A lot of people use Github because it's easy to use and popular. Not everyone wants to self host, although it would be nice if the larger projects did. What I really hate is when open source projects use something like disord for support.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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I hope this changes (even if a little bit) once Forgejo (FLOSS Gitea fork) adds forge federation.
Whenever I see a project which the support relies on Discord, I ignore it, or I treat it as if it doesn't have support at all.
I refuse to participate in a community which makes Meta looking like a privacy focused company.
I do the same—& software makers should take note that they are fargmenting their communities
I disagree with the fact because they want to self host. Codeberg exists and is pretty easy to use. Been thinking of migrating there.
I don't mind if they have a support discord, as long as they have a better alternative available
There's been a general trend towards self-hosted GitLab instances in some projects:
Small projects tend to not want to spin up infrastructure, but on GitHub you know your code will still be there 10 years later after you disappear. The same cannot be said of my Cogs instance and whatever was on it.
And overall, GitHub has been pretty good to users. No ads, free, pretty speedy, and a huge community of users that already have an account where they can just PR your repo. Nobody wants to make an account on some random dude's instance just to open a PR.
GitHub (since the Microsoft acquisition) is good to users because that's their MO, it's called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and the whole point is to centralize users and projects and make them dependent on the Microsoft ecosystem.
Of course now there's also the whole issue of Copilot, which means any code you put on GitHub could very well show up piecemeal in someone's AI-generated code. If it wasn't for that novel avenue of monetization, you can bet your ass GitHub would have already made the free user experience a lot shittier.
Wouldn’t code hosted anywhere on the open internet be potentially susceptible to AI scraping?
Micosoft also owns npm, Windows, Azure, Office, Outlook, Teams, & LinkedIn—MS GitHub is not just Copilot, but Sponsors & Codespaces. The whole overarching goal is to integrate all this data & make support between these products is prioritize with little upsells inside the apps, & get you hooked on the ecosystem… neo-EEE.
You can host a git repo with little effort on any Linux machine you can ssh to. You don’t need to host a git lab instance unless you want some web gui.
Because most of us want projects with users, and there's a lot more users on GitHub and Discord than Gitea and Matrix
@OsrsNeedsF2P But that's the problem we need to fix, not the reason to give up. There will be more people on Gitea and Matrix if you try. There is also more people on Reddit and Twitter, yet here we are.
If you try. Have you ever maintained any sort of large FOSS project? Have you ever run infra for FOSS? Even if you control your own DNS, you somehow became your own Domain Name Registrar, you bought the fiber all the way to your internet backbone provider, you are still compromising somewhere. For those of us that actually maintain and run foss projects it’s a massive pain in the ass. There’s nothing to “give up”. It’s all about using your personal resources wisely. I can’t spend time trying to get gitea up and running when I can quite easily use GitHub and lose absolutely zero functionality. And it’s not like any project I put on GitHub is somehow worse off than on gitea, they’ll function exactly the same since I only use MIT licensing.
I wish I could upvote you more than once.
It all really comes down to making choices that make the most use of the extremely limited resources (time, money, spoons) you have as a maintainer.
@foosel If that is the case, then how did the choice of using an open-source license even get through? It sounds like you are confusing commercial thinking (we have to get more users, we have to be where the users are, we have to support them, we have to meet the KPIs...) with the open-source. You don't have to do any of those.
You misunderstood me. My reason isn't "get more users". My reason is "my day only has 24h and maintenance itself is a full time job, without adding on hosting, administration, etc for code repository or communication infrastructure".
I have to choose my fights if I don't want to burn out. I've been a full time maintainer for 10 years now, 8 of those self employed.
That being said, I do in fact self host a web forum for my project (which I can only do because I have a volunteer admin taking care of the day to day and a whole ton of mods helping with moderation), and I do have a nightly mirror of everything on the project's GitHub org to my private NAS just in case.
@foosel But why do you feel like you "have to" do those things? Are you paid for it? Are you trying to sell the project? Are you looking for VC funding? Is someone threatening you if you stop fighting those fights? Those are all things from the commercial mindset, or things exploited by Jia Tan. Of course everybody likes when a project is maintained, good quality, free, but that should come from the cooperation and from the freedoms in the license and platform, not from your personal sacrifice
Welcome to the real world, where open source maintenance should be a lot of things but instead boils down to a whole lot of personal sacrifices by maintainers. I don't like this either, and do what I can to improve it, but that's a slow process. Idealism is nice, but it doesn't help here.
And why do I do this to myself? Because I believe in open source and because I want people to have free access to good tooling. Currently I can afford to do this thanks to crowd funding of my work. I would never accept VC funding.
Kindly stop insinuating that I'm a turbo capitalist corporate drone, it's insulting and absolutely ridiculous.
@foosel So you want to continue sacrificing yourself? Your choice 🤷♂️
Now you are back to believing in open-source, so let's stop sending users to walled gardens, shall we?
Yeah, I don't see this discussion going anywhere given that you are doing your best to misunderstand me, turn my words around on me and just can't move even one step away from your idealism and instead demand that maintainers cater to that as well on top of everything else.
Have a nice day, I'm out, I have a project to maintain and a community to manage.
@foosel Saying that I demand maintainers to cater to my requests can be easily disproven by just looking at my words above where I say the exact opposite. Then who is doing their best to misunderstand and turn words around?
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@tyler Also note how you went from "we want projects with users" to "oh it's so hard to provide services to so many users".. at least stick to your argument. One thing is for sure - actively keeping users away from open platforms is not going to increase the users on these open platforms. Doesn't take a genius to figure that out. Do what you want, I'm just pointing out that you seem to be working against yourself.
@tyler Also note how you went from “we want projects with users” to “oh it’s so hard to provide services to so many users”… at least stick to your argument. One thing is for sure - actively keeping users away from open platforms is not going to increase the users on these open platforms. Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. Do what you want, I’m just pointing out that you seem to be working against yourself.
I literally didn't make any of these arguments. You're just setting up several strawmen to attack. And no, I'm not working against myself. Using non-OSS software has nothing to do with 'working against' FOSS software. I can all but guarantee you use non-OSS software every single day which was the actual point I was making and you so conveniently ignored. Whether it's the software that runs the car you drive, or the software for the train you take to work, or the software in your cell phone, there is lots of necessary non-FOSS software out there and you're completely ignoring that any given person's time and energy can only be spent on so much.
@tyler So why are you doing open source anyway, if not for the philosophy? You are completely undermining that by forcing your contributors to stick to proprietary walled gardens. Last time I checked there were hosting providers for both gitea and matrix.
@tyler So why are you doing open source anyway, if not for the philosophy? You are completely undermining that by forcing your contributors to stick to proprietary walled gardens. Last time I checked there were hosting providers for both gitea and matrix.
none of my users have to use any walled gardens. My final artifacts are pushed up to the respective artifactory like npm, maven central, rubygems, pypi, etc. all of which are artifact repositories set up by non-profit foundations that anyone can use. You are talking about being open to contributors, which is an entirely separate thing from users. I'm not forcing anyone to contribute, and no one is forced to use my projects. I can pretty much guarantee I've contributed to more OSS in the past year than you have in a lifetime, and it's going to continue to be that way for the foreseeable future. So you can fuck right off
@tyler Did you just break some code of conduct by telling me to F off? For what exactly? Arguing for open source software here on the open source community? Interesting...
Reddit and Twitter aren’t comparable here. I’m not bound to the fediverse just because I post here. I can still use Reddit if I want. I don’t care much if my posts aren’t seen by anybody here either.
Code hosting is a different story. It’s not ideal to host on both Github and Gitea at the same time. It’s a mess to keep track of multiple issue trackers at the same time. If you chose one you’re kind of bound to it, so you better choose the alternative that increases the chances of future success of the project.
You could host on Gitea and mirror to GitHub. Obviously, users may be less inclined to sign up to your Gitea instance, but I hope people being unwilling to register becomes less of an issue once Forgejo (Gitea fork) implements forge federation.
Even the issue tracker?
Especially the issue tracker as thats where folks’ thoughts are being recorded. Many issue will come from non-developers—which if you are going to make them create an account somewhere, would you sleep better at night know you aren’t subjecting those wishing to pitch in to the ToS & data collection machine of Microsoft? Microsoft GitHub doesn’t even let you see collapsed comments unless you are autheticated.
Because most oss maintainers are more afraid of their work disappearing due to service shutdowns than they are being profiled by data miners.
Everyone has seen some example of a tool or resource hosted on a persons private server end up taken down because they couldn’t afford it, the isp or university stopped offering hosting or because they simply couldn’t keep doing it due to death or old age.
That’s what people who create software are afraid of. The loss of that creation, not the loss of the privacy of people who contribute to it or download it.
Remember when we used to have mirrors as standard practice? If it is just text, it doesn’t use much space to serve someone else’s code too (no, your README does not need images, video, etc.). Besides, every node in a DVCS is a technically a mirror, it’s just decentralized collaboration is a lost art to many.
Usually because resources are limited, both financial and time, so people make do with what they can.
As projects grow, and as the FOSS alternatives improve, projects can switch over.
Usually, that isn't happening and big projects just stay at Github, which is kinda sad.
They will say “it’s just Git so we can easily switch whenever” but 90% of the time the start buying into the platform-exclusive features & say it will be too difficult to move later. I can have sympathy for legacy projects before the buyout, but now you 're purposefully buying in despite knowing better.
Codeberg is relatively new, gitlab sucks, I’ve never heard of notabug. That’s why. People want their open source projects to be found and contributed to so using what the most popular makes sense. Although i do love codeberg and I’m glad it’s being worked on so well.
I see Github as a mere tool. As I could use a proprietary operating system like Windows on my development computer, I can use Github to distribute the code. It doesn't have that severe consequence to the open source project itself and works well. And it's relatively transparent. Users can view issues etc without submitting to Microsoft. And it's been the standard for quite some time.
I'm far more concerned with FLOSS projects using platforms like Discord, which forces their users to surrender their privacy and that actively contribute to the enshittification of the internet. I wouldn't want to be part of that.
Well, keeping an infrastructure like github is very expensive. Other solutions like gitlab are no real solution as gitlab itself is also not completely FOSS. Codeberg is a relatively new kid in the block, and sustainability in the long term is still not proven. Gitea/Forjego requires you to selfhost your repositories and that's something not everybody can afford/take the time to do.
So, we have a situation of a standard de facto, when one company took the space and constitued a monopoly, forcing the users to use it or be invisible otherwise.
So, there you have the reason: visibility in a market dominated by just one actor.
How to fight this situation? There is no much way as individuals, a partial solution is to use a FOSS solution and then mirror on github for visibility. Of course this is limited as individual solutions wont change collective problems, but FOSS groups doing the same are no longer individuals but communities so with time we may have a way to get out...
EDIT: s/go/get
Not only that FOSS use GitHub and other proprietary hosts, they even in much cases contain APIs of Google, M$, Amazon, Fakebook & cia, APIs also offered as FOSS by Big Brothers. Since these companies have entered the world of OpenSource, what was previously considered free software is becoming more and more perverted.
It's ridiculous when I want to use an OpenSource service where an account is necessary, most of the time a window appears with the kind offer to log in with a Google or Facebook account or that this service send data to googleanalytics, googletagmanager and Alphabet, like ocurres with an account in Mozilla.
Time to update and redefine what free software should be.
Maybe an unpopular opinion but why would you care about how privacy invasive GitHub is? Your code is open-source anyways so MSFT can steal it wherever you host it. And if they haven't changed it you're able to sign up with just an email and a pseudonym. It's not a social network where you have to post private information for it to be useful you can and most people do use it pretty anonymously.
So I never understand the outrage about GitHub and MSFT. Git is distributed anyway, the only thing that can be lost are issues and pull request histories. If they fuck up, everyone can just move. Now GitHub Actions, that is a clever thing for binding users...
@mormund It's not about the privacy of the code, but the privacy of the users clicking on github and then reading some news. They aggregate behavioral data about you.
> the only thing that can be lost are issues and pull request histories
"Only"?? That's a HUGE problem. That's exactly one of the walls keeping people inside github. Git protocol could distribute that, but it doesn't suit the commercial platform's interests -> go to open platforms instead.
Well put!
Gitea is simply amazing! Give it a try!
I am also thinking of starting an open source project, and honestly, will do it on Github, because so far, GitHub does not require microphone or location access, yadayada... And the AI thing would happen anyway. Do you think Google has not used GitHub repos for training Gemini?
I am very interested in syncing the repo with a federated git server, but from what I am reading Codeberg/Forgejo still don't have federation working?