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Why FOSS projects are using proprietary, privacy invasive infrastructure? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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As you can easily notice, today many open source projects are using some services, that are… sus.

For example, Github is the most popular place to store your project code and we all know, who owns it. And not to forget that sketchy AI training on every line of your code. Don't we have alternatives? Oh, yes we have. Gitlab, Codeberg, Notabug, etc. You can even host your own Gitea or Forgejo instance if you want.

Also, Crowdin is very popular in terms of software (and docs) translation. Even Privacy Guides and The New Oil use Crowdin, even though we have FLOSS Weblate, that you can easily self-host or use public instances.

So, my question is: if you are building a FLOSS / privacy related project, why using proprietary and privacy invasive tools?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I hope this changes (even if a little bit) once Forgejo (FLOSS Gitea fork) adds forge federation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Radicle already supports this and it is in use right now.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Federation doesn't really solve the issue that self-hosting takes effort away from working on the actual project.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (3 children)

No but it does solve people not wanting to bother making an account for your effectively single-user self-hosted instance just to open a PR. I could be up and running in like 10 minutes to install Forgejo or Gitea, but who wants to make an account on my server. But GitHub, practically everyone has an account.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

ForgeFed solves a storage issue with Forgejo too… no Git object dedup means that the storage starts to balloon if you require all patches be in the form of pull requests on your server.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

This is the main reason why we haven't moved lemmy's repo there (yet). Most of the devs are on board with leaving github tho at some point.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I could be up and running in like 10 minutes to install Forgejo or Gitea

You could maybe do that but only because you already know how unlike most developers and you completely dismiss any active maintenance like updates, moderation, debugging performance issues, resizing storage,...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

The whole point is you can take the setup and maintenance time out of the equation, it's still not very appealing for the reasons outlined.