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.
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:
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.
Very well written and understandable. Also your official information on this. But I’d like to hand over to the angry FOSS aficionado living in the back of my head:
Why do you simply accept how it is instead of actively working on rewriting your pipeline, rewriting your tests, and changing your suite to support generic backends instead of only MS GitHub? You could also make your MS GitHub page for the project a mirror of your Codeberg or a self-hostes Forgejo instance and set it so that no new issues and PRs can be only done there but not on MS GitHub.
Don’t get me wrong, we want to leave but we just don’t have the resources to make it possible as we just have other priorities at this point.
Atom was neglected for a long time before it was officially abandoned so we have had an awful lot of work getting it updated to modern tools, getting a new package backend working (written from scratch as the original was closed source), getting a website and documentation up and running. Those were by far our largest priorities - being on GitHub isn’t breaking anything or causing us problems.
We have no love for Microsoft and GitHub, bear in mind that Pulsar is a fork of Atom. An editor we loved enough to continue development of it but was actively killed off by Microsoft purchasing GitHub and putting all their focus onto VSCode. We don’t trust or like what they have done and what they may do so as much as it wounds me to be on GitHub I can concede it is still the right choice for the time being.
(Btw I also used this thread as inspiration to start up a conversation about this in a more general context that you may be interested in: https://lemmy.ml/post/1990593)