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The other reply is correct. It's about raising awareness that these choices have consequences and motivating others to raise their voice about the importance of

The other reply is correct. It's about raising awareness that these choices have consequences and motivating others to raise their voice about the importance of open platforms for building open communities and open software. Also, I think hosting an OSS community in non-accessible, proprietary user-hostile platforms is more toxic than... pointing out the originating toxicity.

amscanne 3y ago
Maybe it’s just me… I like open platforms but I don’t see how they are important in the creation of open software. If it were, then why did GitHub accelerate collaboration and network effects for open source so much? Sometimes “free as in beer” is okay, and can serve a greater good. Sometimes demanding ideological purity can be counterproductive.
- predictabl3 3y ago
  Well, for one I don't appreciate having to login to discord every single time Firefox restarts but Discord doesn't care to investigate my bugs reports. I don't appreciate that Discord bans accounts using third party clients. I don't appreciate that Discord refuses to invest in the Linux client remotely near enough (do they support Wayland yet? Screensharing across web and electron in Linux? Maybe, but it took them a year or more. And I don't appreciate an open source community holding important project knowledge in a place that can't be Googled.. And GitHub is a great example. I'm tearing my hair out with obvious, obvious feature gaps that have been present for 2+ years, bugs that don't get any replies let alone fixes. And on top of it, GitHub has caused material harm to projects by COMPLETELEY REMOVING access to issues and PRs that later-banned users have commented in. There are entire, important issues and context completely gone now. And I'm actively working on an alternative to GitHub actions and am looking at moving off GitHub literally this week.
  - scrollaway 3y ago
    You make it sound like the OSS alternative to GitHub is something that offers the exact featureset you want, and includes the exact features that you are missing. Given the chronic underfunding of OSS projects, this is an absurd take. Whether something is OSS or not doesn’t mean it will have more or less bugs, and it doesn’t mean it will have the set of features you do or do not want. What it concretely means is that the development of said project can be more aligned with its primary community. But it doesn’t really mean anything for its users. GitHub is insanely good and has been a massive boon for OSS. Anyone denying this is out of their mind and I will not take them seriously.
    - predictabl3 3y ago
      I have written patches for countless applications I use. I'm not denying GitHub is good or valuable, but luckily we live in a world of gray areas and nuance. I'm getting a bit frustrated. The proposition is really, despite how everyone wants to twist it, quite simple. I spend my life on OSS, I haven't had a paycheck in 5+ years. I'm sick and tired of pouring my expertise and knowledge and investment into platforms that I can't fix. I use closed-source firmware, and that's it. My "unfree" predicates for my NixOS machines contain nothing. That's by design after 25+ years of using computers and applying the same philosophy. I build software and adopt software for the long-term, and every time I break my "okay, this time" rule, I get burned. Case in point, the GitHub issues *that don't exist anymore because GH memory-holed them* And yes, I spent less time moving my shit to sourcehut and getting CI going there than I did spending additional days working around GitHub. Obviously this isn't feasible for a large project overnight, but responsible projects are absolutely entertaining conversations about it.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - scrollaway 3y ago
        Power to you. I respect your stance, but as you said we live in a world of nuance, and this absolutism is incompatible with how the world works. It can work /for you/, in a vacuum, because you can selectively accept the tradeoffs. It also used to work for me! I've been in tech long enough to have been through what you're doing, and I have stopped doing it because at some point, it crippled my ability to effect change on the world. And I'm not interested in living in my bubble of free software a la Stallman. I'm interested in making the bubble larger. I can't do this from inside the bubble. (Email me if you want to continue this convo and chat a bit, I'd be interested)
TylerE 3y ago
Walls of shame, which this obviously is, are inherently toxic.
- predictabl3 3y ago
  I disagree, or don't care. I kinda of groan at people insisting hard to hear truths are toxic. I think it's ironic you protray this as a demand when I'm simply stating I'm not going to waste my time on toxic platforms.

amscanne 3y ago

Maybe it’s just me… I like open platforms but I don’t see how they are important in the creation of open software. If it were, then why did GitHub accelerate collaboration and network effects for open source so much? Sometimes “free as in beer” is okay, and can serve a greater good. Sometimes demanding ideological purity can be counterproductive.

predictabl3 3y ago
Well, for one I don't appreciate having to login to discord every single time Firefox restarts but Discord doesn't care to investigate my bugs reports. I don't appreciate that Discord bans accounts using third party clients. I don't appreciate that Discord refuses to invest in the Linux client remotely near enough (do they support Wayland yet? Screensharing across web and electron in Linux? Maybe, but it took them a year or more. And I don't appreciate an open source community holding important project knowledge in a place that can't be Googled.. And GitHub is a great example. I'm tearing my hair out with obvious, obvious feature gaps that have been present for 2+ years, bugs that don't get any replies let alone fixes. And on top of it, GitHub has caused material harm to projects by COMPLETELEY REMOVING access to issues and PRs that later-banned users have commented in. There are entire, important issues and context completely gone now. And I'm actively working on an alternative to GitHub actions and am looking at moving off GitHub literally this week.
- scrollaway 3y ago
  You make it sound like the OSS alternative to GitHub is something that offers the exact featureset you want, and includes the exact features that you are missing. Given the chronic underfunding of OSS projects, this is an absurd take. Whether something is OSS or not doesn’t mean it will have more or less bugs, and it doesn’t mean it will have the set of features you do or do not want. What it concretely means is that the development of said project can be more aligned with its primary community. But it doesn’t really mean anything for its users. GitHub is insanely good and has been a massive boon for OSS. Anyone denying this is out of their mind and I will not take them seriously.
  - predictabl3 3y ago
    I have written patches for countless applications I use. I'm not denying GitHub is good or valuable, but luckily we live in a world of gray areas and nuance. I'm getting a bit frustrated. The proposition is really, despite how everyone wants to twist it, quite simple. I spend my life on OSS, I haven't had a paycheck in 5+ years. I'm sick and tired of pouring my expertise and knowledge and investment into platforms that I can't fix. I use closed-source firmware, and that's it. My "unfree" predicates for my NixOS machines contain nothing. That's by design after 25+ years of using computers and applying the same philosophy. I build software and adopt software for the long-term, and every time I break my "okay, this time" rule, I get burned. Case in point, the GitHub issues *that don't exist anymore because GH memory-holed them* And yes, I spent less time moving my shit to sourcehut and getting CI going there than I did spending additional days working around GitHub. Obviously this isn't feasible for a large project overnight, but responsible projects are absolutely entertaining conversations about it.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - scrollaway 3y ago
      Power to you. I respect your stance, but as you said we live in a world of nuance, and this absolutism is incompatible with how the world works. It can work /for you/, in a vacuum, because you can selectively accept the tradeoffs. It also used to work for me! I've been in tech long enough to have been through what you're doing, and I have stopped doing it because at some point, it crippled my ability to effect change on the world. And I'm not interested in living in my bubble of free software a la Stallman. I'm interested in making the bubble larger. I can't do this from inside the bubble. (Email me if you want to continue this convo and chat a bit, I'd be interested)

TylerE 3y ago

Walls of shame, which this obviously is, are inherently toxic.

predictabl3 3y ago
I disagree, or don't care. I kinda of groan at people insisting hard to hear truths are toxic. I think it's ironic you protray this as a demand when I'm simply stating I'm not going to waste my time on toxic platforms.