Not that I hold out too much hope here, but given GitLab's emphasis on the enterprise and self-hosting, it would be amazing if they could put some effort into making disparate GitLab installations behave like one big network (think Six Apart with trackbacks/typekey/etc way back in the day).

Github's huge win is the network effect of having one account and being able to interact on thousands of issue trackers, create PRs, etc. It would super cool if GitLab could achieve some of that same experience without requiring everyone to all be on gitlab.com. It would go a long way toward addressing the criticisms that Github is too centralized.

> Not that I hold out too much hope here, but given GitLab's emphasis on the enterprise and self-hosting, it would be amazing if they could put some effort into making disparate GitLab installations behave like one big network (think Six Apart with trackbacks/typekey/etc way back in the day).

Yeah, I think it'd be awesome if there was some form of optional federation between GitLab instances (sort of like Matrix or NextCloud).

See my comment below, we'd love this and look forward to everyone's ideas on this [0]

[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4013

IIRC Gogs/Gitea and GitLab have plans to enable pull request federation, so you could use your own instance to make pull requests on a completely different one.

I also recommend to check out Gitea (community fork of Gogs) if you haven't yet, it's a nice alternative to Gitlab for selfhosting.

Federated merge requests (pull requests) is something we've been wanting to do for a long time [0]. Maybe 2017 is the year to do it.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4013