@Russelli My spacemacs isnt super fast to load, maybe about 5 seconds. Still faster than what you expiernced.

And yes you actually can use both, all my projects do. In your repository go to the repository settings and there is a mirror option. You can choose to have gitlab as your main repo and mirror changes into a github repo as commits come in automatically. You can also do the reverse and mirror github into gitlab and make github your main repo.

Technically you can have it be bidirectional as well with any commit on either side mirroring to the other by setting up both, this is what I do.. But it can in some cases (particularly on very active repos) cause conflicts where the repos become out of sync. If you select "Keep divergent refs" it will help mitigate this partially by keeping the branches in sync that it can even if one branch gets out of sync. But use bidirectional mirroring with caution, it has never caused a conflict for me yet but it can and you should be mindful of that.

@freemo 5 seconds is great, that is in the useable realm. Did you need to reconfigure to achieve this? Perhaps I just need to run an update?

@Russelli not really, i picked the plugins i wanted, threw in one or two of my own custom ones and was good to go.

@freemo Yes, I used to use Dropbox on GitHub repositories, and this caused really weird conflicts and data corruption. I think the problem was Dropbox might take a break from trying to sync half way through a git reference or head. I think I will use a one way mirror. There must be some significant advantages of gitlab. Is it mainly about visualization, or is it integration? I can explore, I will mirror based on GitHub and see what happens.

@freemo I wonder, if I can use the qoto licence to download the client side gitlab program too? I assumed the answer might be yes, but then I was confronted with an authentication challenge so I gave up. I once used the free trial of Git Kraken, it was super ace, I was able to find snippets of code based on keyword search, that I had otherwise regarded buried.

@freemo Oh yeah, totally git is a nightmare for LFS. I spend a lot of time using the bfg, removing large files I accidentally committed. Really, Next cloud also. Wow qoto users are so lucky! I once tried to use Open Science Frame work, it is meant for open data storage it has some git like behavior, and the principle is awesome, but programmatic access to Open Science Frame is cumbersome.

@Russelli You really should read our about more page, it outlines all our services and also goes into some details on our moderation policies which is important too:

https://qoto.org/about/more

@freemo Okay I read it. It looks like qoto is very STEM driven, and supporting of FOSS tool chains and services. I think I probably put thought into joining qoto at the time, and then downgraded my memory of what I had joined to FB/twitter alternative. Hey umm... when trying to login to these services, I think I got some auto logins that were based on redirections from logged in qoto. Then I bungled up that work flow, by trying to login with my actual email. How can I consult the appropriate credentials? And also thanks for all of your help @freemo I really like this STEM community. I checked out Funk whale, it looks like a FOSS alternative to spotify and pandora.

@Russelli
Each service you have ton register too seperately

Also they are all federated and most use activity. So you can for example follow your peertube account from your account here. When you post a new video it will show just like a status update would for an account on this server.