Move organisation to codeberg?

[felinira]

Sorry for misuising the protocols repo, but it's the closest we have to a place to hold long-term project-wide discussions.

I have personally been enjoying github less and less, and am trying to move my activity elsewhere. It's not just their extremely adament push towards shoving LLMs into everyone's face that has been nagging me, but even things I always thought were good about github (uptime, reliability) have gone downhill in a major way.

How would we (as maintainers of and contributors to magic-wormhole projects) feel about getting away from github in a coordinated way? I could of course just move magic-wormhole.rs to, say, codeberg, and keep the current repo as a mirror, but maybe others feel a similar way and we can coordinate things.

We would not be alone, others have done so in the past, and are planning to do in the future:

• Gentoo
• Guix
• Genode
• Zig
• and many more https://codeberg.org/explore/repos?q=&only_show_relevant=true&sort=moststars

[meejah]

I certainly share your frustration with how centralized (and crappy) GitHub has been getting. Some initial thoughts:

For some time I was holding out hope there'd be some movement on "federated" pull/merge requests, but last I checked nothing has really changed there.

Friction: So, even assuming CodeBerg (or some other alternative) is stable, has funding, resists enshittification, etc there's a lot more friction to contribute. (That is, make yet another account, etc). Perhaps that could be seen as a good thing in some ways. However, that's still leaving a ton of users out.

Migrating: I don't know what "migrate" even looks like here -- is there a straightforward way to move all the issues (and discussion) to other platforms (such as CodeBerg)?

Different Issue System: Perhaps moving Issues to something like https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug (first) would be a more sustainable step? Then moving (and the potential to have to move again) would be a little simpler, because you'd only have to move "the Git repo" and issues would come for free. That said, I haven't used git-bug at all. I'm not sure if there are existing code-hosting platforms that also support Git Bug (that would be neat!). Git Bug itself says it has "bridges" for Jira, GitLab, GitHub and Lunachpad.

For any of these options, I'd really want to have a test repository moved first -- to "try out" both a migration, and any new platform.

Regardless of any of the above, we'd still want to maintain the GitHub orgs and repositories at bare minimum as placeholders, but ideally as proper mirrors.

[felinira]

is there a straightforward way to move all the issues (and discussion) to other platforms (such as CodeBerg)?

Actually yes. Forgejo has extensive migration features. Contrary to what the docs say it can actually migrate almost everything.

Different Issue System

I think this creates long-term friction and makes everything more complicated in the end. Migrating the issues once is probably much less disruptive.

I'd really want to have a test repository moved first

Of course. This is nothing to do overnight. I was merely trying to start the conversation :)

we'd still want to maintain the GitHub orgs and repositories at bare minimum as placeholders, but ideally as proper mirrors.

ACK, we can totally do that, forgejo has features to maintain mirrors no problem.

My personal concern lies mostly with migrating CI infrastructure tbh, especially because I am not entirely sure we can get everything to work with Codebergs free runners. The offered capacity is not really a lot. But I am sure we can figure something out. It might be worth reaching out to them over matrix about that.

The reason for me to be primarily considering codeberg is because it's a proper nonprofit (risk of enshittification is basically zero), and it seems to generate a lot of traction lately. Their funding seems stable, although rather small. And they are nice people :)

I have used forgejo extensively at work, and it's shaping out to be quite good. They are on the right track for sure.

[warner]

I'm under-informed, having been away for a while, but I'm not excited about moving infrastructure. Having a large paid team maintaining the tools you use has a lot of value, as does using the same tools as everyone else, and generally being in the same place as everyone else. Us needing to make new accounts, having people discover where the project is based, somehow leaving pointers from github to the new place, asking contributors to make new accounts, not being able to e.g. refs magic-wormhole-mailbox-server#45 easily.. all that sounds like friction. And I expect that moving at all, regardless of where we go, will make us (the magic-wormhole maintaners) also need to be CI maintainers, and bug-tracker maintainers, and a bit of everything else, because it'll all be a little bit bespoke and not a lot of people will know how it works yet.

So it's kind of a "just how bad is it?" question, which you and @meejah are clearly in a better position to answer than I am. But what I'll do is to get back into development (on magic-wormhole but also development at all; I've been busy with meatspace for a while now) and try to experience the github downtime and LLM pushy-ness and the other things that are making it less fun to use github, so I can get better informed, and then maybe I'll come to feel the same as you, or maybe I'll come to have a stronger-held opinion that github is good enough.