• GitHub has network effects that makes it easy to attract users and contributors. You basically get some free marketing by hosting there. For established projects it doesn’t matter much, but when starting every bit of marketing can be incredibly valuable.

    •  Evan   ( @Cloak@lemmy.ml ) 
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      3 years ago

      Yeah this, also consider that gitlab is not federated and people are not likely to make an account on your gitlab instance to contribute.

      The same thing goes for discord, more people use it than matrix, and therfore you reach a larger audience by using it

      re @Echedenyan@lemmy.ml not sure what part you are talking about, I’m happy to shoot myself in the foot for my projects because I don’t expect much contributors nore feel a drive for a big star count

      • The third line was my focus.

        There is no such thing as neccesary evil.

        You can use different kind of IM solutions depending on the needs for managing a FLOSS project and these must be FLOSS if there is option (by now, always are).

        Not every people need voice or video channels. To be exact, I don’t know a single FLOSS project which use them, just a daily videocall if they work with SCRUM for the Daily SCRUM which can be made in several platforms.

        You can just do this with a group of Matrix rooms (with space or just name prefix like use to be made on IRC) and Jitsi.

        As for the code hosting… Is there a problem with just mirroring?

        If you use Git you must know that is decentralized and all you need is an account at the hosting service which could be just raw username and password (plus email verification sometimes) or you can just login/register with your account from other service.

        • All this does is make it harder for your contributors. I’m ok with it for my projects, but many are not. I have certainly skipped out on some drive by contributions because it would require the hassle of making an account.

      • gitlab is not federated

        I was mistaken for thinking that it was federated. I wonder why gitlab isn’t federated, it seems like it would be beneficial for code contributions for open source projects if it had federation.