We moved from GitHub to Gitlab and the rate at which new contributors found the project effectively halved. We had a Matrix at some point and one person used it. The reality is you have to pick your battles.
That’s fine and I understand; and I’m cool if projects have multiple ways to make contributions. What I hate is when open source projects only exist and allow communications on closed platforms.
We also have forum.2009scape.org, which is open source. Any questions people have are only answered here, for the explicit purpose of better searchability of answers.
(But people hate registering on new sites)
Trust me, I know what you’re saying. We did our best, but ended up deciding to focus on the project, rather than a larger movement as a whole
Gamers 😤 For what it’s worth, more users, especially on a gaming-related project probably the effort providing basic support faster than it increases contributions.
The network effect is a real problem tho. Hopefully ForgeFed & Gitlab implementing ActivityPub will help with this. Same with OAuth with GitHub as the SSO provider.
Bridging Matrix seems like the best of both, but takes a lot more work.
I’m a purist, so if I see a project uses Discord, I’ll immediately start looking for viable alternatives.
We do, but people don’t come over. It’s a service issue; if the goal is maximize contributors, you need to minimize friction. A mirror minimizes friction, but it’s still a significant step over “just being on Github”:
That’s a shame. If GitHub didn’t have their own pull request system (or at least did it the way git does) I would have suggested maybe finding a way to allow PRs from GitHub.
We moved from GitHub to Gitlab and the rate at which new contributors found the project effectively halved. We had a Matrix at some point and one person used it. The reality is you have to pick your battles.
That’s fine and I understand; and I’m cool if projects have multiple ways to make contributions. What I hate is when open source projects only exist and allow communications on closed platforms.
So almost every project hosted on GitHub?
Oh I assure you I am no fan of Microsoft/Github :)
We also have forum.2009scape.org, which is open source. Any questions people have are only answered here, for the explicit purpose of better searchability of answers.
(But people hate registering on new sites)
Trust me, I know what you’re saying. We did our best, but ended up deciding to focus on the project, rather than a larger movement as a whole
Better that than Discord lol. I really wish people used something open that isn’t trying to advertise to it’s users and sell cosmetics.
Gamers 😤 For what it’s worth, more users, especially on a gaming-related project probably the effort providing basic support faster than it increases contributions.
The network effect is a real problem tho. Hopefully ForgeFed & Gitlab implementing ActivityPub will help with this. Same with OAuth with GitHub as the SSO provider.
Bridging Matrix seems like the best of both, but takes a lot more work.
I’m a purist, so if I see a project uses Discord, I’ll immediately start looking for viable alternatives.
Why not have a mirror on GitHub that makes it VERY clear that the development happens on another platform.
We do, but people don’t come over. It’s a service issue; if the goal is maximize contributors, you need to minimize friction. A mirror minimizes friction, but it’s still a significant step over “just being on Github”:
That’s a shame. If GitHub didn’t have their own pull request system (or at least did it the way git does) I would have suggested maybe finding a way to allow PRs from GitHub.