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.
The important takeaway, from the original point, was that the account is specifically associated with microsoft – this may not exactly be a palatable idea for some people.
If one is going to go through the effort of making a post on Lemmy, why not just cut out the middleman and open an issue? The difference in effort is rather small.
Invasion of privacy.
Sure, but it is far more effort to have to make API requests to a third party (which can easily be throttled) instaed of just pulling directly from your local database. On top of this, this sort of behaviour can be publically tracked and reported since Microsoft can’t just obfuscate their actions internally. Every instance would be able to see the huge amount of API requests being made, and potentially report them.
GitHub is a good idea because way more people use it. For the few that can’t or won’t use it, they can use lemmy and someone will make an issue.
That’s the main reason for not going with an alternative. They’ll get more participation with GitHub than an alternative.
This is why I mentioned in my post that, as it currently stands, I didn’t think that it would be a wise idea to completely switch away from GitHub in favor of something like Codeberg.