Hi, I'm Fey, also known as mysteriosa (my online nickname).
For more information about me check out my website https://mysteriosa.net.
My git projects are available at https://git.mysteriosa.net, this account is only for contributing to existing accounts.
GitHub, the world's largest software forge with many amazing features hosts the majority of open source projects.
Why is this a problem?
Not just because it's proprietary and owned by Microsoft, no. It's about control.
You may have noticed I don't particularly like Github. Why do I keep using it then? Because I have no choice.
The projects I'd like to use and contribute to are hosted here, so there's no way around.
I used to have another GitHub Account, which I was actively using, but now that I changed my nick I thought it might be a good opportunity to get rid of it and migrate to something better. Which I did, but I quickly realized I still need GitHub so here we go :o
There are self-hostable alternatives to GitHub, such as Forgejo or GitLab.
But putting your code onn your own instance and having contributors sign up on it first is really inconvenient.
That's why some clever folks started working on federation, which is a concept you might already know from e-mail:
All Servers can run independently, but they all speak the same protocol. This enables us (the open source community) to do very cool stuff with it.
If you would like to, for example contribute to a project hosted on my instance,
you can just create a Merge Request using your account hosted on the instance of your choice (for example https://codeberg.org).
GitLab announced plans to support federation too, so you could in theory even contribute via GitLab, even though I'm using an entirely different software stack (Forgejo).
Read more about it here: https://forgefriends.org
Help loosening GitHub's grip on the open source community by migrating your projects to a software forge which puts you, the user, in control.
Forgejo is awesome and imo even better than GitHub feature-wise. If you can't / don't want to self-host it, there are many public instances available, such as codeberg.
If you contribute to other projects and the maintainers are open to discussions, you might wanna try bringing up the idea of migrating.
Important: Please stay respectful! If someone doesn't want to migrate, that's their decision. Unfortunatetly there are lots of legitimate reasons to host a project on GitHub.
If we are lucky there will be legislation prohibiting this gatekeeping behavior of Big Tech and GitHub will be forced to federate. (Or they might even do it voluntarily, lets see)
With all that being said, thanks for reading my little rant, thanks for contributing to open source projects!
Have a nice day!
~Fey
P.S. FUCK YOU MICROSOFT! At least let me sign-up via tor :'(