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Those who forget history often inadvertently repeat it. Some of us recall that twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a fully Free and Open Source (FOSS)
site called SourceForge, proprietarized all their code — never to make it FOSS again. Major FOSS projects slowly left
SourceForge since it was now, itself, a proprietary system, and antithetical to FOSS. FOSS communities learned that it was a mistake to allow a for-profit, proprietary
software company to become the dominant FOSS collaborative development site. SourceForge slowly collapsed after the DotCom crash,
and today, SourceForge is more advertising link-bait than it is code hosting. We learned a valuable lesson that was a bit too easy to forget — especially when corporate involvement manipulates
FOSS communities to its own ends. We now must learn the SourceForge lesson again with Microsoft's GitHub.
Does anyone have experience with Codeberg? It looks like a pretty good alternative.
Codeberg is based on Gitea, which closely resembles GitHub’s interface. Contributing to projects hosted on Codeberg is just as easy as contributing to GitHub projects.
The good: familiar UI, nice community
The bad: much worse accessibility.
Conclusion: I’d recommend keeping a Gitea/Codeberg remote but not using it exclusively. Doing so should include more people without excluding people who use assistive technology.
So what forge should be used as the one with better acceddibility?
@opensource
We need better accessibility on FOSS projects. It has tu suck needing to use a cringe service like GitHub because of accessibility.
Also, one might look into Sourcehut (sr.ht)
I saw this the other day but couldn’t really understand how it works:( Using mail list in 2022 seems a bit … unintuitive?
also I’d love to be educated about equivalents to issues/PRs in sourcehut cuz I’m thinking about shifting away from github too:)
Mailing list is actually very accessable IMO. You do not have to sign up for any service (with another account or some hostile captcha) but just drop your changes via e-mail (which everyone on the internet has).
With that workflow you just do your changes locally and once done you create a patch from the diff and send it afterwards to the mailing list. It is super easy with git send-mail and you should check out git-send-mail.io for infos about the git mail workflow (the site is actually by the devs of sourcehut).
EDIT: Drew also made a nice video about PR vs mail workflow here.
I have to disagree from personal experience. There has only once in my life been a mailing list that it was useful to have been subscribed to, it was by a friend group. Every other mailing list that I was ever part of was a waste of time.
How does that contradict the usefulness of mailing lists in context of software development? It’s not a chat for anything but specifically discussing contributions, thus not any worse than discussion boards below PRs.
maybe it doesn’t.
https://git-send-email.io is very informative, thanks!
I use it, it’s pretty nice. As someone already said: the interface it’s practically the same.