this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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Digital Fiefdom (aka walled-garden) Required 🏰

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This community collects stories, cases and situations where people are forced into digital colonialism via walled-garden to carry out a public transaction or essential task of some kind. As governments impose a digital transformation policy with no analog refuge, people are forced into becoming serfs in a technofeudal system that is subservient to lords (Microsoft, Cloudflare, Google, etc).

Well-known walled gardens include (but are not limited to):

(note I do not say X or Meta above because I do not recognize or promote obnoxious and detrimental trademarks)

¹It’s somewhat unlikely that a gov would impose Github, but it is listed as an example because some govs do have git services. E.g. the EU has a public-facing self-hosted git instance.

Somewhat related communities:

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evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org
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Github isn't a fully walled garden though (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org to c/digi_fiefdom_required@lemmy.sdf.org
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I wouldn't lump Github with Facebook or Twitter because, at its core, it's just a plain jane git server. If you stick to core features, you can exfiltrate your repos at any time in seconds and move them someplace else. And you can interact with Github's git server with open-source, fully documented tools.

It's the extended features Github offers that lock you in - the social media stuff and advanced git tools. So if you want to give Microsoft the finger, use Github only for basic services.

Me, I host all my repos there, and I use them also to host videos and as Linux distro repositories (apt and rpm) for my packages: I make it my duty to use up as many Microsoft resources as possible without paying them a dime and without giving them any edge to lock me in.

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[–] evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The git component is the only liberated functionality on there. The most important service by GitHub is the bug tracker. That’s the trap. I will not be a serf for our lord Microsoft, so I am therefore excluded from contributing bug reports.

As a consequence, I do not report bugs on MS Github projects. And by extension, the commons does not benefit from my QA contributions due to that private walled-garden.

Github’s detriment is exposed here.

I make it my duty to use up as many Microsoft resources as possible without paying them a dime and without giving them any edge to lock me in.

MS would love you for that because they are profitting from your data without your money. I’m not sure how you can use GH without adding value to it. You could make a private project which you then use only as a git backup, but then I think MS charges for the privilege of private repos. But even then, I’m not sure the private projects don’t add value to Copilot in some way.

I think you would need to use Github as an encrypted backup of a project that lives in a liberated space. In principle.. it might be an unsurmountable effort to encrypt git contents. I suppose the fun part would be that every tiny change would result in a diff the size of the whole object you change.