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Free accounts are not sustainable. If you let investors subsidize you, it's not in the platforms best interests to work in your best interests. SourceHut charge

Free accounts are not sustainable. If you let investors subsidize you, it's not in the platforms best interests to work in your best interests. SourceHut charges for its services, publishes financial reporting, transparent operations information, and so on, so that you know that it's sustainable and accountable to you. The VC-subsudized approach is not sustainable and does not work. If you want infrastructure to be sustainable and accountable to your needs, you need to get used to paying for it again.

em-bee 4y ago
a few questions: is there a general FAQ besides the one about pricing? does sourcehut have tools to import assets like wiki, issues, etc, from github/gitlab besides the git repository? what payment options do you offer? credit card, paypal, crypto? is there a trial period? basically, can i import my projects and make sure everything is working the way i need to before i start paying (with the expectation that if i am not satisfied, the projects will be deleted again) if i decide to selfhost sourcehut, can i easily replicate all my projects from public sourcehut? (the promise of full data autonomy suggests that this may be a feature in the future) is 2FA required or optional? is it possible to pay for other peoples projects? like gandi and some other domain hosting services allow anyone to pay for any domain, even if they don't own it, such a feature would be very useful for project hosting too. it would allow small projects to receive "donations" in form of hosting credit, or allow a project community to continue managing a project even if the account manager is unavailable.
- ddevault 4y ago
  Some import tools exist, like this: https://sr.ht/~emersion/gh2srht/ https://sr.ht/~emersion/gh2srht/ Unlike SourceHut, much of GitHub and GitLab does not utilize standard, interoperable formats, so import and export can be a headache. Payment is available only through credit cards currently, but we're working on expanding it to support SEPA transfers, iDEAL, etc, now. No timeline on when it will be available. There's no trial period, but if you are unsatisfied you can request a refund. Transferring all of your data to/from a second sourcehut instance is very easy. 2FA is optional. You cannot pay for other projects. We considered it but decided not to add this.
  - surewe 4y ago
    > You cannot pay for other projects. We considered it but decided not to add this. Out of curiosity, why's that?
  - welterde 4y ago
    I think the gitlab export format is actually not too bad: Just a tar file with the git repo in bundle format and all the gitlab specific components in ndjson format (and data in those ndjson files looks fairly straightforward as well on first glance). The problem is though that there are no real interoperable formats for things like tickets, project boards, CI setup, etc. (that I am aware of anyway). So everyone invents their own export format (if they even bother to implement that functionality in the first place) and importing into a different platform will always require writing some extra code and mangling of the data to account for different features.
    - em-bee 4y ago
      issues could be exported as email threads. not only would that make them immediately readable offline by any mail client, but it would be easy to share them, and writing an import handler would also not be hard.
      - welterde 4y ago
        Writing an import handler for the json files is not more difficult than writing an import handler for email threads. And you want the import to reproduce what you just exported and since the source was not an actual email thread you'll have to stick quite a lot of additional information into many X-.. fields in the email headers to be able to reconstruct the original issues on import. If you want it to be in email format it would make more sense to just write a small tool that just converts the json files into email threads after the export as an additional processing step.
        em-bee 4y ago
        not an actual email thread github and gitlab at least send out all issues by email, so that conversion is mostly done. they can also receive email replies, so import is at least partially done too. (i don't know if new issues can be created by email). and i believe it will be easier to standardize mail header fields than a json format. json could then be reserved for raw data exports that are as close as possible to the native data structure of a system, while the email format would be the compromise that everyone can agree on.
bachmeier 4y ago
> The VC-subsudized approach is not sustainable and does not work. If you want infrastructure to be sustainable and accountable to your needs, you need to get used to paying for it again. For me, it's not even so much about having to pay, but the pricing plans. Gitlab pays for the free users by charging $19/month for the few paying customers. SourceHut charges $20/year.

em-bee 4y ago

a few questions: is there a general FAQ besides the one about pricing? does sourcehut have tools to import assets like wiki, issues, etc, from github/gitlab besides the git repository? what payment options do you offer? credit card, paypal, crypto? is there a trial period? basically, can i import my projects and make sure everything is working the way i need to before i start paying (with the expectation that if i am not satisfied, the projects will be deleted again) if i decide to selfhost sourcehut, can i easily replicate all my projects from public sourcehut? (the promise of full data autonomy suggests that this may be a feature in the future) is 2FA required or optional? is it possible to pay for other peoples projects? like gandi and some other domain hosting services allow anyone to pay for any domain, even if they don't own it, such a feature would be very useful for project hosting too. it would allow small projects to receive "donations" in form of hosting credit, or allow a project community to continue managing a project even if the account manager is unavailable.

ddevault 4y ago
Some import tools exist, like this: https://sr.ht/~emersion/gh2srht/ https://sr.ht/~emersion/gh2srht/ Unlike SourceHut, much of GitHub and GitLab does not utilize standard, interoperable formats, so import and export can be a headache. Payment is available only through credit cards currently, but we're working on expanding it to support SEPA transfers, iDEAL, etc, now. No timeline on when it will be available. There's no trial period, but if you are unsatisfied you can request a refund. Transferring all of your data to/from a second sourcehut instance is very easy. 2FA is optional. You cannot pay for other projects. We considered it but decided not to add this.
- surewe 4y ago
  > You cannot pay for other projects. We considered it but decided not to add this. Out of curiosity, why's that?
- welterde 4y ago
  I think the gitlab export format is actually not too bad: Just a tar file with the git repo in bundle format and all the gitlab specific components in ndjson format (and data in those ndjson files looks fairly straightforward as well on first glance). The problem is though that there are no real interoperable formats for things like tickets, project boards, CI setup, etc. (that I am aware of anyway). So everyone invents their own export format (if they even bother to implement that functionality in the first place) and importing into a different platform will always require writing some extra code and mangling of the data to account for different features.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    issues could be exported as email threads. not only would that make them immediately readable offline by any mail client, but it would be easy to share them, and writing an import handler would also not be hard.
    - welterde 4y ago
      Writing an import handler for the json files is not more difficult than writing an import handler for email threads. And you want the import to reproduce what you just exported and since the source was not an actual email thread you'll have to stick quite a lot of additional information into many X-.. fields in the email headers to be able to reconstruct the original issues on import. If you want it to be in email format it would make more sense to just write a small tool that just converts the json files into email threads after the export as an additional processing step.
      - em-bee 4y ago
        not an actual email thread github and gitlab at least send out all issues by email, so that conversion is mostly done. they can also receive email replies, so import is at least partially done too. (i don't know if new issues can be created by email). and i believe it will be easier to standardize mail header fields than a json format. json could then be reserved for raw data exports that are as close as possible to the native data structure of a system, while the email format would be the compromise that everyone can agree on.

bachmeier 4y ago

> The VC-subsudized approach is not sustainable and does not work. If you want infrastructure to be sustainable and accountable to your needs, you need to get used to paying for it again. For me, it's not even so much about having to pay, but the pricing plans. Gitlab pays for the free users by charging $19/month for the few paying customers. SourceHut charges $20/year.