this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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from the article:
Interesting to do a “s/Discord/Github/” replace on the above. Same situation yet hardly anyone gives a shit.
So yes, Drew DeVault is right. But he overestimates people’s commitment to free world digital rights principles and consistency thereof.
not at all the same situation. Git itself is not proprietary so all the projects can survive without GitHub if the need arises. Additionally, you don’t need an account to view the repository or its discussions. There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue, however it doesn’t compare to discord, which is much, much worse.
I don't care about the wall around the garden as much as I care that the wall was made by a deranged clown with no UI design experience.
And if you insist on using Microsoft GitHub, this contribution concern can be mitigated by offering an alternative mirror or a mailing list/email address to send patches. One way to help prevent lock-in would be to use MS GitHub’s repository settings & straight-up disable non-portable features like “Discussions”, “Sponsors” & maybe even the “Issues” tracker favoring a third-party option or the issue tracker of the mirror along with disabling “Actions” choosing a third-party CI option or the CI that comes with the mirror (or require checks ran locally before pushing).
Having a bug tracker in that walled garden is the biggest problem. It demonstrates what I’m talking about: digital rights being disregarded.
like I said I agree, Discord is simply more terrible.
You’re neglecting the exclusion that’s inherent in Github when the need to bounce does NOT arise.
Also worth adding that during the war in Gaza some of us boycott Israel. Which implies boycotting Microsoft.
Advocating read-only access is comparable to endorsing only freedom 1 and 2, not freedom 0 or 4. Which is precisely what I’m talking about: FOSS projects that discard digital rights and partake in digital exclusion for some convenience frills.
Bug trackers have more of a monopoly on bug reports than discord has on discussions. There are countless decentralized discussions about free software all over the place -- threadiverse, probably facebook, ad hoc phpbb forums, IRC, usenet, mastodon, mailing lists, conferences like FOSDEM … and rightfully so. Discussions don’t need the centralization that bug trackers do. General discussions also do not have the degree of importance to QA that bug tracking does.
Case in point, when bugs are reported outside of Github, they don’t get noticed by developers and triaged.
not sure what to answer, I made clear in my comment that github is also problematic, discord is simply worse, therefore they’re not the same like the original commenter said. I’m hoping both of them will fuck up like reddit and twitter did and more people will make effort to move away from it.
I give a shit. Open source contributions shouldn’t require proprietary services if open alternatives (even if it requires more than a single service) suffice. In the case of Git forges, the alternatives are great--& the more you buy into the Microsoft GitHub-specific features the harder it will be to migrate which will lead to lock-in.
There are not enough of you. Evidenced by ~95%+ of noteworthy FOSS projects being jailed in Github’s walled garden.
And certain projects I don’t deem it worth my time to contribute due to this fact. The unfortunate issue with that is usually there isn’t a good way to communicate that to the maintainers when they lock all coms to Microsoft GitHub & Slack/Discord. There are certain projects I have skipped on trying based on this too as to me it becomes an indicator of poor decision-making trying to capture hype/marketing rather than fostering goodwill of the free/ethical software movements. At least on Lemmy you get an upvote instead of harassed by asking for an open communication and/or contribution option 😅
Of course there is.
Bingo. Prioritizing convenience features above digital rights principles is exactly why Github’s walled garden dominates over forges that have a lower barrier of entry.
Again, people to setting aside their principles is exactly what I’m talking about.
doesn’t help that modern tools like lazy.nvim, etc make alternative hosting a barrier to entry. and a GitHub mirror is a tedious half measure.