But, to be clear, I am not asking you to use inferior platforms for philosophical or altruistic reasons.
Except you just called people selfish for it a paragraph up. A platform that depends on human interaction without humans to interact with is an inferior platform regardless of technical merit.
Going where people are isn't selfish. It's rational.
But 99% of people won't. Choosing that platform massively shrinks your community.
I'm not saying don't do it and try to grow that ecosystem if you want to. I'm all for federated becoming the standard going forward. But don't judge people not wanting to massively compromise their project with a platform that actually is massively worse because it doesn't have people there.
choosing non-free platforms is an individualist, short-term investment which prioritizes your project’s apparent access to popularity over the success of the FOSS ecosystem as a whole
Nah, I don’t give a shit about stars or followers. Had the argument been the endowment effect, I probably wouldn’t have commented at all. I have very limited free time and choose to spend it on things I enjoy. Migrating every single one of my hundreds of repos from more than a decade of collection is not something I’m interested in. I know this because I started the migration to GitLab when MS bought GitHub and it was a huge time suck that brought me no joy. Realistically no one is going to use my code after I die so who the fuck cares.
On the other hand, choosing FOSS platforms is a collectivist investment in the long-term success of the FOSS ecosystem as a whole, driving its overall growth.
I don’t think the FOSS ecosystem could scale quickly enough to handle mass exodus. If all the MIT and Apache 2 code left GitHub for Codeberg, I think Codeberg would die. But what do I know? If Drew DeVault wants to use their free time to migrate my code to the open ecosystem and put their money where their mouth is, I’d be happy to move. I just need all of the servers and random computers that I do dev on to have the remotes updated too.
Cool! Does he migrate all the code and update references or does he just make sweeping generalizations without understanding common user personas for the experiences he claims to own?
These are large existing code-bases that where developed without federation in mind. Gitlab also started working on AP federation, but like with Forgejo it looks like a multi-year project that it involves a lot of refactoring of the code.
Well, I mean, it's been like that from the beginning. You don't open a pull request to the Linux kernel through a web UI, you tell git to send Linus an email with your changes.
One reason people stick on Lemmy and other fediverse communities, is the choice of quality over quantity (in this case - wrt comments).
So quality over quantity could also apply to platforms like Codeberg. Github has so many abandoned student projects or forks going nowhere - maybe making the effort to look beyond the obvious is an indicator of serious (new) projects and contributors ?
Quantity becomes a problem only if its hard to find things you're looking for. It's not like you have to sift through hundreds of projects to find what you need, you just search for it and it pops up. I don't think quantity is a big deal here.