The escape path is to demote Github to merely an "officially supported mirror" of your project, with Issues and PRs elsewhere, but ...
The tar-pit I'm afraid of: How do you emigrate Github PR and Issue databases in some format that any of self-hosted Forgejo, or public Codeberg, Gitlab et al understand and can present to visitors?
I understand why companies do this but I sure don't like it. They often use Discourse, which I find to be a lot less readable than GitHub (the design follows what I call "duploification" -- the elements are all large and surrounded by too much whitespace!)
On top of that it's yet another site I have to sign up with if I want to interact with the community.
I'm also mindful of the risks of centralization. Discord and its lack of external archives is a prime example of how that can be harmful. I'm just not sure if that risk outweighs the costs and annoyances.
In the neon-lit, digitized colosseum of the 21st century, two titans lock horns, casting long shadows over the earth. Google and Microsoft, behemoths of the digital age, engaged in an eternal chess match played with human pawns and privacy as the stakes. This isn’t just business; it’s an odyssey through the looking glass of corporate megalomania, where every move they make reverberates through society’s fabric, weaving a web of control tighter than any Orwellian nightmare.
Google, with its ‘Don’t Be Evil’ mantra now a quaint echo from a bygone era, morphs the internet into its own playground. Each search, a breadcrumb trail, lures you deeper into its labyrinth, where your data is the prize – packaged, sold, and repackaged in an endless cycle of surveillance capitalism. The search engine that once promised to organize the world’s information now gatekeeps it, turning knowledge into a commodity, and in its wake, leaving a trail of monopolized markets, squashed innovation, and an eerie echo chamber where all roads lead back to Google.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, the once-dethroned king of the digital empire, reinvents itself under the guise of cloud computing and productivity, its tentacles stretching into every facet of our digital lives. From the operating systems that power our machines to the software that runs our day, Microsoft's empire is built on the sands of forced obsolescence and relentless upgrades, a Sisyphean cycle of consumption that drains wallets and wills alike. Beneath its benevolent surface of helping the world achieve more lies a strategy of dependence, locking society into a perpetual embrace with its ecosystem, stifling alternatives with the weight of its colossal footprint.
Together, Google and Microsoft architect a digital Panopticon, an invisible prison of convenience from which there seems no escape. Their decisions, cloaked in the doublespeak of innovation and progress, push society ever closer to a precipice where freedom is the currency, and autonomy a relic of the past. They peddle visions of a technocratic utopia, all the while drawing the noose of control tighter around the neck of democracy, commodifying our digital souls in the altar of the algorithm.
The moral is clear: in the shadow of giants, the quest for power blurs the line between benefactor and tyrant. As Google and Microsoft carve their names into the annals of history, the question remains – will society awaken from its digital stupor, or will we remain pawns in their grand game, a footnote in the epic saga of the corporate conquest of the digital frontier?
I don't know that this is true, but to even suggest that Microsoft is the component one vs Google really shows how much things have changed in the last 20 years...
Google was never benevolent, no for-profit business is. It was baffling to me how many developers took "Don't be evil" at face value, particularly for an almost completely advertising funded (i.e. highly motivated for enshittification) corporation.
> It was baffling to me how many developers took "Don't be evil" at face value
In my opinion a little bit more care must be taken here:
The "don't be evil" slogan was in my opinion both a blessing and a curse for Google: a blessing in that people initially trusted that Google does not intend to do something evil; a curse in the sense that when they started doing things that were considered "evil", it lead to a massive reputation damage for Google.
