bridgetownrb
docs: move Plugins directory away from GitHub sources
As a mass migration away from GitHub envelopes the open source community due to Microsoft's atrocious choice to subsume GitHub and turn it into an AI platform, we're also looking at ways to pull out of the GH ecosystem. Right now the Plugins directory is automatically sourced from the bridgetown-plugin topic on GH, but it would be better to make it something we can update manually via static collection resources managed by PRs. That way the plugin can live anywhere and it's not GH-specific.
Note: there are no immediate plans to move the Bridgetown repo officially off of GitHub. This issue discussion is about updating the Plugins directory.
FYI for the curious: we have a mirror running now on Codeberg! 👏🏻 https://codeberg.org/bridgetownrb/bridgetown
What serious projects on GitHub are leaving? You're making a bold claim that I've yet to see.
As a mass migration away from GitHub envelopes the open source community
What is the purpose...? To hurt the project by putting it on some platform with a fraction of the user base? That is guaranteed to lower contribution and interest.
If the goal is to stop GitHub from having access to the code for AI training and the like, you can just throw that hope out the window. For one, I'm never moving to codeberg.org and neither are plenty of other people. I'll continue to maintain a fork here until you close source the project.
@jclusso
What serious projects on GitHub are leaving? You're making a bold claim that I've yet to see.
The project I'm most personally familiar with on Codeberg is PieFed, an excellent "threadiverse" alternative to Lemmy. Although it may have started on Codeberg so not sure that's the best example. There are certainly others.
What is the purpose...? To hurt the project by putting it on some platform with a fraction of the user base? That is guaranteed to lower contribution and interest.
Loss of GH community is of course a concern, which is why we haven't jumped and pulled the ripcord yet. Arguably, aligning with people who care deeply about developing open source on a platform that is itself open source is also appealing. (Codeberg is built on the OSS Forgejo software which has become a focal point for the effort to bring code forges into the Fediverse. That would be a huge game-changer, just like Mastodon has been for people leaving corporate silos like Twitter.)
If the goal is to stop GitHub from having access to the code for AI training and the like, you can just throw that hope out the window. For one, I'm never moving to codeberg.org and neither are plenty of other people. I'll continue to maintain a fork here until you close source the project.
What a strange comment! Git is itself a decentralized protocol. Only the "forge" aspect has ended up centralized in the hands of Microsoft as a closed-source platform which is now pivoting to AI. Obviously folks will be concerned about that (and this paradox of FLOSS hosted on a proprietary service was already a concern way back when Microsoft first purchased GitHub).
No need to maintain a "fork" of Bridgetown if is the code is identical. If you want to soft fork (or even hard fork) Bridgetown for your own purposes though, that's fine certainly!
The project I’m most personally familiar with on Codeberg is PieFed…
That’s not evidence of a trend. Pointing to one obscure project hardly proves there’s a "mass migration" from GitHub. Meanwhile, every serious open source ecosystem like Rails, Kubernetes, Node.js, Python, Postgres, Linux Foundation projects, etc, is still on GitHub.
Loss of GH community is of course a concern, which is why we haven’t jumped and pulled the ripcord yet…
That’s basically admitting that GitHub’s community is too valuable to walk away from. Without the reach, you lose contributors, visibility, and integrations. Moving to Codeberg doesn’t protect the project, it just isolates it. And Mastodon is a joke. It has no comparable reach to Twitter.
No need to maintain a "fork" of Bridgetown if is the code is identical. If you want to soft fork (or even hard fork) Bridgetown for your own purposes though, that's fine certainly!
Let me correct myself since you seem to have missed the point of my statement. I'll maintain a "mirror" on GitHub regardless of what you do meaning that GitHub will have the entire codebase rendering this grand standing to be totally worthless.
every serious open source ecosystem like Rails, Kubernetes, Node.js, Python, Postgres, Linux Foundation projects, etc, is still on GitHub.
This isn't even true — the GNOME ecosystem (including GIMP) is on a branded GitLab instance, Fedora is in the process of an ecosystem migration to hosted Forgejo, Inkscape is on standard GitLab as is Wireshark…
If you want to make the case we'd be better off migrating to GitLab than Codeberg etc., there are certainly good reasons to pitch that. But a knee-jerk reaction just isn't helpful to anyone. Thank you!
I personally agree with @jclusso. I really enjoy Bridgetown, but unfortunately, it seems like nobody has heard about it. People are still using Jekyll, and they don't even realize that it is mostly unmaintained for a long time. They continue to struggle with the many workarounds that Jekyll forces them to use, and I guess they don't realize at all that things could be better.
This project lacks promotion, and moving away from GitHub would make things even worse.
If you want to make the case we'd be better off migrating to GitLab than Codeberg etc., there are certainly good reasons to pitch that. But a knee-jerk reaction just isn't helpful to anyone. Thank you!
Good point. At least somebody has heard of GitLab and a few people might have accounts there. For a comparison though, Codeberg gets ~11k visitors, GitLabs gets 1.3M visitors, and GitHub gets ~48M visitors.
I'd still argue that it is guaranteed to have zero positive impact. I can personally say that I would not have made the 10+ PRs on this project that I have made if it was on another platform. I just wouldn't have gone out of my way. If you actually care about this project, why would you do something that only will hurt it?
Lastly, your entire reasoning for this falls apart once anyone maintains a mirror on GitHub.
I have updated the issue description:
Note: there are no immediate plans to move the Bridgetown repo officially off of GitHub. This issue discussion is about updating the Plugins directory.
Apologies that this wasn't completely clear before. I'll also just reiterate that currently the Plugins directory simply scrapes items via the GitHub API, so there's literally no way to curate it, or add additional commentary to it, or even support plugins hosted anywhere other than GitHub. None of those points are ideal, so we'll end up with a much better product after this work gets done (aspects of which were already intended long before this latest GH debacle).
I see.
I was going based on this bold notice on your GitHub that has quite the opposite claim and this issue on codeberg for moving Bridgetown there.
Yes that's correct, I'm moving my projects to Codeberg.
The Bridgetown repo is its own question, and the core team has deliberated on that for some time now and will continue to deliberate on it.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/05/github_copilot_complaints/
"Despite being a symbolic change, it seems to have galvanized the open source community from just complaining about Copilot to now actively moving away from GitHub," said McClure. "Many of my contacts in the open source community have been talking about plans to move from GitHub to Codeberg or a self-hosted Forgejo (Forgejo is the software used by Codeberg) over the last month, and the comments in those two always-busy GitHub threads have increasingly been people describing how Copilot is inspiring them to move to Codeberg as well."
Calls to shun Microsoft and GitHub go back a long way in the open source community, but moved beyond simmering dissatisfaction in 2022 when the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) urged free software supporters to give up GitHub, a position SFC policy fellow Bradley M. Kuhn recently reiterated.
Some of the developers participating in the issues raised by McClure and by others have said they intend to move away from GitHub over its stance on AI.
Instead of quoting articles from people nobody knows or cares about, why don't you list the projects that are actually moving if you want to provide evidence to your baseless claim.
Surely there must be a huge list of serious projects if a mass migration were occurring.