As you can easily notice, today many open source projects are using some services, that are… sus.
For example, Github is the most popular place to store your project code and we all know, who owns it. And not to forget that sketchy AI training on every line of your code. Don’t we have alternatives? Oh, yes we have. Gitlab, Codeberg, Notabug, etc. You can even host your own Gitea or Forgejo instance if you want.
Also, Crowdin is very popular in terms of software (and docs) translation. Even Privacy Guides and The New Oil use Crowdin, even though we have FLOSS Weblate, that you can easily self-host or use public instances.
So, my question is: if you are building a FLOSS / privacy related project, why using proprietary and privacy invasive tools?
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.
I run a fairly popular open source project called Svelte Material UI, and I can tell you why I use Discord for support. My users want me to use it. GitHub too.
People want to use what they already have, and most people, even developers, don’t care that much about privacy. I would gladly self host a support forum, but tons of people would rather use a different library than sign up for my personal support forum. And the people who really care about privacy wouldn’t trust my self hosted solution either, so there isn’t really a better option than Discord, as much as that sucks.
When support is hidden away in discord, web searches can’t find it. Nobody can even look through it without having an account.
I agree that it sucks. I would much rather use a more open platform. But my users don’t want that. Discord is convenient, people want convenience, and I want to give my users convenience (even if it means I have to answer the same questions once in a while).
Love your project! Have you looked into bridging to something like matrix from discord?
Unrelated question but why did you not upvote your own comment?
on lemmy.world it automatically does that for you.
I posted like I normally do from the Voyager app, and it shows me that I’ve upvoted it, so I don’t know.
Whose voices can you listen to when all of your communication options are closed? Of course the ones already on the proprietary plaforms are more okay with it. If you are worried about folks not trusting your host or sign ups, choose a decntralized service so no one has to trust it or sign up.
Right next to the Discord link is my Mastodon link, and no one has ever reached out to me there asking for other platforms.
I hope this changes (even if a little bit) once Forgejo (FLOSS Gitea fork) adds forge federation.
Federation doesn’t really solve the issue that self-hosting takes effort away from working on the actual project.
No but it does solve people not wanting to bother making an account for your effectively single-user self-hosted instance just to open a PR. I could be up and running in like 10 minutes to install Forgejo or Gitea, but who wants to make an account on my server. But GitHub, practically everyone has an account.
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
makes Meta looking like a privacy focused company
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
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.
Network effect.
Using GitHub as an example, choosing any alternative (as a small project) will reduce the amount of contributions and will make the project less discoverable. Especially if you consider projects where the technical barrier for contribution is lower, it is much more likely for a potential contributor to have an account on a “mainstream” platform.
I used to think that this was less of an issue in more niche communities, but a recent post by an Emacs package developer (Protesilaos Stavrou, won an FSF award a few years ago) changed my mind: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-04-30-re-emacs-github-freedom-microsoft/
That makes sense. But what about big ongoing projects/ Couldn’t they easily migrate to a FOSS service? I’d imagine people will look out for them specifically no matter where they’re hosted.
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.
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.
@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 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.
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.
