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Cake day: March 2nd, 2023

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  • Are there any stats to suggest that? I don’t mean in a “prove it or gtfo” kind of way but I maintain a community for the Pulsar text editor on lemmy.ml (back before it was cool /hipster) when there weren’t really any other (popular) instances. We have no political ideology (as a group, not speaking for individuals within it) and it is meant to be a Fediverse alternative to our Subreddit for discussion and support. The last thing I want is for people to not have access to it because instances are blocking it or people are shying away from lemmy.ml in general.



  • This is the problem, making the fork known to the userbase of the original software. When the Atom text editor was killed by Microsoft we decided to fork it as Pulsar but it was an uphill struggle to really get the word out. We got a massive boost when the youtuber Distrotube featured us in an episode and again with an itsfoss article but we still routinely find people who have been using Atom without knowing we even exist.


  • Its the same as the GitHub problem though, if you want to get community involvement then the necessary evil is to go where the people are. We use GitHub and Discord as that is where the vast majority of our users are, our Lemmy community sees barely any activity over our subreddit, we have barely anyone clamouring for Matrix or IRC. Our Mastodon is probably our only large ‘fedi or fedi—adjacent’ platform and thats because we drew the line at twitter. Would I love to get away from Discord? Absolutely, but that limits our ability to have an active community whilst we are still growing the project.




  • Unfortunately GitHub really has become a huge problem in this space from sheer popularity - it feels like a very similar situation to Reddit, Twitter, Discord. It is just so much easier for people to just use a single space to monitor and interact with everything so they just don’t even look at GitLab or Codeberg.

    Not to mention the fact that people use GitHub (and it seems only GitHub) as a CV for getting jobs meaning they simply won’t even “waste their time” on any other platform.

    And I say this as somebody who is part of a project hosted on GitHub who would desperately love to move to Codeberg. Somebody started a mirror but we had to shut it downL:

    1. because “downstream” mirroring wasn’t really allowed and it caused some issues on GitHub
    2. we simply don’t have the resouces to start monitoring two forges for issues and PRs (and I think those don’t (or at least didn’t) sync which means a Codeberg only user wouldn’t be able to find existing issues or PRs
    3. the application we forked was already heavily integrated with GitHub (being a GitHub project after all) so extracting it really isn’t easy.

    We had to put a statement on our site to beg people to stop asking. No, GitHub doesn’t fit with our ideals but at this time, without it, we simply wouldn’t have a working project so it has become a necessary evil until we can be in a postion to devote time and effort to a migration.

    You can have a read of our official stance if you really want to (or don’t believe me :P).

    It is a similar story with Reddit. I’m desperate to abandon Reddit and migrate the entire subreddit and its community to Lemmy but we had a recent poll after we reopened from the blackout and it hasn’t quite worked out as I hoped - lots still just want to use Reddit and to close it for our ideals just harms our community.