Migrating Dillo from GitHub
I would like to migrate the Dillo project away from GitHub into a new home which is more friendly to be used with Dillo and solves some of its problems. This page summarizes the current situation with GitHub and why I decided to move away from it into a self-hosted server with multiple mirrors in other forges.
Background
Before we dive into the details, I would like to briefly mention what happened with the old site. The original Dillo website was at dillo.org, which also had the source code of Dillo in a mercurial repository at hg.dillo.org. But it also included the mail server used to reach the developers, a bug tracker and archives for the mailing list. However, in 2022 the domain was lost and someone else decided to buy it to put a similar site but plaged with AI generated ads. The original developers are no longer active, but luckily I had a copy of the mercurial repository and with some help I was able to recover a lot of material from the original server (some parts are still missing to this day).
I want to avoid this situation as much as possible, so we cannot rely on a single site that can go down and the whole project become lost. Initially, I uploaded the Dillo source and website to git repositories on GitHub, but I no longer think this is a good idea.
The situation with GitHub
GitHub has been useful to store all repositories of the Dillo project, as well as to run the CI workflows for platforms in which I don't have a machine available (like Windows, Mac OS or some BSDs).
However, it has several problems that make it less suitable to develop Dillo anymore. The most annoying problem is that the frontend barely works without JavaScript, so we cannot open issues, pull requests, source code or CI logs in Dillo itself, despite them being mostly plain HTML, which I don't think is acceptable. In the past, it used to gracefully degrade without enforcing JavaScript, but now it doesn't. Additionally, the page is very resource hungry, which I don't think is needed to render mostly static text.
Another big problem is that it is a single point of failure. I don't mean that GitHub is stored in a single machine, but it is controlled by a single entity which can unilateraly ban our repository or account and we would lose the ability to notify in that URL what happened. This can cause data loss if we don't have a local copy of all the data.
On the usability side, the platform has become more and more slow over time, which is affecting the development process. It also requires you to have a fast Internet connection at all times, which is not the case for me sometimes. Additionally, GitHub seems to encourage a "push model" in which you are notified when a new event occurs in your project(s), but I don't want to work with that model. Instead, I prefer it to work as a "pull model", so I only get updates when I specifically look for them. This model would also allow me to easily work offline. Unfortunately, I see that the same push model has been copied to alternative forges.
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