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People keep bringing that up, but that's missing the bigger picture: GitHub is more than just a git host, it's also a "social hub" where people can fork repos a
by AceJohnny2 10y ago
People keep bringing that up, but that's missing the bigger picture: GitHub is more than just a git host, it's also a "social hub" where people can fork repos and offer changes back (pull requests), a passable bugtracker (issues), even wiki, and even web host (github.io).
Many people have warned that using these added-value features makes you dependent on GitHub (Linus Torvalds has a kernel mirror on GitHub, but for this reason refuses to use its other features). Migrating all that metadata is hard (is it even possible?).
- ForHackernews 10y agoThere are plenty of replacements. Bitbucket, gitlab, etc.
- sidlls 10y agoI actually prefer bitbucket because I don't have to pay for private repos.
- Perihelion 10y agoYou can have private repos for free on GitLab.com too. Disclaimer: I work at GitLab.
- sidlls 10y agoI was completely unaware of that. Thanks for the heads up. I use gitlab at work, and now I might try it for my personal projects.
- ProAm 10y agoThe problem is social hubs add very little real value and are easily replaceable, especially among technically astute people.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoOh, but they do add a lot of real value. In fact, they're extremely efficient at making this value - so efficient that they don't get to monetize anything but a small fraction of it.
- matt4077 10y agoI think Github is a prime example of how much a "social hub" can add. In the 6 years or so before GH, do you think I ever send a patch upstream? Now, collaborating is almost easier than not doing it, and it's an awesome community.
- icebraining 10y agoJoey Hess' github-backup backs up everything github knows about a repository (including branches, tags, other forks, issues, comments, wikis, milestones, pull requests, watchers, and stars) to the repository. I'm sure most of these could be re-imported into an alternative service through its API, even if with some loss of fidelity. https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup
- AceJohnny2 10y agoThat's awesome. I need to send JoeyH more money. (for others: he's also the creator of git-annex, an out-of-band file storage extension to git, and for a long time was the maintainer of critical parts of Debian's ecosystem. He likes to live in a yurt: http://joeyh.name/yurt/ http://joeyh.name/yurt/)
- icebraining 10y agohttps://www.patreon.com/joeyh https://www.patreon.com/joeyh ^^
- flukus 10y agoThe other problem is that "cloud services" have taught people not to back up their data.