I think you are doing sourcehut injustice as it is pretty much a “one guy” run service trying to make it an income generating job for himself. Asking for subscriptions is not unethical in that regard and you pretty much get what you pay for in that case.
Personally I don’t like sourcehut much because it relies too much on email and selfhosting it is a mess (but it is all FOSS) so I would not recommend using it, but overall it is not a bad service.
He generating a job for himself is not what I criticize. I criticize promoting an undemocratic service for something so crucial that needs to be democratic which includes free service by default (otherwise you do not stand a chance against moving people out of GitHub and the like). I would never recommend to people in general a commercial and thus undemocratic service for key development (vcs).
And did it occur to you it is a “one guy” show probably because he wants it that way? That is prone to authoritarianism, and prone that sourcehut maintainer to make it a very profitable business just like GitLab and now Gitea unless founding a proper non-profit organization? A blog post about not being driven by profit is not enough; make it a proper non-profit registered organization.
In any case OP explicitly asked for a free service (which sourcehut in the future won’t be).
You are making it sound like a “non-profit” is a magical solution to running a service. All it does it adding some tax regulations and making it difficult for non-worker owners to extract rent profits. Most “non-profits” are controlled by a few people that thus can decide their own salaries and make a profit any ways.
And there is no such thing as a “free” service. Someone needs to pay for the infrastructure and operating costs one way or the other. It is just a question of how direct that payment is and if it is affordable by poorer people.
We are hosting 42010 repositories, created and maintained by 34042 users. Compared to one month ago, this is an organic growth rate of +3372 repositories (+8.7% month-over-month) and +2271 users (+7.1%).
I think you are doing sourcehut injustice as it is pretty much a “one guy” run service trying to make it an income generating job for himself. Asking for subscriptions is not unethical in that regard and you pretty much get what you pay for in that case.
Personally I don’t like sourcehut much because it relies too much on email and selfhosting it is a mess (but it is all FOSS) so I would not recommend using it, but overall it is not a bad service.
He generating a job for himself is not what I criticize. I criticize promoting an undemocratic service for something so crucial that needs to be democratic which includes free service by default (otherwise you do not stand a chance against moving people out of GitHub and the like). I would never recommend to people in general a commercial and thus undemocratic service for key development (vcs).
And did it occur to you it is a “one guy” show probably because he wants it that way? That is prone to authoritarianism, and prone that sourcehut maintainer to make it a very profitable business just like GitLab and now Gitea unless founding a proper non-profit organization? A blog post about not being driven by profit is not enough; make it a proper non-profit registered organization.
In any case OP explicitly asked for a free service (which sourcehut in the future won’t be).
You are making it sound like a “non-profit” is a magical solution to running a service. All it does it adding some tax regulations and making it difficult for non-worker owners to extract rent profits. Most “non-profits” are controlled by a few people that thus can decide their own salaries and make a profit any ways.
And there is no such thing as a “free” service. Someone needs to pay for the infrastructure and operating costs one way or the other. It is just a question of how direct that payment is and if it is affordable by poorer people.
We have Codeberg. So there is no need in recommending sourcehut if the priority is promoting democratic services.
Codeberg is nice overall, but I fear centralizing on them is a really bad idea (and there are signs of that happening already).
What are the signs? Gitea federation is being worked on. The Gitea fork is needed to address the Gitea for-profit issue.
https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-hackathon-translation-service-more.html
I hope Gitea federation will reduce this trend, but for now this centralisation is not good at all.
An issue I see is that public instances are not properly announced/listed.
and for sourcehut, i could not find anything.