While I appreciate your dismay for GitHub (which I share), I don’t think your “(shamefully)” concept would be constructive to our platform.

The precise word choice is immaterial to my thesis. The status quo needlessly promotes MS Github. One option is to use “shamefully” in cases where the project using it has core purpose to its mission that’s undermined by its use of MS github. The word would be far-fetched for projects where privacy or the environment are orthogonal to their mission, in which case “unfortunately” would suffice.

One of the main facets of ReverseEagle is to educate people on alternatives, and why they’re so much better.

Of course it educates. Neglecting to link to page of Github harms is a missed opportunity to educate.

About Gitlab.com: we have decided not to list that, as it’s hosted on Google Cloud and Cloudflare. Instead, we thought it was wiser to direct uneducated users to a wide range of alternative hosts.

You list Github precisely because it is detrimental. Yet for the very same reason, you’re choosing *not* to list Gitlab.com. Why the inconsistency? Gitlab.com is even more harmful than Github. They should both be listed and condemned together.

While I was creating the article listing alternatives to Visual Studio, I felt that the best approach to listing alternatives was to list other developer environments. It wouldn’t be appropriate to say “learn a different language”.

The stated purpose of the project is “Privacy-conscious, ethical and safer alternatives to software for developers.” Because “ethical” is mentioned, promoting unethical languages (i.e. languages that hinder free society and feed unethical tech giants) is counter-productive. To be very precise, learning the offending languages is not in itself where the harm is done. If Bob’s C# program only runs on his machine and is never distributed, and he never uses MS products to develop it, no harm is done. The harm is done when a tool in an MS-controlled language is publicly distributed because it empowers Microsoft and adds to the dominance and demand of an exclusive and oppressive language. Of course it’s appropriate to condemn polluting the commons with software that works against Reverse Eagle’s stated mission.

Who learns a language with intent to keep the works they create internal? It’s very unlikely outside the non-free software context, so learning C# will generally propagate the spread of it.

The thing is, there’s a lot of research that’s gone into UX work that makes your suggestion hard. For example, it might have the opposite effect: less people would click the link, as that’s an extra step.

Two cases:

1. They click the link– they discover Lemmy and they make a move to it. That’s also less time that they are on Reddit, feeding Reddit and making Reddit’s ads profitable.
2. They don’t click the link– a moment of their time was spent making their Reddit UX worse. The more frustrations experienced by Reddit users, the more the Reverse Eagle mission cause benefits.

It’s a win either way.

If I were an uninformed user on Reddit, I would much rather have the text on the page.

Are you actually trying to add value to Reddit, and make the Reddit UX positive enough to keep ppl there?

So bear this in mind: we’re a young community, we still might need to rely on platforms like Reddit to ‘spread the word’. We’ll see.

That being said, we do continue to link people to our Lemmy, from Reddit. I think I speak for everyone on the ReverseEagle team when I say: Lemmy is unanimously preferred over Reddit.

Then there’s no reason to link into Reddit from outside of Reddit. All links outside of Reddit of this kind should reference a Lemmy post.

Of course, and we don’t blindly trust them. They even say you should seek advice from other platforms on their page.

In principle it’s good that they do that, but PTIO and PRISM Break are terrible recommendations that far too often undermine their own cause. Neither of those projects have integrity and it’s harmful to mention them.

What platforms would you recommend for this? I heavily doubt immature FOSS projects have enough donations to be able to self-host a discussions platform like Discourse.

There is a huge list of alternatives, but I see no reason not to stick with git.sr.ht and framagit.org. Git is inherently decentralized, but there is a project that takes the idea further which is perhaps worth mention.

I think you’re proving a point I made the other day. As we continue to be more influential, and make waves in the FOSS world, we need to be very careful of which products we actually recommend.

I did not suggest recommending Patreon, Liberapay, and Open Collective. I suggest condemning them. Of course condemning these services is not risky, unless you consider advocating for your own mission risky.

If you want to find an alternative to endorse, there is a raw list here (some good, some bad) to review.

There is also freedomsponsors.org and villages.io. Both are hosted by Amazon but perhaps a lesser of evils.

Especially where money is concerned. Then, it gets hairy. Doesn’t Liberapay use PayPal too?

IIRC, Liberapay accommodates Paypal if a project discloses their PP acct. You should look further in case I’m confusing the three. But I think there is no choice with Patreon – it’s Paypal or nothing.

Are you offering to provide an improved version?

I did. I’ve got more dirt on MS than that, but it’s a start. Since the project is on framagit, I might be willing to contribute more directly.

If you have any more suggestions, and if you are in possesion of a Matrix account, please join our Matrix room.

Matrix seems to have a high-level dependency on CloudFlare, so I’ve not even been motivated to investigate using it yet.

About Qwant, what is so bad about it?

I go into some of it here:

https://lemmy.ml/post/31487

thanks. here is more info:

Element sells an ultra-secure messaging system — used by the French and German military already — which is built on a decentralised communications standard called Matrix. (via sifted.eu)