Mozilla will move Firefox development from Mercurial to Microsoft’s GitHub

Moving to git is nice but I don't understand why they don't self-host a gitlab instance.

Imho the main argument for github is that it lowers the hurdle for new ane ad-hoc contributions like issues. I'm problably too lazy to registsr a new account for your instance just to open a bug report.
I'd love a federated git/issue/wiki thing
- In my opinion that sounds like a plus. People that are too lazy to register an account to put in a code merge request or report a bug aren't going to be writing quality code or quality bug reports.
- Are they moving issues or just code storage to GitHub?
- They're going to continue using Bugzilla for bug reports.
- It wouldn't make it more difficult than with mercurial, which isn't supported by github either.
- GitHub will just serve as code mirror. Patches and bugs will still go through Mozilla's usually channels.
but I don’t understand why they don’t self-host
Why would anyone self-host a FLOSS project? Trade secrets is not a concern, nor is it barring access to the source code repository. Why would anyone waste their resources managing a service that adds no value beyond a third-party service like GitHub?
- Because Microsoft will eat your ass in your sleep
- Because while you do have control (and "copies") of the source code repository, that's not really true for the ecosystem around it - tickets, pull requests, ...
  If Microsoft decided to fuck you over you'd have a hard time migrating the "community" around that source code somewhere else.
  Obviously depends on what features you are using, but for example losing all tickets would be problematic for any projects.
  Apparently Mozilla won't be even accepting PRs there so it doesn't matter much.
Or, you know, Gitea or such.
- I keep hearing people only on Lemmy bring up Gitea but I haven't really heard of it otherwise. What's the appeal and what's keeping it locked away with the Lemmy community?
Money most likely.

The repository will be hosted on GitHub, though the move is expected to take “at least six months before the migration begins.”

Another major opensource project that chooses a proprietary hosting platform 🤷

Let's be honest here, at least like 98% of the popular OSS is on GitHub at this point. You don't have to like it, but it's how things are
- Doesn't mean that they have to continue putting stuff there. But oh well, maybe once ForgeFed becomes a real thing, things might change a little.
GitHub is just serving as public code mirror, it's not going to be their hosting platform.

Using and financially contributing to Codberg seems like a good next step to take. Doubt they will though.

So, from a decentralised solution to the world’s biggest repository
You need to check your notes. Git is decentralized, even if you host a repository somewhere.
Decisions like these (...)
As a Firefox user, these initiatives matter nothing in my decision to use Firefox. In fact, I'm glad they went this way. They need to focus on working on code instead of wasting their time with irrelevant details.
But what browser do we use then?

Ah! 😣 Why not nest or self-hosted pijul!?

It's not battle tested on massive projects nor does it have the prior mindshare git has. It doesn't have a lot of tooling either. (Does any CI/CD system support pijul?) It has nice properties, but ultimately git with all it's terrible warts is well understood.
- Seems to my mistake. You question is about CI/CD services that supports Pijul. So yes, almost zero. But it’s like ouroboros. Just use pijul more then git and talk about it, and services will support it soon.
- CI/CD
  Pijul as git or hg or any other is a VCS, so what are you talking about? If you mean web-service like GitHub with social things and CI/CD services, so yes, nest have CI/CD with nix. But mostly you shouldn’t host your huge project on the Nest because, as I’m absolutely sure, you as anyone other should create your own host (public or private) to support decentralization to prevent github-like centralization situation. Pijul was created with decentralization in first place in mind.
  Not tested with big projects in production
  Not publicly. Many private projects, personal and in-company, that uses pijul are existing. Personally I have one HUGE personal. Also I worked for two companies where pijul is used.
Neither has reached 1.0. They're perpetually unstable.

Chromium has a mirror on GitHub and it's fine. While it feels a little strange to have just one mirror (on GitHub), after moving to git entirely, nobody is stopping to them from hosting a GitLab mirror.

Doesn’t make much sense to judge a program by its underlying language. While I don’t enjoy writing Python much anymore for several reasons it can produce perfectly fine applications. Mercurial is one such example.

Cool now I can actually check it out. Tried to previously but my connection failed about an hour into the clone. --depth=1 --shallow-submodules --recurse-submodules should really be given its own command in git. Not really sure why'd they choose MS as their host though.