They do if you want to collaborate with others. No one is going to want to create accounts on your personal instance

I think initiatives for forge federation are trying to do too much. When running a forge for a project, I'd don't want to be dealing with spam or large amounts of data from other instances. And people should be able to report bugs and upload attachments, without having to give permission to share those with other instances.

A good system to download and migrate issues and pull requests is important, but that doesn't require federation.

I would love to see a smaller scoped federation of:

  - Forks across instances, including for the purpose of PRs (Git)
  - Activity feeds and notifications (Activity or ATproto)
  - Authentication and some user settings (OAuth)

Because we are headed into a world where attacks on project hosting are more common, and loss of issues/PRs can halt a project while setting up an alternative and attempting to restore archived information.

The attacks span from forged DMCA takedowns, to national blocking orders, to suspicion that a contributor is from a sanctioned country (whether they still live there or not), to rogue project admins, and some other more creative attacks.

Project infrastructure should be distributed, with copies of data in as many computers as possible, across as many jurisdictions as possible.

It's easier and enables more features to have 1 common platform.

For example, the social features of GitHub, which I like (like stars, browsing repositories by tags etc..)

But also For PRs, the way to make a pull request to a repo hosted at A, from your own node hosted at B.

And like other commenters said, you can do this workflow with git over email like a lot of projects to, but the main goal of the federation here to me is the user experience, the UI being able to link all of theses separate repositories, issues, PRs, etc, like everything was hosted at the same place.