Ongoing Changes to FooSoft.net

I’ve been rethinking the role this website serves as part of my personal brand. Up till the start of the new year, I have been pretty burned out on open source development. The satisfaction I receive from the programming was unchanged, but the support burden was taking a big toll on the enjoyment I was getting from engaging with my own projects. This led me to reconsider the way I view my projects. I now see them as an artifact resulting from my hobby as opposed to an end-product designed for external consumption.

Focusing on coding instead of stars and visibility has been reinvigorating. I still value high quality contributions, but only to the extent that they fit within project scope. As part of this new direction, I’m making several changes to my homepage as well.

Homepage

For many years, the main purpose of this website was to share out information about projects I’m working on. Over time this became redundant as literally all forges support rendering of the README.md file (which explains the purpose of the repository). Nevertheless, I have been maintaining an intricate static generation pipeline, which generated pages based on git submodules hosted in the projects subdirectory. I’m now getting rid of all of that, not because it’s difficult to maintain, but more because it’s unnecessary complexity which doesn’t add anything of value to the site. After removing projects, I realized that I’m now left with a website that feels too large for the remaining blog and portfolio sections. I haven’t yet decided on a new design, but I think it’s going to be very minimal (both visually and structurally).

Repositories

At the start of last year, I’ve migrated all my projects off GitHub to a self-hosted Gitea instance. After overcoming the initial user engagement FOMO, I’ve instead awakened to the zen of an email-based patch workflow and the utter lack of caring about project popularity. The lack of other social features and Copilot upsells has been another benefit which cannot be overstated.

Alas, all things good things must come to an end, and within the past couple of weeks, my Gitea instance has been getting completely destroyed by AI content scraping bots, the majority of which completely ignore the robots.txt file. My choices were playing cat and mouse with the scrapers or moving back to a publicly forge. As the former was a lot more work then the latter, I got to searching for a new home for my projects.

The first forge I evaluated was Codeberg, an up-and-coming GitHub alternative which is running Forgejo, a fork of Gitea, what I was previously self-hosting. I’ve gotten as far as moving several projects over, but then a couple of days later Codeberg decided to go political over a two word remark (n****r balls) by some juvenile spammer, blowing up everything into yet another left versus right conflict.

We will not be discouraged in our fight against far-right ideologies. They are currently on the rise in many parts of the world, and we believe it is important to protect all kinds of marginalized groups. However, if you believe this does not affect your project, you are wrong. Far-right forces pose a threat to all of us.

Guys, I just want to host my git repositories and do not want to engage in politics, virtue signaling, or activism of any kind. Codeberg says this is wrong so I deleted my code and moved on. I finally landed on SourceHut. While I can’t say the user interface is very intuitive, I do like that this forge supports a patch-based workflow and clearly advertises itself as a paid service. It seems to support everything I need, without turning into another social network. I’ve updated the redirects on my nginx instance so that old links to git.foosoft.net should now redirect to SourceHut (for both viewing project information and cloning over HTTPS). Sorry if I missed something and broke your workflow!

Finally, I’ve de-listed a lot of projects that are no longer maintained, and for all practical purposes are dead. I obviously still have copies of the repositories on my home server and can re-add anything if need be.