mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

366K
active users

@downey @Mastodon Our bug tracker has always been on that proprietary walled garden, and everyone who has ever contributed code to Mastodon has an account on there. It only makes sense to move discussions that are so tightly related to bug tracking there so that people don't have to make an extra account, or check a separate site.

Eugen Rochko

@downey @Mastodon Let me be clear: I care that Mastodon as an end product is free software. I do not care if the tools used to create Mastodon pass a free software purity check. If a tool will make the job of creating Mastodon easier, I will prefer it. See: GitHub, Discord, and so on.

@gargron @downey @Mastodon I think having a Twitter account makes more sense as a requirement to participate. Let projects like LibreOffice require a Microsoft account. Just fits better that way! 🤦‍♂️

@Gargron @downey @Mastodon Mastodon is such a popular piece of software, it also has a pull effect. If you were to choose a Free Software source forge and discussion forum, you would also attract people to make the move to this platform.

It's not only a problem for purists, it also affects the independence of the project. By tying everything to GitHub or another proprietary provider, you are buying into vendor lock-in.

@mxmehl @Gargron @downey @Mastodon no, you're not. GitHub is just a git repo after all, you can just push it's remote wherever and migrate the discussions easily.

@bobrzasty @mxmehl This .. is not true. Most of GitHub consists of proprietary components other than git.

@downey @mxmehl it is true. It takes one command to move the project's important bits elsewhere.

@bobrzasty @downey Did you every attempt to migrate issues, wiki entries, CI builds etc to another provider? The more services you use, the harder the migration because they neatly integrate into each other.

It's not entirely impossible, but it's very costly in terms of time, energy, and friction with established workflows. That's the definition of vendor lock-in (plus money, if you cannot do it all by yourself) :)

@mxmehl @downey I mean, if there's an API on both sides, and you have some time on your hands... GH issues or wikis are pretty simple entities. It's not JIRA (which is a nightmare in itself, not to mention migration).

@Gargron @downey @Mastodon Shouldn't it matter that tools used disallows the use of free software for the rest us? For example we cannot participate in the chat using only free
software.

@Gargron @downey @Mastodon additionally, isn't it against the spirit of the whole thing? Decentralization? Freedom to chose the server and client implementation? The server to host, and our own rules?

I wonder why we don't use matrix to chat?

@Gargron

I dont agree with your argument. But what difference does that make in this case..

@downey @Mastodon

@downey Not sure if you have ever participated in this forum but it is in 95% dedicated to getting technical help with setting a Mastodon instance up for a first time or upgrade issues. There is a certain overlap between things discussed there and GitHub issues. For this, GitHub might be a better place.

I spent some time on this forum and I will not miss it as it were.

Bashing @Gargron because "Discourse hosted account" might be better than "Microsoft hosted account" is unfair.

@Mastodon