We are moving to GitHub Discussions
discourse.joinmastodon.org
Since GitHub supports an integrated forum now, it makes sense to consolidate our presence there. This will allow people to participate without having to create a yet another account, and for everyone directly involved in the Mastodon project to see new questions from a unified notifications screen. This forum will be discontinued.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/123094

Found this news via Michael Downey’s toot (admin of FLOSS.social:

Cool cool, @Gargron moving all @Mastodon project discussion behind a proprietary walled garden that requires agreement with Microsoft terms of service (and their analytics tracking). Now THAT makes a ton of sense. 🤦‍♂️

#MastoAdmin #Mastodon #OpenSource #FreeSoftware #FLOSS #privacy

I suggest the most useful place to provide feedback is the Discourse thread, if you are a member of the Mastodon community forum.

It is a pity because there’s interesting stuff going on that goes the fedi direction. I replied to Michael:

What is interesting is that both for #Discourse and for #Gitea there are plans to add federation support. In Gitea the first commits are already made after @forgefriends graciously made some money available from their own project budget. AFAIU they did not get @NGIZero grant, but will continue nonetheless.

And as for Discourse. The Pavilion plugin builders have shown interest to start in 2022 their #Fediverse entry. See Discourse will be joining the Fediverse

I hope both these projects do commence, as I consider them both very important for the #Fediverse as a whole. In any case they should get any encouragement and help we can give if only spreading the word on these intentions, like I do now.

Consider joining the Forgefriends community if you are passionate to help break code forge walled gardens, specifically Github.

  • Sr Estegosaurio
    6•2 years ago

    I think that if we really abogue for a descentralized and free internet we shouldn’t be using GitHub.

    GitHub has become enormously big and that’s a problem, they are now the defacto standard and a project can be as free as they want but if at the end they are still on the hands of Ms…

    • smallcirclesOP
      1•2 years ago

      Yes, you are quite right. With all the tools and features that MS Github brings together there will be more and more network effects and FOMO for devs to stick to their platform. There’ll be implicit vendor lock-in. Microsoft increasingly uses the open source ecosystem (that tbh they did great service to in the past) to bind developers to their entire portfolio of other services. I expect in future, as their dominance growse even further, that they’ll start to monetize more and more stuff. Then it will be harder still for projects deeply embedded on their platform to move somewhere else. And at the same time for people new to open-source it is really hard to get an overview of the free software movement. That ‘somewhere else’ seems to be all github-based.