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'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.
I can't give you an exhaustive list, but I'm, for example, not a fan of:
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.
They make a lot off of paid repositories and enterprise contracts, id be shocked if they had to enshittify it
But you'll need an account at whatever place you're reporting issues. If you want, you can always post those issues to Lemmy instead, and someone will let the devs know.
What is the practical implication of this? I guess maybe advertising and whatnot, and that could be a good reason for moving most of the development to another platform when that happens.
I think there should always be at least a read-only mirror on GitHub (perhaps with issues and PRs that are auto-synced with the other platform) for visibility.
Microsoft can easily reach out to other public repos hosted with other services if it wanted to. I'm not sure if they do, but I doubt it would be a huge burden to do so.
The larger issue here is copyright infringement, and I would love to see additional protections for this to require AI to get consent before training on a given repo. This is a legal battle, not a hosting battle.
The important takeaway, from the original point, was that the account is specifically associated with microsoft -- this may not exactly be a palatable idea for some people.
If one is going to go through the effort of making a post on Lemmy, why not just cut out the middleman and open an issue? The difference in effort is rather small.
Invasion of privacy.
Sure, but it is far more effort to have to make API requests to a third party (which can easily be throttled) instaed of just pulling directly from your local database. On top of this, this sort of behaviour can be publically tracked and reported since Microsoft can't just obfuscate their actions internally. Every instance would be able to see the huge amount of API requests being made, and potentially report them.
GitHub is a good idea because way more people use it. For the few that can't or won't use it, they can use lemmy and someone will make an issue.
That's the main reason for not going with an alternative. They'll get more participation with GitHub than an alternative.
This is why I mentioned in my post that, as it currently stands, I didn't think that it would be a wise idea to completely switch away from GitHub in favor of something like Codeberg.