As an enthusiastic supporter of Lemmy, I am eager to contribute to the project. However, I hold strong reservations about writing a single line of code for a project hosted on a Micro$oft server. While I have created a few issues on GitHub, I firmly believe that my contributions could be significantly amplified if there were a mirror of Lemmy that utilized Forgejo hosting outside the United States. I would be absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to contribute more actively to this incredible project if such an alternative hosting option were available.
Even if Lemmy moved away from GitHub, you’d still be relying on GitHub a ton:
- NPM is owned by GitHub which is owned by Microsoft
- TypeScript, the language that the UI is made out of, is made by Microsoft
- The Rust crate index and a lot of the crates are hosted on GitHub
Forget it. For some reason FOSS projects love closed-source public Git run by Microsoft.
I gave up telling people that (and why) GitHub is problematic. It’s like explaining licenses to Windows users.
Unfortunately GitHub really has become a huge problem in this space from sheer popularity - it feels like a very similar situation to Reddit, Twitter, Discord. It is just so much easier for people to just use a single space to monitor and interact with everything so they just don’t even look at GitLab or Codeberg.
Not to mention the fact that people use GitHub (and it seems only GitHub) as a CV for getting jobs meaning they simply won’t even “waste their time” on any other platform.
And I say this as somebody who is part of a project hosted on GitHub who would desperately love to move to Codeberg. Somebody started a mirror but we had to shut it downL:
- because “downstream” mirroring wasn’t really allowed and it caused some issues on GitHub
- we simply don’t have the resouces to start monitoring two forges for issues and PRs (and I think those don’t (or at least didn’t) sync which means a Codeberg only user wouldn’t be able to find existing issues or PRs
- the application we forked was already heavily integrated with GitHub (being a GitHub project after all) so extracting it really isn’t easy.
We had to put a statement on our site to beg people to stop asking. No, GitHub doesn’t fit with our ideals but at this time, without it, we simply wouldn’t have a working project so it has become a necessary evil until we can be in a postion to devote time and effort to a migration.
You can have a read of our official stance if you really want to (or don’t believe me :P).
It is a similar story with Reddit. I’m desperate to abandon Reddit and migrate the entire subreddit and its community to Lemmy but we had a recent poll after we reopened from the blackout and it hasn’t quite worked out as I hoped - lots still just want to use Reddit and to close it for our ideals just harms our community.
I firmly believe that my contributions could be significantly amplified if there were a mirror of Lemmy that utilized Forgejo hosting outside the United States
Well, I don’t think so. GitHub is unfortunately the leading platform and shifting to another one will rather lead to a decline.
However, they have an (now inactive) Gitea and a (working) Codeberg mirror but I think they only accept contribution via GitHub PR anyway.
Anyway, you could still bring this topic up (and unlike previous issues ask them to not only mirror the code but also accept PRs there). Though I think the devs would not really want to manage contributions across multiple platforms (maybe this will get better once Forgejo finally supports federation though).
