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Comment by bubblethink | Hacker News Reader

Why was this hosted on gitlab.com ? If you're not on github, the discoverablity is pretty low. You are not self hosting. There is no upside for a project like this to be on gitlab.com. If you're already taking the hit of not being mainstream, why not self host in a sane country ?

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I don't know about this project, but some projects fled GitHub on principle, when they sold out to MS.

If this project were, say, an adtech company, or someone publishing open source solely for resume-boosting reasons, then principles might not matter.

i dont understand this principle at all, mind explaining what is the problem with MS owning github?

https://jacquesmattheij.com/what-is-wrong-with-microsoft-buy...

1) There are lots of reasons to avoid Github and they are all spelled Microsoft.

2) Putting something on Gitlab means that there is one level of activation energy between idiots trying to pad out some corporate "social goodwill" number by "fixing" things on your project.

If I ever had to open-source anything, I would host it somewhere else and mirror a read-only repo to github.

I've never experienced the latter but if somebody wants to waste their time sending me unwanted pull requests I can just ignore them.

Discoverability is solved by being on the Mozilla AddOn store.

Besides, not everybody cares about discoverability.

But it was removed from AMO. That was an issue as people that installed it from AMO just stopped receiving updates silently. You had to uninstall it and re-install the gitlab version for the auto-update to work again.

Hmm, didn't catch that. I see there's still _a_ Bypass add-on on Mozilla. There always were a few, and close forks last I bothered to check. Is this different?

There are some but with very few users and limited to a small number of sites. The only one still on AMO that comes close is the one by iamadamdev (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywal...) which is discussed here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40016918

It was removed from AMO after it was already on the site. Maybe they didn't want to move it.

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