A Mix Up Post

EDIT: 2020/07/09 @ 18:12 – Response from Codeberg added towards the bottom.

Just a quick post to cover a few different things today.

First up is furthering my post from the other day regarding Adding Search to Ghost. I just re-enabled Plausible Analytics and noticed that one of the referrers was from https://paritybit.ca - so I went to take a look like I always do when I see a new referrer.

One of the posts on the site was actually about adding search to their blog by using DuckDuckGo. This seemed like an incredibly simple solution so I thought I'd give it a whirl. While I'd prefer to have the results show up within the Search page, it certainly serves its intended purpose. I haven't linked that page in the nav bar yet as I'm not entirely happy with it. But a big thank you to jbauer on Mastodon and his post for such a simple solution to a simple problem.

A screenshot of a DuckDuckGo search page showing some results from my blog after searching for "plausible"

I recently started playing around with codeberg to see what it was like, what it was capable of, etc.

I really like the nice, clean, simple interface. It's been a real pleasure to use something so simple again. I usually use GitHub and at first I wasn't overly bothered by their UI change but it has certainly began to grate. Things just seem wrong. I have another post in progress regarding that so I won't go in to much further detail.

My serious concern right now is that they are going to struggle without proper funding.  Someone has to pay for all the storage and transfer they must be using. I had a look at their donate page which currently shows them receiving only €11.38 per week.

We are hosting 3494 repositories, created and maintained by 2825 users. Compared to one month ago, this is an organic growth rate of +511 repositories (+17.1% month-over-month) and +282 users (+11.1%). - Codeberg Blog: May Monthly Report

On top of those donations, however, they do currently have a number of members to Codeberg e.V.

Codeberg e.V. has 67 members in total, these are 51 members with active voting rights and 16 supporting members. - Codeberg Blog: May Monthly Report

To become a voting member, you'd need to pay membership dues of €24/year minimum and €10 as a supporting member. You can opt to pay more at more regular intervals which some probably are, but we'll work on that minimum basis. That means they could be pulling just shy of €2,000 a year through membership dues and donations. I bet that does not last very long once you factor in all the bills.

This is just pure speculation of course and I have no idea about their actual income. Still, you don't want something hosting your code to have to close down due to lack of funding. Something GitHub is not going to have to worry about any time soon... It's not like they're Mixer or anything (Seriously Microsoft, not impressed).

Anyway, I love what they are doing and may continue to use it for personal side projects for fun right now. If it is something I do start using a little more often then I might get the donations going. All these donations add up rapidly though.

EDIT:

I had a response from Codeberg shortly after posting this to my Fosstodon feed where they took the time to confirm their funding and how it's all playing out. This info makes me feel far more confident about the service they are providing.

I don't have many public repos, and those that I do have are damn tiny with very little interest. I do have a few private ones though where I try and teach myself things on occasion. If Codeberg is something I do start using more, then will most likely pay the €10 annual fee to become a supporting member.

So if you haven't already - go and check out Codeberg.org and take it for a spin.


The last quick bit of waffle for today is the recent news of Google & Canonical working together to bring Flutter Apps to the Linux desktop. I read the news over at 9to5Google and it looks like they're pushing it all towards the Snap store.

Part of me thinks Flutter is going to make it big time, but who knows. They've got partnerships running with Microsoft too to bring it to Windows but I've not heard much about that in some time.

Watch this space I guess.

Show Comments