This will take place ~24 hours from now. Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , @SleeplessOne1917@lemmy.ml , or @phiresky@lemmy.ml about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
Will the source code ever move off of proprietary Microsoft GitHub where users need to have an account to contribute & search code—or certain users are blocked due to US sanctions? If the idea is wanting to stand up against centralized US-corpo-controlled social media for forums, why use that US-megacorpate-controlled code forge / social media platform?
Removed by mod
The took down
youtube-dlsince record labels cried while allow ICE repositories. Whatever pleases the corporate & political interest is what they will do.Removed by mod
So far these problems are mostly theoretical, in practice Github works fine. But once Forgejo gets federation working we will probably migrate to a selfhosted instance.
I’d also be in favor of moving to Forgejo once federation gets fully functioning, and reliable.
Its unfortunate that we (and it seems like 99% of other Rust projects), do their issue tracking on github. We have multiple mirrors set up for Lemmy, so the code is safe from takedowns, but the issue tracker is a concern.
The main issue I’ve had is: if we migrate, I want that migration to be permanent, and for me a requirement for that is federated collaboration. I’ve had codeberg remove a torrent project of mine to comply with German law, and gitlab has most of the same problems of github. Self-hosted gitea instances work, but many people just don’t contribute to them when they have to make an account on each one.
You’ll see below that Lemmy’s two main devs are in favor of migrating our issue tracking to forgejo, once federation gets reliably up and running.
I agree that it’s not ideal to be hosted on a platform controlled by Microsoft, but it’s just a fact that you lose 90+% of contributors if you are anywhere else (there’s an article where someone compared, can’t find it right now). It’s not great that that’s how it is, but you need to choose your battles.
I’m not really very concerned, since git itself is decentralized, and if Github starts causing visible problems moving somewhere else is not a huge problem. Also VPNs exist.
Yeah, tbh the worst vendor lock-in part of Github (edit: other than the aformentioned social aspect) is Github Releases. And Lemmy doesn’t really use them.
I’ve seen projects shed significant numbers of contributors by moving off GitHub. RIP
This is a good idea. There are currently mirrors on codeberg and a gitea instance, but I could see picking one of those platforms as the main place to host and making the github one a mirror. The main hurdle I can see for this sort of migration is that all the open issues are currently on github.