10 ms·

As a rule of thumb, it is a good idea to support smaller and indie companies than mega corporations, IMHO - even if those mega corporations aren't doing anythin

• BeetleB 4y ago
  Last time I checked, sr.ht was mostly an email based workflow, and many teams wanted an issue tracking system that is web based
  • ddevault 4y ago
    SourceHut offers an email-based workflow with a web application built on top of it. You can file tickets via email, but you can also file tickets on the web: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/hare https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/hare The same goes for patches. You can submit changes directly via email, but you can also use our web interface. We're also working on web-based tools for code review built on top of our mailing lists, which will provide a complete experience similar to GitHub's pull requests, but built on top of the decentralized, standardized protocol that git was designed for.
    • hunterb123 4y ago
      Hello, kinda offtopic, but are there plans for ForgeFed / ActivityPub support? That really seems the best way to dethrone GitHub, as it's moat is mainly carved via a social network. The git repo is already decentralized, ForgeFed is a great way to integrate and decentralize the social part. In the future gitea, srht, and many other implementations could interact with each other's users.
      • ddevault 4y ago
        No, not at this time. I don't think that ActivityPub is the correct way to address this issue -- some people treat it like a golden hammer. SourceHut is already federated: via email. Email is a standardized, federated protocol with thousands of implementations and a global fault-tolerant system already working in production for decades, and it's the approach git was designed to use. I think this is a better solution. You can already use SourceHut's tooling to contribute to projects like Linux, which don't use any forge software at all, thanks to this standardization.
        • hunterb123 4y ago
          That's unfortunate. It's pretty difficult to run your own email server plus deal with the blacklisting. I see your points, but I also see a possibility to support both email and ActivityPub mediums. A lot of people want a dedicated interface, hence you having to make a web portal. I don't see why the web portal couldn't support ForgeFed in addition to email. Being able to bridge standalone gitea instances users with repos on your service would be a good step forward for federation.
          • ddevault 4y ago
            ForgeFed is just a protocol, just like email. The interfaces can be essentially identical. It's pretty difficult to host a fediverse server, too. I want to make SourceHut easier to self-host post-beta, including dealing with email bits, but I also don't think the dream of federation involves everyone running their own servers. One of the advantages of the federation model is that it strikes a balance between total centralization and total de-centralization in that it allows a talented sysadmin to provide services for a large number of users. There are more ways to federate than ActivityPub.
            • hunterb123 4y ago
              Exactly my point. You could support both ActivityPub and email as protocols. I believe even commits could contain either address as it's a similar format. As far as hosting difficulty goes, once Gitea supports ForgeFed, you'd be able to spin up your own instance as easy as running one program, and no worries about blacklisting. I agree not everyone needs their own server, which is where shines sr.ht over Gitea, but a community developing a product sometimes wishes to run their own servers for their users. Sure they could run an email server, and users could use that, but it seems roundabout and outdated. I agree there's more than one way to federate, but the goal is bridging everyone together. Those two aren't mutually exclusive if you support both protocols.
    • BeetleB 4y ago
      Thanks Drew. I may have been mistaken, or perhaps you added those features after I tried them. I'll take another look.
  • yowmamasita 4y ago
    Email is still the most robust communication medium. But I have also observed that it has also prevented emoji-only replies which is great.
    • SnowHill9902 4y ago
      Standard but not robust. In fact it can silently fail.
      • ddevault 4y ago
        Email is very robust and does not fail silently -- unless you ignore the "undelivered returned to sender" emails you get. Mail servers are very fault tolerant, with essentially all implementations supporting an exponential backoff on failure. What's more, even if SourceHut is down, everyone in the Cc will still receive your emails, because they're routed around lists.sr.ht anyway. In the event of a lists.sr.ht outage, you might not even notice that we're down.
        • kelnos 4y ago
          Unfortunately some of the larger mail providers will "accept" mail they don't like, but then blackhole it. Yes, you can say "well, your intended recipients shouldn't use mail providers that do that", but in reality that's not our choice.
        • midenginedcoupe 4y ago
          That's unfortunately just not true. It does, and has, failed silently. I've had Google silently swallow emails before, both sending and receiving. It's not fun.
          • kcartlidge 4y ago
            You may be right generally, but for your specific example that's not email being rubbish it's Google being rubbish. Why not switch to a professional provider?
  • spoils19 4y ago
    Then those teams are wrong considering email is more robust, efficient and overall a better tool for the job.
  • akudha 4y ago
    That is why I said "wherever possible". If your team is going to quit their jobs (I doubt it) because they will only deal with a web based issue tracking, then sure, go for GitHub. The point I am trying to make here is - by default people spend their money with mega corps, because of brand awareness, convenience etc. Instead, it would be nice if the default is indie/small businesses. In other words instead of "the mega corps aren't working for me, let me look for smaller/indie options instead", it would be nice if we all did "smaller indie options don't fit my requirements, let me go with Microsoft/Apple/etc instead". Maybe this is too idealistic?
    • billythemaniam 4y ago
      There is usually a reason those mega corporations became mega corporations. GitHub, in particular, is the easiest way to collaborate for most developers and they were the first one to get most things right. Absolutely vote with your wallet. If you want to support smaller companies, then do that. But realistically GitHub will be the default option until something comes along that is better. And whatever replaces Github has to be significantly better to justify the switching cost for majority of developers.
      • presentation 4y ago
        At such point it will probably become a large corporation that people will consider ethically challenged.
    • BeetleB 4y ago
      > If your team is going to quit their jobs (I doubt it) because they will only deal with a web based issue tracking, then sure, go for GitHub. No but they will quit because an ideology most members of most teams was used to justify a decision that affected their work.
    • nirui 4y ago
      Maybe also too optimistic as well. Let me start by telling you a story about me trying to buy clothes for the first time: Back then, I have no idea of branding and the symbolism behind, I don't even have the idea of quality. After many hours of browsing and comparing, I picked what I liked based on showcase pictures and user reviews, completely brand-blindly. A week later when they arrived, I quickly discovered that few of them are false advertisments, some of them are in the wrong size and one got damaged during shipping. And for the rest items that were "just right", half of them ripped/deformed after half-year of use. So, as a normal person would do, I created a table which consist of factors such as durability, price and styles etc to help me increase my "success rate". And after few years of iteration, that table ended up points me to just few brands that happens to be well-known and big. I eventually settled on those brands with membership cards etc, and now whenever I need new clothes, I open their store page. What I learned from my experience is that discovery itself generates cost, and the cost is nonrefundable. It is reasonable for an user to settle on a trusted brand. It's not brand loyalty, it's just rational decision making. For most users, choose GitHub is rational, because it's the most trusted platform out there, and it provides good services (including the infrastructures and socials). You already knew what to expect before you even sign on, that's the level of trust GitHub delivers. It's really hard to ask users to discover and move to the alternatives once their needs are well-fulfilled by the current one, even when the alternative provides the same level of service. What makes it even harder is that services such as BitBucket, GitLab, SourceHut, Gitea etc can't provide the same level of service that GitHub offers for free. At this circumstances, the megacorp such as GitHub will always win even when the user is pro-indies by default. But we are not completely dead in the water here. GitHub succeed because they created something new at the time, something better than what SourceForge offered. I assume if someone wants to beat GitHub, they need to do the same. Don't just create alternatives, create something new that also does old things better.
• wnolens 4y ago
  I don't follow what you've taken for granted. Why not buy the best product at the price you're willing to pay for it, even from a company with the values you share? Where does company size take precedent?
  • RootKitBeerCat 4y ago
    Who shares Microsoft’s “values”, and what are they?
    • minraws 4y ago
      Microsoft? from what the flowing winds tells me, they seem to be, > A very rich, multi-trillion dollar asshole-ish corporation, that feels lonely on it's birthday and goes on a bender buying less rich and asshole-ish companies to successively kill them, to calm it's mood. Not sure how true that is, but something tells me it might just be the reality.
  • MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
    Two reasons. If you don’t make an effort to try smaller company’s products, you’re going to be biased towards bigger companies by virtue of them having better marketing and network effects. Some conscious preference to smaller companies can help counteract this. And even if the smaller company has a worse product initially, some people using it anyways can help keep them alive in order to fund innovation. Smaller companies tend to be more willing to experiment or innovate, but that can’t happen if no one is willing to make a long-term bet.
  • kelnos 4y ago
    I think it's more nuanced than that. I'm happy to buy from a smaller producer that may not have the absolute best product, as long as it meets my needs. I think consolidation and concentration of capital is one of the worst features of capitalism, and we should patronize smaller producers when it's reasonable to do so. Having said that, I still buy a lot of things from Amazon because it's much more convenient than the alternatives. It's a habit I've been trying to kick, but I have a ways to go.
• RicoElectrico 4y ago
  On the B2B and B2G side economic patriotism is strong in Germany and France, but it seems that as a result local companies don't have to try as hard. Why bother if they will choose you based on nationality, not necessarily merit? Remember OVH server room fire? Was there any failure of such magnitude in AWS/Azure/GCP?
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • Macha 4y ago
    OVH is not playing in the same market as the big cloud providers - its primary business is doing commodity dedicated servers with the primary selling point being low cost. It's hardly surprising that low cost options are more prone to failures in many markets.
• Aeolun 4y ago
  > Why support Github when there is st.ht? Github is about 1000x more user friendly?
  • 015a 4y ago
    I would argue, that depends on the user.
    • mkeedlinger 4y ago
      If it's more user friendly for 1000x the number of users, I would say that counts.
      • xigoi 4y ago
        What proportion of GitHub users has tried SourceHut?
  • xigoi 4y ago
    If by “user-friendly” you mean “slow”…
• _8j50 4y ago
  Are you kidding me? Smaller companies will use you to make mistakes and learn. And when they can't support something because of resources then you bear the consequences. Nice notion but not a rule of thumb in my opinion. Mega corps like google are terrible as well. Newish companies that have been in the industry a few years are the rule of thumb unless you can afford to be their guineapig/stepping-stone.
  • echelon 4y ago
    > Smaller companies will use you to make mistakes and learn. And the big ones don't ever do this? You're probably shielded from the jira ticket backlogs that are thousands deep. While there's no hard and fast rule, small companies tend to care more, as they're closer to the pain. A loss of a customer isn't just "churn". We should strive to have at least four to six alternatives for every type of system. It keeps pricing competitive, gives users lots of alternatives, and prevents single players from strong arming behavior. Right now there are too many monopolies and duopolies in tech.
    • _8j50 4y ago
      I agree with the last part of your post but I think you misunderstood what I meant by smaller, I meant small because they are new not because they haven't grown yet. It is unavoidable for new companies to have growing pains, doesn't matter how much they want to please customers. Once they have developed some maturity with their staff the "jira backlogs" will be prioritized right because their staff has learned from outages they caused because they did not understand what different aspects of your product mean to each customer.
• vlunkr 4y ago
  Smaller companies are a much bigger risk as a dependency. Whatever GitHub may do in the future, they are unlikely to disappear in any time frame I care about.
  • ddevault 4y ago
    This is why we take pains to be transparent about things like finances: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-04-08-2021-financial-report/ https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-04-08-2021-financial-report/ SourceHut is profitable and sustainable, thanks in no small part to the fact that we expect users to pay if they have the means. Small companies providing free services with investor subsidies are much more likely to disappear than a company with a service you're paying for which isn't beholden to any investor demands for infinite growth.
    • alberth 4y ago
      > “ we expect users to pay if they have the means” Hi Drew I’d encourage you to start charging then based on your comment above. Because sourcehut pricing page currently says “payment is currently optional”. You’ve been in alpha for a few years now and I’m sure many of us would agree it’s totally appropriate for you to start officially charging based on the quality of your service. https://sourcehut.org/pricing/ https://sourcehut.org/pricing/
      • ddevault 4y ago
        I should have been clearer: the expectation is only in force following the beta. We have a specific set of goals we would like to meet first. In the meantime we expect users to pay but are understanding of those who would prefer not to pay for incomplete software, even if our definition of "complete" exceeds industry standards.
    • zxspectrum1982 4y ago
      But is it really profitable and sustainable? IIUC your report, you are paying developers (and yourself) only USD $30,000/year. The typical software developer would make at least three time that much elsewhere. With 3x salary, I'd say SourceHut would no longer be profitable or sustainable. Or am I missing something?
• throwaway894345 4y ago
  > Why support Github when there is st.ht? I’m not super opposed, but Drew can be pretty over the top ideological/irritable for my tastes (at least that’s my perception from reading his blog). I’m not sure I want to invest in his platform if he could just boot me over an Internet disagreement or something. Yeah, I can back up my stuff, but at a certain point I may as well self-host.
  • akudha 4y ago
    I only gave source hut as an example. Maybe there are other projects like source hut that you might like, but are not ethically challenged like GitHub, that you might support? The larger point still stands though. Instead of consumers simply supporting the biggest players in the market (because of convenience), it would be nice to give smaller players (who are not shady) a chance?
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  • yellowapple 4y ago
    > I’m not sure I want to invest in his platform if he could just boot me over an Internet disagreement or something. Has that happened?
  • josephcsible 4y ago
    > I’m not sure I want to invest in his platform if he could just boot me over an Internet disagreement or something. But the FAANGs do that to people all the time.
    • kelnos 4y ago
      That's not a reason to use a small, independent platform with a capricious project leader, though[0]. That's just an argument to use neither. [0] (I have no idea if Drew DeVault would actually boot someone off his platform for arbitrary reasons, though. I'd hope that's not the case.)
  • indrora 4y ago
• snapetom 4y ago
  > Why support Starbucks when you can support a mom & pop coffee shop Because small, local is not always better. It's quite common to find coffee shops here in the PNW that make a horrendous espresso. Most roasters here in Seattle are pretty mediocre and only capitalizing on the Seattle reputation. I can rattle off all the "local" and "small-batch" bourbon/gin/vodka distilleries that use sourced alcohol and are over-priced train wrecks powered only by marketing and no skill. At least with Starbucks, I get consistently bad coffee. I'm not risking over paying for coffee that I spit out. Definitely have been looking at st.ht but if github fulfills my needs better, I'm sticking with that.
  • petre 4y ago
    > I'm not risking over paying for coffee that I spit out. That's exactly what happened to me at Starbucks. I had to wait for a small cookie shop to open up in order to buy an overpriced decent espresso. They had an Illy logo which helped a bit. In Italy and Greece you specifically want to avoid big chains as almost every small shop makes better coffee.
    • flakiness 4y ago
      Comparing Seattle with Italy would be insulting :-/
      • petre 4y ago
        For Italy?
    • OJFord 4y ago
      > They had an Illy logo which helped a bit. Interesting, does it? Obviously tastes differ, but I'm trying a tin at the moment because I ran out and could get it same day vs. waiting for delivery from my usual roaster subscription - I may as well be drinking any old thing off the supermarket shelf, don't find it superior at all. Possibly the blend just isn't too my taste, it also doesn't seem to be as fine as I think I would grind it, but I think the main thing is freshness. Despite its vacuum seal it's still months old, vs. I usually receive beans within a few days of roasting and grind on demand.
• rendaw 4y ago
  You're alienating the vast majority of devs by choosing sr.ht, who don't have accounts there and don't want to set up yet another account, don't want to use mailing lists, etc. In the end it's an ideals tradeoff. Are you going to prioritize the growth of your project ecosystem but give into megacorps, or are you kneecap contributions by choosing esoteric ethical workflows.
  • freeopinion 4y ago
    I'm not here to defend any one service specifically. But I would like to let anybody with an aversion to Github know that they are not alone. And you are not some pariah. For that matter, it's ok if you don't even use git. If you have an interesting project, people will still be interested if you're willing to work with them. Many a would-be contributor has lost interest when a project was entirely dependent on github, too. It's pretty telling when a contributor uses git, but can't contribute to a project that also uses git.
• tssva 4y ago
  Having dealt with many local small businesses owners I'm not sure there is any significant difference in their propensity for ethically dubious behavior vs mega corporations.
• astrange 4y ago
  > Why support Github when there is st.ht? Why support Starbucks when you can support a mom & pop coffee shop? Small businesses usually treat their employees worse than chains do (because "we're all a family"). Also… coffee shops seem to have big opinions of themselves but the farmers do all the work. Baristas just have value unfairly credited to them by the customers because the product is addictive.
• manfre 4y ago
  Another generic rule that is worth following is to not depend on software or services self labeled as alpha, beta, or any other pre-release.
  • ddevault 4y ago
    It's a useful shorthand, certainly, but what is it shorthand for? Sophistication of the software, availability, performance, sustainability, security? We have many of these things and we offer transparency and data to back it up. SourceHut has a proven record of better uptime than GitHub and GitLab over its entire lifetime and is the highest performing forge platform available. We can offer many guarantees, backed by public data, which many platforms which label themselves as production-ready cannot. We hold ourselves to a higher standard than most and we have a specific and documented set of goals to accomplish before we declare the alpha complete. However, any potential user who wants to use SourceHut today can find a wealth of information to secure peace of mind in their choice.