Request for comment: Migrating to Codeberg

[zesterer]

Hello all. I'm planning to move chumsky to Codeberg at some point soon.

I'm opening this issue thread to give frequent contributors prior warning, and an opportunity to discuss it. Fair warning: my mind is largely set on the move, although I'm not entirely beyond persuasion.

The push factors

I don't really want to enumerate the reasons for wanting to move here; I'm sure many of them are obvious. The short and long of it is that I no longer feel that GitHub is culturally friendly toward community-driven projects like chumsky, and that the dial has been steadily turning toward exploitation and profiteering on the back of the open source community for a while now. The increasing influx of AI-generated slop has become tiresome. I've wasted hours dealing with it and it's been killing what motivation I still have for open source. I do not want to burn out and for chumsky to be abandoned.

What stopped me making this move before was a lack of suitable alternatives. The traditional competitor, GitLab, is largely VC-funded and the same financial incentive for exploitation is present. I have no interest in jumping ship only to find that the safe haven is not so safe either.

The pull factors

Over the last few months, however, it's become clear that Codeberg is a destination worthy of our trust. In particular:

• It's been around since 2018. It's not going anywhere, and enough projects have placed their faith in it already that it's likely crossed the 'too big to fail' threshold.

• It is a member-driven non-profit, and this member control is guaranteed by German non-profit legislation.

• Its current leadership strikes me as trustworthy and engaged.

• It's built on top of Forgejo, and it's fast. I've been quite taken aback at how pleasant it feels to use: GitHub feels sluggish and claustrophobic in comparison. I had not noticed how much of a chore to use GitHub had become until I experienced an alternative.

Trial

I have already migrated another of my crates, Ariadne, to Codeberg. I was expecting friction, but I've been genuinely surprised by how seamless the experience has been. Codeberg makes it very easy to set up third-party CI runners, and I now use a VPS as a runner. The experience has convinced me that migrating to Codeberg is right for chumsky.

Your thoughts

As mentioned above: my mind is largely set on this move. However, I'd still like to hear your thoughts about the move, any personal experience you may have, and things you believe should be considered. Thanks for reading!

@CraftSpider @wackbyte @Hedgehogo @bew @zyansheep @Zij-IT (apologies about the ping: you're the largest contributors!)

[CraftSpider]

It's always a pain having to jump ship in these kinds of situations, but I totally agree that Github is becoming increasingly unfriendly. I don't have any experience with migration myself, but I'm also interested if anyone else has thoughts. I've set up a codeberg account and will keep following chumsky wherever it moves - it's nice to see it seems to be fairly full feature in terms of notifications, emails, etc.

[Hedgehogo]

I would really listen to the detailed reasons why Github is becoming unfriendly. I'm not actively following his changes. What I see in post is very abstract for the most part, what kind of deterioration for Chumsky follows from the GitHub policy?

[Hedgehogo]

Well, I'm worried about how the current issues will be transferred, there is a whole list of purely mine, and I'm not the only one doing them

[zesterer]

I would really listen to the detailed reasons why Github is becoming unfriendly. I'm not actively following his changes. What I see in post is very abstract for the most part, what kind of deterioration for Chumsky follows from the GitHub policy?

A few come to mind:

• Bloat and bugs. The GitHub UI has become increasingly sluggish and unpleasant to use over recent years. Several annoying bugs and missing features continue to languish. According to various sources, Microsoft is increasingly cutting the teams dedicated to maintenance.

• Uptime and availability. GitHub's core platform uptime has dropped to about 90% over the last month. That's not just bad, that's abysmal. That's a sign of a company that's fired everybody that knows what they're actually doing and is running on fumes.

• Prevalence of users making use of AI. I've had to wade through several slop PRs at this point, each for over an hour, in order to understand what the user was trying to achieve. I do not want to continue doing that, and I'm inclined to believe that users of Codeberg are less likely to.

• Exploitation. Microsoft is increasingly seeing the FOSS community as a resource to be exploited for the purpose of AI training. I am not interested in remaining on a platform run by a company that believes that sort of behaviour is okay.

• Likelihood of things getting worse. The trajectory is quite clear: Microsoft has burned an ungodly amount of money on the AI bubble, only to find that there's not very much money to be made. Investors are going to be wanting their money back, and that means that Microsoft will be forced to cut jobs and find ways to exploit its existing products to produce more revenue. That's a hallmark of service enshittification, and I don't want chumsky to be dependent on this service as that's happening.

[zesterer]

Well, I'm worried about how the current issues will be transferred, there is a whole list of purely mine, and I'm not the only one doing them

Codeberg has a migration tool that brings across issues, PRs, branches, and more. I've used it with ariadne already, and I was quite surprised at how comprehensive it seems to be: so no worries there.

[Hedgehogo]

Codeberg has a migration tool that brings across issues, PRs, branches, and more. I've used it with ariadne already, and I was quite surprised at how comprehensive it seems to be: so no worries there.

How will this tool link my Github account and Codeberg account to understand that I am the creator of the issue? (And I have the appropriate rights to manipulate it)

[zesterer]

How will this tool link my Github account and Codeberg account to understand that I am the creator of the issue? (And I have the appropriate rights to manipulate it)

In your Codeberg settings you can link your GitHub account to your Codeberg user. All issues and PRs associated with that account automatically become owned by your Codeberg user, as you might hope. I believe this works even for users created after the migration too. It's all very smooth.

If you're curious, take a look around https://codeberg.org/zesterer/ariadne and see what you think. The migration occurred about 2 weeks ago, so anything older than that has been automatically migrated across. It's even migrated subtle stuff like comment reactions!

[zesterer]

Migration has now occurred.

Please open new issues on Codeberg. I'm going to be archiving this repository soon!

There is still some minor bookkeeping to be done before the new repository is in full swing.

If you decide to sign up to Codeberg, please post your usernames here so I can add you as contributors!

[CraftSpider]

I'm CraftSpider on Codeberg as well - https://codeberg.org/CraftSpider