Plan for Typelevel's exodus from GitHub: AI slop, disrespect, and a future without control

[rossabaker]

Important

ai;dr: What follows is a generated issue, but maybe if we helplessly stand in place as the slop rises from knee deep to neck deep, GitHub will become agentic enough that we can just ask the bots to move us.

The Gathering Storm: GitHub's Descent into AI Slop

The Typelevel community is at a crossroads. The relentless proliferation of AI-generated issues and pull requests—slop churned out by tools like Copilot—represents an existential threat to the integrity and sustainability of open source stewardship. Maintainers are besieged by a relentless tide of low-effort, irrelevant, and frequently nonsensical contributions, all in the service of Microsoft's bottom line.

Utter Disregard for Maintainers

AI-generated issues are not just a nuisance; they are a flagrant insult to the time and expertise of maintainers. These so-called "contributions" waste scarce human attention, trivialize the value of genuine participation, and further erode the quality of our shared work.

Microsoft and GitHub: Champions of Hostility

Microsoft continues to unleash maintainer-hostile tools, heedless to the outcry of the very communities that make their platform possible. The recent announcement that Copilot can now create issues automatically is yet another brick in a wall of contempt.

Worse, Microsoft/GitHub has steadfastly refused to provide even the most basic tools for communities to defend themselves. No opt out. No labeling. No recourse. See GitHub Community Discussion.

Demand for Action: Plan the Exodus

We must begin planning Typelevel's departure from GitHub before the deluge becomes an unmanageable catastrophe. Alternatives such as Codeberg, SourceHut, or even a self-hosted forge now demand serious consideration. If we do not act, we will be complicit in our own marginalization.

The time for complacency is over. The era of AI slop is upon us, and only decisive action will safeguard the future of our projects and our community.

Let us not be remembered as the generation that surrendered open source to the algorithms of indifference.

[rossabaker]

The first question would be where to host it. Two obvious choices, suggested by our sloppy friend above, are:

• Codeberg, a non-profit and increasingly a default for those fleeing GitHub
• Self-hosting, which maintains independence but requires infrastructure we've not historically managed.

The most formidable challenge is CI. We currently pay GitHub through the nose for extra capacity and platforms. Forgejo supports actions in a somewhat compatible fashion with GitHub Actions. Self-hosted runners can be hooked into modern Forgejo instances, including Codeberg. Providing that compute is another vexing infrastructure question, and probably also a financial one.

I think now is the time to be thinking of this, but also that it's not an overnight effort. A concrete first step could be to select project or affiliate project as a pilot and see exactly what we'd be up against. A couple ideas:

• http4s/http4s-servlet circumvents the multiplatform challenges and is mostly me these days
• typelevel/scalacheck-xml is rather low profile

[rossabaker]

An even better place to start is a personal pseudoproject. I can almost build no without modifications to the action. I am confident this could be resolved.

Windows and MacOS runners would be problematic. If our other ducks were in a row, I'm indifferent to that duck.

[valencik]

I think one of the bigger technical hurdles is that sbt-typelevel doesn't support anything besides GitHub yet.

Making a call on a target CI platform and then investigating how much work it is to support from sbt would be pretty cool.

[rossabaker]

Forgejo Actions are mostly compatible with GitHub Actions. This Forgejo build passed on a mirror of this commit, using the same workflow. A couple rough edges remain:

• I haven't yet properly configured caching, which is why a couple steps hang for a few minutes.
• Forgejo supports absolute URLs for actions. GitHub does not. I had to set the default actions source on my Forgejo to https://github.com/ to reuse the definition. This could be cleaned up with a parameter in sbt-typelevel, not a full rewrite.
• The upload artifacts on some other builds fails, because the GitHub-hosted action doesn't support it on non-GitHub hosts. There's a fork of that action for Forgejo, but it won't work until the above bullet point is fixed.