Currently, the Lemmy Project only uses Github for its repositories related to Lemmy’s development (e.g. Lemmy, Lemmy-UI). GitHub is a proprietary service, and it is owned by Microsoft. These facts open the door for a myriad of potential issues across the ecosystem, and community. I would like to clarify, though, that I don’t think that it would be a wise decision, currently, to remove Github as the primary location for development, but I would think that it would be a good move to mirror Lemmy’s repositories to a FOSS service (e.g. Codeberg). I personally would advocate for the use of Codeberg, as it is entirely open source, and non-profit, and they are currently working on implementing federation (through ActivityPub) – all these things, I think, align well with Lemmy’s role in the wider community, and its more general philosophy. In the future, I would ideally hope for a permanent move to such a service, but, in the meantime, I think it would, at the very least, be a wise, if not only benevolent, move.
I decided to post this here, as I felt that it didn’t seem appropriate to post it as an issue in any of the Lemmy repos.
Removed by mod
Codeberg and other alternatives are used by 2 people, if not more. If a repo is hosted on such unpopular service, potential contributors must register a new account. This is very frustrating if you want to report just one issue or make one pull request. Self-hosted repos are even worse.
This problem can be solved by implementing federation. GitLab, Gitea and Forgejo already working on it, but really slow.
It last reported it has about 400 members (people who pay money) , liberapay shows about 190 supports (and the number is slowly but consistently growing for years).
It takes about a minute to make an account and store it in a password manager, it might be better because a higher threshold for contributing might mean a higher average quality of contributions.
Is there a problem with GitLab if used on gitlab.com? Would it be worse than GitHub?
Still subject to a company’s will in the cloud. For something like this (not doing anything in a legal gray area) it’s probably fine, though. For now, places like GitLab know they’d dissolve their trust with the world in an instant if they fucked around with a legal projects code (and github knows this too).
I think the point is less worry about corpos and more about “let’s support FOSS since an actual alternative exists”.
Unfortunately gitlab.com have been really cutting back on features for even open source projects due to money problems
how so?
Most potential contributors are on GitHub.
It’s yet another instance of the network effect.
It’s free (as im beer), it’s stable and it offers git integration. As usual, people prefer stability over amything else.
I completely get that. Codeberg is a non-profit open source project and these things tend to flop in a capitalist eco-system where the only thing of value is money and how much you can make of it.
I also mirror my stuff on GH to GitLab and Codeberg, but I consdier the main repos to be on GH. First I change stuff on GH, then mirror/push to all of the other repos.
Why not? They allow FOSS, so does it really matter if the hosting service itself is FOSS? Since it uses git, it’s quite easy to switch to another service if that ever changes, with the main issue being getting outside contributors to also switch. But starting out on something else would just add barriers to getting those outside contributors in the first place, so it’s not like that’s a strong argument in favor of starting with something else.
Using GitHub doesn’t violate their ethics and philosophy even if GitHub itself does. I see no conflict here.