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.
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.
