection of links (like the Github starred list) and blogposts I find interesting and so on, as a searchable database of things I found interesting and would like to (at least) be able to find again. Sometimes I remember some nice tool that I one saw but then had no use for, and I am able to find it in the “tools” list in my Github. NICE.

This is something I might actually do soonish. I am using Github Stars to keep a list of things I am interested in, I even have some lists configured there to be able to sort stuff into categories. But that can only include projects that are on Github, which is maybe 80%, hopefully...