I don’t run a bug tracker, instead all my projects link to this page:

https://uninformativ.de/bugs.html

It basically says, when you find a bug, please send me an email.

Now I’ve read this:

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/EmailVsForgesUnfortunate

I hadn’t thought about this before. That’s a quite valid reason. 🫤 Sadly, it applies to any truly independent self-hosted service. That OAuth thingy (“Sign in with GitHub”) might be the only compromise …

(I rarely get any feedback on my projects, btw. jenny might be an exception, because we’re talking about it here sometimes. Overall, the number of bug reports has dropped significantly since I moved away from GitHub.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Since I moved all my projects off of Github for a number of reasons, I’ve also seen a significant decrease in “bug reports”, but more so “contributors” too. But… I’ve always run an up-to-date instance of Gitea at https://git.mills.io where all my projects live. Despite that, it hasn’t really seen much use beyond a handful of folk, like y’all here 😢 – Sadly today, I’ve had to disable open registration on my Gitea instance, as well as my own Yarn pod (for Twtxt) because of the horrid amount of SPAM you have to deal with and cleanup.

I agree, Email is a giant PITA. I would never ask anyone to send me patches via Email. However on a positive note, I do sometimes get folks reaching out to me on Signal and sometimes Email. Then we form a bit of a relationship, set things up and go from there. That is actually much nicer.

I’m not sure what else we can do? I’m nNOT moving back to Github, ever.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah I”m not really sure to be honest what stops people from contributing. Maybe it’s a discovery problem too? I’m not sure. Should sit down and see what the contributions have been for some of my projects before and after the migration away from Github? 🤔

Are we supposed to “forge hop” (as in “distro hop”) all the time, migrate from the most non-shitty hoster to the next? That can’t be the solution.

I sure hope not, that kind of defeats the point of an ecosystem that is suppose to encourage distributed software development and distributed forms of collaboration. Right? 🤔

How do we collectively improve things?