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.

  • exscape@kbin.social
    141·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      243·
      11 months ago

      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.
      • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
        71·
        11 months ago

        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.

        • andrew@radiation.partyEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

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