Going Github

Posted: 2023-03-25

I’ve moved Marginalia’s sources to Github. Can’t pick every battle.

The main reason is I’m kind of tired of the amount of spam bots that keep signing up to my Gitea. The juice of self-hosting a public-access git forge, even locked down to prevent arbitrary repo creation, that juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.

This is not without some consideration.

To be blunt, I don’t like Github. Their use of dark patterns leaves a real nasty after-taste. I’m also old enough to remember the Microsoft of the early 2000s very vividly.

There are other options available, but on the other hand, Github is probably the most accessible option which also needs to be a consideration for an open source project. Using a “weird” host causes friction to contributing.

So we’ll see how permanent this is.

I’ll give it a year or so to evaluate. Vacillating too much with regard to this is a nuisance in itself. In the end, if worse comes to worst and Github becomes completely intolerable, git is git and it’s fairly easy to just change origins. I don’t see Marginalia Search getting roped into CI/CD or such features that would make it difficult to migrate.

I redirected git.marginalia.nu to the Github repo so that most links remain (relatively) unbroken.