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Comment by toastal | Hacker News Reader

> Choosing proprietary tools and services for your free software project ultimately sends a message to downstream developers and users of your project that freedom of all users—developers included—is not a priority.

— Matt Lee https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/opinion-github-vs-gitla...

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I agree, but nobody bats an eye if your open source project is hosted on GitHub.

I see your point, and I don't use GH when I can avoid it, but those are very different in my mind. GH, for all its flaws, is a value-added hosting service on top of git. It interoperates freely with any other Git host and you can clone/pull at any time. Discord is in an entirely different category: a completely proprietary reimplementation of IRC, with rent-seeking features bolted on.

IRC is horrible compared to Discord at least you have a history to of chat vs nothing.

This is why SourceHut provides an IRC bouncer with its paid subscription because they are committed to the usability of IRC.

A friend and I recently started a dev collective (https://pico.sh) to work on projects targeting the smol web. We decided that many popular communication and collaboration tools would not fit into our stack. Things like GitHub and discord were out of the question pretty quickly.

Instead we opted for Sourcehut and irc and have been pretty happy with the results.

For issue management, sure – but just using Github doesn't remove the semi-decentralization of git.

At least some of the things on GitHub are not inside a walled garden.

I am all for moving away from GitHub, but GitLab is dogshit:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/22578

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/556

I think Codeberg is a better option:

https://codeberg.org

How is that first issue a blocker for you? It arguably makes the plafond worse to have more gamification and social features.

Anyways, GitLab vs. GitHub is a myopic lens for the quote I posted. All proprietary software choices have consequences, and it this case we're focusing on the parent's issues with Discord vs. open alternatives.

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