Recently Librecast Gave Up GitHub. It was a move that was long overdue for a number of reasons (accessibility, lack of IPv6, owned by Microsoft etc.), but SFC's campaign made it more urgent.
GiveUpGithub is aptly named. There's no replacement for Github - the centralised value it brings is also its curse. It is a matter of making the choice to give up something that is bad for our Free Software community. In the end, as a project founded on Human Rights first, technology second, it wasn't a hard choice to make.
We have always run our own git server and pushed there first. Our reason for being on Github was solely as a place to publish code. It's never been our place of work. git is distributed and we work locally. Servers are mainly a place to backup our code, and to make it easy for other people to find it. All the other code sites are functional code forges, but Github is (was) the place to be found. However, for the kind of folks we want to attract to our project, GitHub had become a liability.
That of course raised the question of where to move to. We still need a place to publish our code and to make it easy for the community to interact with our project. And to have a backup of our code on someone else's infrastructure.
We chose Codeberg. It is based in the EU, funded by donations, based on an Open Source forge, gitea, and popular with projects in the Next Generation Internet community. It is first on the list of hosting services listed on the SFC GiveUpGithub page. It has IPv6. It seemed like a safe choice, and we didn't want to spend a lot of time shopping around. We have code to write.
The sign up process should have rung some alarm bells immediately. In truth, it did, but I ignored them. The confirmation email was sent from <noreply@codeberg.org>, an address that doesn't exist, not even as an alias to /dev/null. So our MXs bounced the email. I sighed, whitelisted them and tried to signup again. There's no option to resend a confirmation email, and my email was "already taken" so I couldn't proceed. Eventually I figured out that I could perform a "password reset", and use that link to get in. Having done that, I then needed to "click to verify my email", receive another email, paste that link and finally I have an account. Now I needed to import our repos...
Importing repos from Github works, on average, 1 time in 10. The import fails silently with no error or user feedback. Then it will work for a couple of repos, and then fail 10-15 times in a row. Quite possibly Github's API limits, but telling the user would be a Good Thing™. The first time I sat there for ages waiting for nothing to happen. Painful, but fortunately I only have to go through this once. Codeberg looked like the kind of community driven FOSS org we want to associate with, so a few technical glitches is no big deal.
Hurrah! We're on Codeberg! Well, almost...
Next (On the Subject of Accessibility)
2022-07-19