I think that it would be good to mirror the Lemmy repositories to a FOSS alternative (e.g. Codeberg)

Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works to Lemmy@lemmy.ml – 132 points –

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.

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It’s actually already mirrored to Codeberg, though it seems the devs haven’t pushed the changes for a couple of months.

https://codeberg.org/LemmyNet

Note that Codeberg discourages read-only mirrors though.

It’s actually already mirrored to Codeberg

My mistake! I swear that I did check before I posted this! I must've improperly searched for it, or somehting, because I really don't remember seeing it when I looked.

it seems the devs haven’t pushed the changes for a couple of months.

Indeed, that seems to be the case. I wonder why?

EDIT (2024-01-19T00:45):

I think that I found what I did "wrong", initially: I searched for "Lemmy" under "Repositories" on Codeberg (which didn't display the Lemmy repos), where I should've searched under "Organizations". Personally, I feel that this is a bit of a UX issue on Codebergs end; the main search should be a fuzzy search with options to fliter afterwards.

Honestly I didn't even knew that codeberg existed. A Open Source gitub would be pretty pog ngl

Okay, I‘ve read this now a few times. What does pog mean?

It means “good”, “agreeable” or “desirable”. It's modern slang so I don't blame you.

Just for completeness, “ngl” stands for “not gonna lie” and means something akin to “in my opinion” or “to be honest”.

Short for “PogChamp”, which is a Twitch chat emote featuring an expression of surprise like “😯”. Is used to be a picture of streamer GooTecks until I think he made some comments supporting Jan 6th and twitch changed it (in the worst way possible, but that’s another story)

So saying something is “pog” means you are excited/hyped for it. Other uses include “Poggers” or “Poggies”. Over time it’s worked its way into the larger Internet slang lexicon as Twitch has grown.

I'm all for open source services, but realistically, what potential issues are there with using GitHub?
Every contributor has a copy of the Git repo, so isn't the worst case basically losing access to issues and similar data? And even that is very unlikely.

I can't give you an exhaustive list, but I'm, for example, not a fan of:

  • Needing an account at Microsoft for reporting issues, contributing code or searching code in repositories. Microsoft operates in the ad/tracking business and is known for violating laws.
  • Microsoft will potentially link this account data with LinkedIn or other Microsoft services in the future.
  • Microsoft violates the licenses of code hosted on GitHub to train their AIs.
  • Microsoft is known for creating lock-in effects and EEE, generally putting humanity worse off for their own profit. I'd rather not contribute to that, neither with code nor socially.

And just in general, Microsoft will enshitify GitHub one day. Its inevitable for every free service run by a public for-profit corporation. You can count on this as much as you can count on climate change.

So why wait until it starts happening? Get started with the move now.

They make a lot off of paid repositories and enterprise contracts, id be shocked if they had to enshittify it

You can self host gitea and begin mirroring the Lemmy repos yourself right now.

Are selfhosters not doing this now? If you're a coder and selfhosters you should absolutely host gitea and mirror repositories, it's fun! And makes things like yt-dlp that much harder to squash out

Indeed! But, I think that it would be preferable for it to be handled officially.

Yeah devs should definitely take on extra work that serves no purpose whatsoever.

extra work that serves no purpose whatsoever.

No purpose? I outlined the main rationale in my post, and this comment followed up with more detail.