Topic: github alternatives/forge mirrors for e621ng

I’ve considered making some drive-by PRs in the past but decided against it due to my hard boycott stance against github enshittification (and boiling-frog censorship) under Microsoft. If a push mirror could be set up on, say, Codeberg or Tangled.org for accepting contributions it would go a long way towards making it easier to accept external help. I see that the current repo is quite entrenched in the GitHub Actions workflow ecosystem so it’s obviously infeasible to completely migrate at once, but it would’ve wise to start thinking about diversifying your baskets to prepare for contingencies.

I don't have any objections in theory.
Not terribly familiar with either of those options, although I have used codeberg before.
I'd love to see more contributions from the community.

We aren't that entrenched in Github Actions.
It just runs rubocop, eslint, and tests on pull requests.
Plus that CLA thing we were told to set up.

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time, patience, or mental capacity to maintain something like this right now. I am currently working 50-60 hour weeks, and most of the remaining time I spend working on e621.
I'll be in a better situation next year. If there is interest from the community, I'll set it up.

Incidentally, this hit the top of HN frontpage today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46064571

I concur. It's probably not a good idea to put all eggs into one basket, given the censorious nature of US tech companies like Microsoft. A mirror or two would be a good idea.

I mean, there's 4 regular contributors who keep a pretty up-to-date local copy of the main branch, & Cinder obviously has the previously merged changes locally, as he tests them before merging them. Redundancy isn't a bad thing, but even if GitHub nuked the repo tomorrow, we'd still be able to relocate the repo by just pushing our local branches to a new remote.

Also, there's nothing stopping anyone from setting up a mirror on some other site, as long as they mark it as unofficial and unaffiliated with E6 themselves. You just need a cron job that pulls from the GitHub repo every so often and pushes to the mirror. You won't be able to contribute that way (that'd require two-way mirroring, which can get messy very quickly), but that'd fulfill the backup requirement.

Welp https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291156

0f8c4c9d05154171ae8 said:
Welp https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291156

While you can be doom and gloom about self hosted runners being charged, there's this at the top:

Actions will remain free in public repositories

so this seems very irrelevant to anything here

And to said doom and gloom I raise you this:

96% of customers will see no change to their bill. Of the 4% of Actions users impacted by this change, 85% of this cohort will see their Actions bill decrease and the remaining 15% who are impacted across all face a median increase around $13.

Or in other words, this is all around a nothing burger

Counterpoint: the specifics of the change is not the salient issue, but rather the broader boiling frog trend as indicated by Microsoft’s willingness to disregard such bad optics in order to squeeze profits, if you read between the lines. This degree of wholesale flouting of perception is typically indicative of the final stages of enshittification where they don’t even attempt dressing it up anymore. By the eye-test, this is also likely the final straw that flips any last remaining goodwill for the platform especially in light of several recent high-profile announcements of renowned projects migrating to Codeberg/Forgejo, reminiscent of back when Facebook was right on the cusp of transitioning into “old-fart social media of your elderly parents” and people begins looking for greener pastures.

0f8c4c9d05154171ae8 said:
Counterpoint: the specifics of the change is not the salient issue, but rather the broader boiling frog trend as indicated by Microsoft’s willingness to disregard such bad optics in order to squeeze profits, if you read between the lines. This degree of wholesale flouting of perception is typically indicative of the final stages of enshittification where they don’t even attempt dressing it up anymore. By the eye-test, this is also likely the final straw that flips any last remaining goodwill for the platform especially in light of several recent high-profile announcements of renowned projects migrating to Codeberg/Forgejo, reminiscent of back when Facebook was right on the cusp of transitioning into “old-fart social media of your elderly parents” and people begins looking for greener pastures.

That was so many words to say so little

Just say "microsoft bad" and it would have the same effect
Nothing looks bad here, you're reading so far between the lines that you're seeing things that aren't there, things you seemingly want to see to push a narrative of "github bad" despite it still working just fine for public repositories, and considering the topic here is about a repository which is public and thus saw no change, I see no reason to spiral like this

Your read is your prerogative, demonstrable sentiments speaks for themselves. If you have astute observations refuting the patent reality of historical patterns, you need only address the points by their merits and not other personal qualities.

0f8c4c9d05154171ae8 said:
Your read is your prerogative, demonstrable sentiments speaks for themselves. If you have astute observations refuting the patent reality of historical patterns, you need only address the points by their merits and not other personal qualities.

Yeah write more big words the average person wouldn't use, I enjoy reading them
They really bring out your superior intellect

Ok, that's enough.

donovan_dmc said:
That was so many words to say so little

Just say "microsoft bad" and it would have the same effect
[...] I see no reason to spiral like this

donovan_dmc said:
Yeah write more big words the average person wouldn't use, I enjoy reading them
They really bring out your superior intellect

There's no cause to be antagonistic about this. Don't go looking for a fight.

0f8c4c9d05154171ae8 said:
Counterpoint: the specifics of the change is not the salient issue...

Donovan's point was that this isn't relevant to this discussion about the e621ng repository, as it is public; that's correct. As this isn't a thread detailing Microsoft's consumer-hostile actions, it's fairly off-topic. You're perfectly welcome to make one, & with their ...antics, I've little doubt its word count will exceed that of Gone With the Wind; hell, I'll probably have some choice words to throw in there myself. But this is not that thread.

aacafah said:
There's no cause to be antagonistic about this. Don't go looking for a fight.

I would agree with Donovan that the other user's writing style in these last couple posts seems kind of weirdly sesquipedalian (the second one obviously intentionally so). they're just kinda frustrating to parse.

As someone who's brain can't help but choose fancy words, that's not a clear indicator of malice, nor intentionally picking a fight; the same cannot be said of Donovan's comment. It being unnecessarily flowery is at most irritating, not antagonistic. Regardless, that's again not the point of this thread. I said they both need to drop it if they've nothing relevant to say, & I reassert that.

Out of respect for the staff, I had intended to let it slide to avoid a public theatre. But this hurtful betrayal of moderator impartiality made it clear that turning the other cheek only invites further denigration.

aacafah said:
Donovan's point was that this isn't relevant to this discussion about the e621ng repository, as it is public; that's correct. As this isn't a thread detailing Microsoft's consumer-hostile actions, it's fairly off-topic. You're perfectly welcome to make one, & with their ...antics, I've little doubt its word count will exceed that of Gone With the Wind; hell, I'll probably have some choice words to throw in there myself. But this is not that thread.

aacafah said:
As someone who's brain can't help but choose fancy words, that's not a clear indicator of malice, nor intentionally picking a fight; the same cannot be said of Donovan's comment. It being unnecessarily flowery is at most irritating, not antagonistic. Regardless, that's again not the point of this thread. I said they both need to drop it if they've nothing relevant to say, & I reassert that.

Kindly explain, what, precisely, was I supposed to drop on my part, in the face of an entirely unprovoked and unretaliated confrontation?

In a topic about provisioning lifeboats, it is absolutely on-topic to point out indications that you’ve hit an iceberg. And my read on sentiments was already proven right: they had to temporarily walk back on the announcement as backlash was so great -- the exact same VC playbook as the kinds you saw with the Unity Runtime Fee. You are burying your head in sand if you don’t think the noose is only gonna tighten from this point on.

As for your not-so-subtle jab, perhaps you can let furry Hemingway here have at it, he’d certainly keep the word count to a minimum.

donovan_dmc said:
Yeah write more big words the average person wouldn't use, I enjoy reading them
They really bring out your superior intellect

I think this is a big misunderstanding/cultural difference.

I think this person is using chatgpt or similar to translate text from another language (most likely Japanese), which explains the odd vocabulary. (excessive - and -- use and being very grammatically correct).

I'm wouldn't be so quick to say that tone was intentional (at least in the beginning), I think that they've prompted the ai to make it sound 'more intellectual' or similar. I.E. direct japanese -> english translation with minimal localization, possibly with an added instruction like “make it formal” or “sound intellectual”

Japanese argumentative writing when translated too literally can give english like this.

"address the points by their merits not other personal qualities” is a very japanese way to say "address the argument, don't attack the person", but in english that's usually stated explicitly.

Though I would recommend the user state they're using translation software to help avoid misunderstandings like this. The prompt makes the translation comes off as pompous, pretentious, and condescending. I don't believe it was intended to be that way. I recommend adjusting it.

How did you manage to transition from questions of "should there be extra codebase mirror?" to picking apart each other's grammar???

Back on topic: IMO yes, having extra mirror is a good idea. That much is a "no-brainer", which can't be said about choosing right host. Wonder... just in case could e621 static servers hold a most recent copy as a separate archive? Emergency backup of sorts (no history, no deltas, nothing but most recent "known-good" version).

justkhajiit said:
IMO yes, having extra mirror is a good idea. That much is a "no-brainer", which can't be said about choosing right host. Wonder... just in case could e621 static servers hold a most recent copy as a separate archive? Emergency backup of sorts (no history, no deltas, nothing but most recent "known-good" version).

The entire repository is at most 100MB (that includes all history, which is important), most people could easily hold several copies, and any developer's local copy will certainly be more up to date than some dusty copy kept on a server only 1 or 2 people can access

donovan_dmc said:
The entire repository is at most 100MB (that includes all history, which is important), most people could easily hold several copies, and any developer's local copy will certainly be more up to date than some dusty copy kept on a server only 1 or 2 people can access

Still would be better to have more regularly updated copies available for use by whatever community wants to pick up development or hosting in case either is needed. On the other hand I'd rather not involve myself into another argument on topics like this.

justkhajiit said:
Still would be better to have more regularly updated copies available for use by whatever community wants to pick up development or hosting in case either is needed.

I'll reiterate that we've already said we're open to doing this, & we'll look into setting this up when we have the time. We don't feel the need to prioritize this because, as has been established prior, even if GitHub completed wiped out the repo tomorrow, we'd still be able to fairly easily transfer to a new solution with no work lost in a couple days. There's also nothing stopping community members from archiving the repo if they so choose. After all, you don't need to have a GitHub account to clone the repository. The problem is
1. Setting up properly-synced downstream remotes
2. Syncing submissions to those downstream remotes with the upstream master
This requires time & research to do properly with automation, or else it becomes a time sink that further reduces our already minimal time.

justkhajiit said:
On the other hand I'd rather not involve myself into another argument on topics like this.

Passionate yet respectful disagreements are 100% fine, but don't feel obligated to get drawn in if you don't want to; it's caused me problems more times than I'd like to admit.

I'll miss that guy : ( his small html for Bluesky posts was a lifesaver for me (no I don't care about having the "true" DID for a self hosted instance or something), sigh...