Howdy there ! I’m lucid and I work on the social media for kglw.net. I’m trying to encourage more people to join the forum.
What has been y’all’s favorite parts about using the forum? Why would you recommend it to another Gizzard fan?
Honestly, learning more music from other music-obsessed types. So much sharing and discussion going on.
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For me it’s a couple of things.
I’ve always loved forums back in the early 2000s.
I dislike most social media (reddit, discord, facebook, etc - but love the fediverse 
),
so I’m very happy that community run site and forums exist
and that it appears to run free and open source software:
(nitpick: I would prefer any forge other than github 
)
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I second all of what devrtz said. I stay off basically all social media except for reddit. Now that reddit is… doing whatever they’re doing, I think a fan lead place for my favorite community on the internet is a great idea.
As a newer contributor to the site, the forums main draw is just the incredible group of people who engage here and their passion. In depth discussions, content, etc get posted here from people who know their stuff. Even moving from reddit, I’m happily surprised to see the increase in passion and friendliness which makes me hopeful for the future of the site.
I think independent forums and sites are the future of nerding out, collaboration, and being a part of the Weirdo Swarm. At least that’s why I’m here.
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Yoooo lead dev here, absolutely heard on non-GH sites for code storage. We are using GH currently bc it’s what I have the most experience with, and existing integrations (GitHub Pages) made it easy to get small static sites hosted for free (such as KGLW.today)…
I’m interested in learning about other code forges, but I’d need some hand-holding along the way!
The only other ones in the conversation, imo, would be gitlab or maybe sourcehut (looks interesting, still in alpha). I’ve used a bunch of em and github is the easiest to use for me. Sure, it’s owned by Microsoft which is not good (not to mention it’s pretty much a monopoly)… but it does pretty much everything that the alternatives offer and a lot they don’t. If you can ignore some of the commercialization of their offerings, at it’s core, it’s completely fine. And that’s all you really need, imo.
I get the draw of the alternatives, but they are often less stable and could end up going commercial on you at any time. From a project like this, I think github is totally a good choice. But would love to hear alternative perspectives as well!
Gitlab
Gitlab is what I use the most in my day to day work (Debian, GNOME, …). It can do “Gitlab Pages” (see official and other examples) and configuring custom domains also seems to be straight forward.
I’m only using the features from the free (as in freedom) version and I usually end up disabling a bunch of stuff for my repositories, because I don’t need half the things. Basically I want: Code storage, CI (with container registry), Issue tracking, MRs and sometimes a projekt wiki.
forgejo (gitea fork after Gitea Ltd went bananas)
Don’t know too much about it, but it appears to do what I expect a codeforge to be doing 
(in a user friendly web UI)
@cwar’s link does have some interesting information, about how the fork came about.
I would only add: With FOSS the danger of the stewards of a project no longer acting in the community’s best interested is mitigated by being able to fork and move on. Sure, it can be some inconvenience but for me this would be a small price to pay.
sourcehut
I think sourcehut appeals primarily to mailing list loving nerds
(e.g. patches/reviews are done via email, not some fancy web UI).
And while I find it very interesting this poses a significant barrier to entry (even among the FOSS crowd).
@cwar said (re: github):
but it does pretty much everything that the alternatives offer and a lot they don’t
I’m genuinely curious: What does GH bring to the table?
I know there’s tons of integrations/bots (webhooks, Matrix/IRC bots that watch repositories, bots that bump dependencies, …) but these things also seem to exist for GitLab (and perhaps other forges).
@SupremeAxendancy said:
Yoooo lead dev here,
You’re a(n altered) beast!
Thanks for all your work on this amazing site.
I’m interested in learning about other code forges, but I’d need some hand-holding along the way!
I can offer a hand or two to hold (:
PS: The GH issue was mainly me being a nitpicky FOSS enthusiast (actually I’m running/developing Debian 
on my smartphone!)
What a great post! I love learning about this sorta stuff.
I think for me what I want on my (public) repo really consists of a few basic things.
Firstly, usability. Most of this really is git for me. I use the gh cli tool to clone a repo. But other than that git under the hood does everything else that I want in my local.
Then extensibility. Webhooks allow us to have custom event driven functionality anywhere we want. The GitHub API lets us go the other way (as long as it’s not a private deployment).
Branch protection. Pre-merge checks on protected branches.
Search. GitHub has decent search/navigation. It’s not the best but it’s usable. Especially in the last few years they’ve really improved the search functionality. And usually this is just if I’m searching through many repos, maybe throughout an organization.
Anything else I’d probably just do off GitHub. I don’t want to be too dependent on any particular forge. GitHub actions? Nah let’s use Webhooks to trigger actions elsewhere… Maybe aws lambda or circleci. GitHub pages? Let’s do a static s3 site instead. This way if things do go south I just find an equivalent forge without worrying about all the bells and whistles.
I would love to check out alternatives. I really enjoy that kinda stuff. I’m sure some of them would ultimately serve us better. But I’m a fan of good enough in most cases and GitHub has a track record with me of being good enough for a long time.
Sorry to derail this thread. Maybe we can continue this conversation elsewhere?
We’ve got a great little group here, but we have plenty of room to grow. How can we spread the word about our forum?
Can we all invite a couple people to come check it out? Share a link to a post on a Discord server, mention us on reddit, tell the person sitting next to you on the bus!
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