It's just funny because they're removing it from a source code repo, packaging it up into a zip, and adding it to another source code repo. If they didn't mind including the change history they could've just published the code as-is as a clone. If they did want to strip the change history they could've published it as a shallow clone or an artifact. But instead they chose to push a ZIP file into a repo with a single branch. I guess at least they'll have a history of their ZIP files.

That assumes they _have_ a source code repo. For all we know maybe it's just random files on some person's hard drive with no source control…

They do have it. They used to publish it. Then someone found a vulnerability in a commit of theirs (6e42e3b1eca73c306db1580719a3a1bfb715f6d8 if you're interested in looking it up in a mirror), exploited it, and took all data Gab ever had.

This current approach is just a deliberate obfuscation in an attempt for it not to repeat. By just providing a zip you can't really look at their changes on top of Mastodon with git log, you have to put in slightly more effort.