Calling all open source maintainers working with Ruby | Hacker News Reader

Calling all open source maintainers working with Ruby

rubyforum.org

14 pointsarto10 comments

I'm not a ruby dev, but what makes this forum authoritative? It launched 7 months ago and the admins seem to be some random business owners? The posts have a couple of replies each? Like this feels as newsworthy as if I hosted a forum called myrubyforum.org and announced all ruby projects should move there?

Good question. I can not answer those questions.

However had, I can also add that RubyCentral had no authority over me or my projects, but still decided to add that pointless 100k download limit or mass purge old devs (https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/09/22/rubygems-mai...).

The way I read that initiative here, though, was that they simply add a forum or subforum for discussions. This may be pointless for those hosted at github or what not, but for some projects it may add an additional option. Not everyone uses github or gitlab for instance.

> all ruby projects should move there

Do they move? The way I understood it was that they referred only to discussions, not hosting. Did I misread that part?

Centralization is bad. When people offer a convenient forum, the price is to bend the knee to their rules instead of one's own. There's also the funding question.

Yeah, the top (only) comment on the linked thread says it well:

> Even if information isn’t duplicated, this would centralize all information related to open source to this forum which would make it a single point of failure should it go down or disappear.

Sounds like jealousy of "Coded in Rust".

"Hosted on rubyforum" has a ring to it I guess. I like Ruby but its vibe now feels more magnetic to drama since all the mishaps.

It's concerning that they're going with Discourse tags instead of categories so project maintainers will never be allowed to moderate their own spaces.

The way sponsors will be allowed to "gain visibility within a growing targeted audience" is also vague. [1]

[1]: https://products.rubyforum.org/sponsors#:~:text=gain%20visib...

forcing things ppl dont really want pretty weird vibes

I share the concerns of too much OSS project discussions being centralized in a single place could end up with a single point of failure.

Ruby should go back to oldschool, before things such as splitting the community, adding arbitrary 100.000 download limits (past that point you can no longer remove your project from rubygems.org; on github.org there is no such restriction. This madness comes from top-down people thinking they control the ecosystem).

As for the idea itself: it is not a bad idea but sounds way too bureaucratic. It should be automated or automatable, no matter where, be it hosted on codeberg or github. Say I have a project on codeberg; I would like a subforum or something like that, so I'd register this via some commandline gem or so that does that. (Also, https://www.rubyforum.org/ is looking strange to me ... github issue trackers or discussion seem more logical to me). Can that be styled or themed? I mean, having alternatives to github is a nice thing but I can't quite imagine how it looks. They should do some screenshots, overview, demo or something like that.

this would be good idea if the forum exist way back when ruby born

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