GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

Are we using GitHub differently? I don’t understand how the social network part of GitHub has to do with having your code discoverable and to discover.

I’ve never stumbled upon a project by browsing GitHub casually. It’s always through finding the product first and trying to find the source code. If the source code is on some other website, I’ll probably figure it out, but it’s be a new muscle. Same with making an issue or a PR. The barrier is higher but not so high that I wouldn’t complain about a bug.

If anything, I find the social tools on GitHub like PR reviews, issue management, and notifications to be terrible for their job. Perfectly fine for a 1 person project and absolutely awful for a team.

I’m in something of the same boat, although I don’t particularly care about my own stars and what not, for me it’s just a rather effective place to find open source projects to use/contribute towards (along with hosting for my own projects).

I have found running GitHub mirrors for my own projects hosted on a private Forgejo instance works well enough, but the fracturing of GitHub will inevitably cause more difficulty in discovering others’ work. I suppose that opens opportunities up for either federation, or at least aggregation (Sourceforge has been doing that already, although I find its interface a little clunky).

In the end GitHub will be a dating site

I remember there's at least one serious effort for forge federation. But don't know what it's called or how to search for it.

Edit: here's one: https://forgefed.org/

And the forks/network tree.

For any given project, are there any forks / is this one a fork, and which ones are more recently/actively maintained, and what are the changes?

That network display where you can not only see all the forks in a timeline, but click on the individual commits is super handy.

Idk how you'd assemble that out of a federated system. It's probably possible but seems like it would require a lot of update traffic going in all directions between all nodes.

Fediverse all the things.

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Only reason that I see is that is free to use, why other alternatives are either paid or you needs to be hosted (and thus you need to pay the cost of a server and the work to maintain it).

Convenience.

This is what I do. If however I wanted to do some open source I would definitely copy releases to GitHub as well

Not saying it doesn't come with downsides and the hassle of maintenance, but at home I have a Linux server (running a Windows VM) + Mac Mini + Forgejo + Forgejo workers on each one of them. With NixOS it was relatively painless to get setup correctly, everything in a reproducible manner, and now I can have a ~10 line YAML file that adds cross-platform builds+signing+publishing when needed, and performance is much better than the free/cheap CI workers you get from Microsoft and others.

They’re free, too. If your project is public, you can spin up dozens (hundreds?) of jobs (10 or so of which will run in parallel) on every push and Microsoft casually pays for it. I’d love to move off GH but I would have to significantly reduce my CI usage (before you ask - already more optimized than anything you usually see) or pay quite a lot for my hobby projects.

It's mentioned in the article.

I tried it, years apart. It's forever experimental, and requires hosting for forever online repo anyway.

Forgejo is also mentioned, to me it's a valid alternative, without the community aspect.

While many have ethical issues with GitHub, my understanding is that the current wave of people leaving are doing so because of _reliability_ reasons.

I might have moved off for self righteousness but my company might be more interested in moving off because their reliability is absolutely garbage

It’s really another way of saying: it needs to meet GitHub’s current utility and functions today.

And one of them is ease of discovery. GitHub make’s it really easy to do that. Same with contribution.

As far as looks go? That’s more subjective.

But the discovery and contributions piece is easy to prove, just look at how much traction a project gets when it’s hosted there versus elsewhere. Even really large projects that has many contributors have moved there like WebKit

I share the feeling though, by corporate I believe what is meant: does not cater to public communities.

GitHub was community first, then enterprise. MS hasn't managed to ruin that.

found the vanilla dvorak user (?)

Tangled is VC funded and owned by investors, not the community like Codeberg or Forgejo.

https://blog.tangled.org/seed/

Avoid.

How would subversion fix this problem exactly? It would still be a centralized forge that Microsoft could still control/ruin. In fact, more centralized than Git, which itself was designed to be decentralized (though admittedly most people don't use it that way).

Microsoft didn't purchase "Git", they purchased Github, the largest forge for Git. Git will continue to exist no matter what Microsoft does.

Also, I have absolutely no desire to ever, ever go back to SVN. When I was a junior engineer in my first software job, every Friday I would have to do The Merge, which would usually take most of the day because it would be spent solving all the merge conflicts. When I discovered the git-svn thing, it was like manna from heaven since it made a 4+ hour job take around ~45 minutes.

Your apparent problems with Git the source control system aren’t what any of this is talking about, this is about GitHub as a platform. SourceForge is your better “pre-git” analogue here, and it, like SVN, still exists and is actively maintained and used.

The issue isn't the technology (git, subversion, cvs, etc), it's that developers FOMO and glom on to what every other developer uses so you end up with these huge silos that they inevitably complain about.