- Forking at the moment does not auto-update the repo, so it would pretty much just be a clone from remote, perhaps adding a link to say “Repo forked from …” on the repo header. But yeah, thanks to Git itself it’s not much of a challenge.
- Skipping HTTPS is not an option. Either way, the way I see it right now is that if we want to have federated pull requests, the best way to go is to have some kind of .patch file sent across the network to the “upstream” instance, which will then create a pull request using the base and the branch name specified by the patch. Kind of like email and how patches are made to the Linux kernel, but cooler
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The biggest challenge seems to be, as you said, to do this correctly in the UX. Forking and making a pull request should be at the very least as seamless as they are now, otherwise the goal is not achieved.
Gitea does not have donations at the moment. Looking through discord, it seems like the issue was not actually really discussed (Liberapay might be a good idea, but this should be discussed thoroughly with owners).