11 ms·

I no longer maintain my Emacs projects on Sourcehut

168 points by goranmoomin 3y ago

brianzelip 3y ago
Thanks Drew et al for Sourcehut, Hare Lang, principles, and more!
NeutralForest 3y ago
Completely understandable and yet another example that practicality beats purity.
pelagicAustral 3y ago
At least for me, the article keeps going offline intermittently. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240308111845/https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-01-27-sourcehut-no-more/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240308111845/https://protesila...
tetris11 3y ago
Prot's thoughts echo some of the fears I had during the "slow leap" of 2018. I never made the jump to sourcehut, but I did leap to Gitlab, and have a general feeling that whatever small following I was building got snapped in half and never recovered. I just suddenly stopped engaging with the users in my projects. Also a good thing in some cases, but it made my work take on a new private and hidden aspect, which is the opposite of what I wanted (open collab, easy dialogue, connecting with like-minded peers). Gitlab just doesn't have the audience that Github does, and so my new strategy since a few months has been to develop on Gitlab, but to clone everything onto Github, just to get some audience.
- internetter 3y ago
  I sheepishly collect analytics, and sourcehut provides similar relative traffic to my website as github does (I host more projects on github). Unfortunately nothing is immensely popular so I cannot say with certainty this will hold true, but I've observed high engagement with popular sourcehut projects.
- overstay8930 3y ago
  GitLab’s UI really feels like it steers you towards work inside of a company more than open collaboration like GitHub does. Very segmented UI without discoverability. I prefer GitLab but I understand why GitHub is the default. Just different products and use cases.
  - mikepurvis 3y ago
    GitLab has some long open tickets about federating instances but the technical implementation of such a thing is really only a small piece of the puzzle. EDIT— here's a newer epic trying to gather some of that together into a cohesive effort: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/11247 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/11247
  - mroche 3y ago
    > GitLab’s UI really feels like it steers you towards work inside of a company more than open collaboration like GitHub does. That's kind of what it was designed for, though. GitLab.com wasn't a popular choice for open projects compared to GitHub until the "big migration" several years ago. Before that, GitLab was very popular for self-hosted internal instances (their customer reel demonstrated that). Even before modifying their OSS org policy for self-hosting, many groups ran their own GitLab CE instance. You couldn't (and still can't) do this with GitHub*. It also had a longstanding unlimited private repos compared to GitHub's free tier (formerly) that enticed developers. GitLab's UI/UX was made for business workflows and processes (hence it being an "all-in-one DevOps platform." GitHub leans more into the community graph and semi-social media style for orgs/communities (the Discussions section a case example). It has come a long way for the business side, though. * Yes, GitHub Enterprise Server exists: good luck getting it without paying for it (unless things have changed).
  - jmholla 3y ago
    > Very segmented UI without discoverability. Sometimes it has far too much discoverability.* It seems some searches are global. For instance, when I go to `My Merge Requests` and try and change the author, it shows me every single account on GitLab. * One could argue this wraps around and becomes undiscoverable. Which I would agree with.
- bigpeopleareold 3y ago
  Did you find out why engagement stopped? Is a preference to the GitHub UI? Or, they simply don't want another site to deal with? If anything, the only value of GitHub to me personally is this vague rationale that 'people like that more' ... but I host everything on GitLab. But, what I host are really not active projects. That's the big difference possibly.
  - zarathustreal 3y ago
    I can’t speak for most, but for me it’s simply that GitHub operates more like a social media network for developers than a web-based git. As such I evaluate it by number of users because it equates directly to the number of social interactions I’m likely to have. Morally I would love to stop using Microsoft products, much in the same way I’d like to stop using Meta products, but the problem is that I’m not there for the product, I’m there for the people. I can find products that better align with my values but I can’t bring along all the connections and possibility of connections
    - raziel2p 3y ago
      how do people use GitHub as a social media network exactly? I know the features are there but I've never talked to anyone who uses it. a simpler explanation is that GitHub has a simpler/better interface than alternatives, and most people already have an account.
      - lutoma 3y ago
        For me, it's two things: * Whenever I come across an interesting project hosted on Github (On Hacker News, Mastodon or some such place), I usually star it. Then when I'm later looking for a library or piece of software I usually search my Github stars first for a nice pre-filtered list of options. I know I could also use a bookmark manager to keep track of interesting non-Github projects, but that's way too high-friction and so in practice I usually forget about them. * There's also the social feed on the homepage where you can see which repositories your friends have starred/contributed to. I don't personally use this super often but frequently I star some repository and then notice a bunch of my friends starred it shortly after, presumably because they saw it in their feed.
couchand 3y ago
To some extent there's a horses for courses argument here: which projects stand to benefit from a high proportion of drive-by contributions? Which projects can appropriately leverage nuanced textual discussion? If the Linux kernel had been hosted on GitHub from the start it would have turned out very different.
- oldandboring 3y ago
  > If the Linux kernel had been hosted on GitHub from the start it would have turned out very different. Of course I get the point you're making and agree, but this is still an amusing statement to read :)
noobermin 3y ago
Should I put up the sircmpwn signal? Would be nice to see his take.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  I thought he was banned for having unpopular opinions. Or was that just on lobsters?
  - DaSHacka 3y ago
    On lobsters he was banned for shilling sourcehut, and knowing Drew, I find it hard to believe he's not already in this thread one way or another.
    - lupusreal 3y ago
      That's farcical. He was banned for having strong opinions about many things, meaning that nearly everybody would disagree with him about at least something, if not everything. The result was that nobody liked him so a pretext for banning him was devised. Hell, I disagree with him on many if not most things, but I don't think he should be banned for it. Drew, if you're in this thread: I've argued with you several times before but the way you get 'canceled' for having strong convictions is an injustice. Stay true to you.
alberth 3y ago
My decision tree for selecting source control: Q: Do I want contributors? A: Yes, use GitHub. A: No, use whatever I want.
- abound 3y ago
  This is pretty much where I'm at. If I want visibility and people to contribute, GitHub. If it's a truly private project (dotfiles dump, esoteric highly personalized tools), self-hosted Gitea. Everything else I put on Sourcehut.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  Q: Do I want to actively antagonize contributors while torturing myself? A: Yes, use SCCS.
- Havoc 3y ago
  Definitely path of least resistance but also bound to get us a monoculture
  - Tuna-Fish 3y ago
    The monoculture already exists, and it was always going to be formed. The one good thing is that git makes it relatively easy to move, so that if Github suffers excessive enshittification, something else can steal their lunch.
    - kibwen 3y ago
      Git makes it relatively easy to move the code itself and its commit history, but not the other things people use Github for: issues, automation, CI... The lock-in is there.
      - zelphirkalt 3y ago
        Maybe this is making a good argument for managing these things as commits in a directory in the git tree?
xinayder 3y ago
> The SourceHut web interface does not show any kind of indication that a message has an attachment. Last time I tried it, I had to download an mbox file and extract the patch from there. This was helped by the fact that I knew what I was searching for, but the experience was not pleasant anyway. If it doesn't work as they expect, why not submit a PR to fix the issue on srht? I'm pretty sure all of the 4 points the author listed can be easily fixed either by code or by talking to some veteran sourcehut users and finding the best solution for the issues. The blog post make it seem like the author is just expecting srht to be exactly like GitHub, which it isn't, plus it does seem like they're lazy to try to fix this issues and have decided to jump ship instead.
- Timshel 3y ago
  Or maybe he is busy maintaining his own projects and does not have time/ don't want to onboard and contribute to SourceHut ...
  - lopkeny12ko 3y ago
    Then he does not have a right to complain about SourceHut.
    - gray_-_wolf 3y ago
      Right, how dare he, complaining about a paid service.
- infecto 3y ago
  Because something is opensource and "easy to fix" are we expected to not talk about it?
  - xinayder 3y ago
    No, it's just that srht was built with this in mind. If I were the author I would talk to some srht maintainers or people that have projects in srht to brainstorm solutions for my issues instead of just writing a blog post and jumping ship. The author doesn't mention at any time that they tried to talk to other maintainers about these problems.
phpnode 3y ago
Github has network effects that will always be difficult for challengers to overcome. Even Gitlab is nowhere near taking over. GH is effectively a professional resume for many people, and if they're contributing to something they want that recorded on their profile. When was the last time a recruiter asked to see your Gitlab or Sourcehut profile? As far as they're concerned those contributions might as well not exist, and like it or not that really matters to people. In short, it's the people, not the code that counts.
- Cloudef 3y ago
  In my experience github has no value in your cv/resume at all
  - anacrolix 3y ago
    I have to agree a stubborn portion of companies refuse to look at it. It's their loss. If a company does not respect open source contributions I think it's a good filter.
    - tomxor 3y ago
      I have so far found it to be a very good filter, helping eliminate BS or candidates grossly exaggerating their abilities. I've yet to experience the opposite but I have hope.
  - phpnode 3y ago
    I'm really surprised to hear that. My GH profile has got me plenty of jobs over the years and also allowed me to skip things like programming tests that are usually part of the interview process.
    - bigpeopleareold 3y ago
      Seems like you lucked out, because this never really happened for me. I wish this was the case! I have a ton of half-finished projects I could show instead of doing tests.
mardifoufs 3y ago
Is there any reason to use mailing lists for a new project? I totally get why you'd want to keep the mailing list structure for existing ones especially if your contributors are used to it, but it's such an off putting experience that I don't get why a newer project would want to use it. I read the article about why mailing lists are still good from sourcehut, but I think it just isn't convincing. So I'm genuinely wondering what I'm missing? I'm glad sourcehut is taking a different approach to other git services but I can't help but think that there's got to be a better way even if you don't want "GitHub style" pull requests.
- bigpeopleareold 3y ago
  A mailing list is not the greatest thing in my opinion: 1. You have to subscribe to it 2. The interface for finding old issues can be bad (like long densely-packed threads with no search feature) 3. It forces me to manage my inbox (well, that's my problem) They can all be solvable though. I never used sourcehut - are these all the same issues?
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    > threads with no search feature If it's a mailing list then surely the mail is searchable using your choice of mail client?
    - ryukafalz 3y ago
      Presuming you were subscribed to the mailing list at the time the issue was reported. Which may be true for your own projects, but is much less likely for arbitrary projects that you may be looking to report an issue on yourself.
    - theamk 3y ago
      Not for emails that were sent before you subscribed. (and that means new contributors get the worse experience.. not ideal)
      - 3y ago
martingxx 3y ago
I just interpret this whole thing as "developer realises their preferred set of trade-offs matches host A more than host B, so they are switching hosts". This happens fairly frequently in various directions for many different reasons. Slightly off topic, but related: I wish we could focus less on which git host is "best" and more on figuring out workable interoperability between them. Sadly, it seems less of a technical challenge and more a question of motive.
- nine_k 3y ago
  But it's not about a git host. It's about a discussion / issues / code review host. All it takes to host git proper is a network-accessible machine with git and ssh. It's the trivial part. Making it convenient for you to communicate with other varied humans contributing to, or otherwise interested in the code, is the key differentiator. And apparently this is not the part SourceHut prioritizes. No wonder, because it's the hardest part.
  - taion 3y ago
    It's also not entirely a technical issue, anyway. In a vacuum the Sourcehut UX might be fine, but if people are used to GitHub-style UX, then they will have a hard time with Sourcehut and end up doing the wrong thing, like emailing the maintainer directly rather than using the mailing lists – through no fault of the mailing lists themselves!
  - couchand 3y ago
    > Making it convenient for you to communicate with other varied humans contributing to, or otherwise interested in the code, is the key differentiator. And apparently this is not the part SourceHut prioritizes. No wonder, because it's the hardest part. Just because you don't seem to understand or agree with another person's priorities doesn't mean that they don't have them. By my reading, contributors to SourceHut absolutely do prioritize tools that humans use to communicate, and in particular ones that have been demonstrated to support complex and nuanced technical discussions.
    - 3y ago
pachico 3y ago
I am puzzled by the fact that he provides private lessons about life in general...
- YuukiRey 3y ago
  Maybe it would be less puzzling if he called it coaching, since it sounds like that’s what is it.
moody__ 3y ago
I really wanted to like sourcehut, the premise of a code forge that you could submit PR's into that had enough-ish traction was nice, even if always a subsection of GitHub. At some point sourcehut had added a 9front runner to their ci system but it was a bit limited and never updated. So I took it upon myself to try and help out and fix this, make things better. Long story short on that was that I got lead on for 8 months with moving goal posts and then eventually told "sorry not interested". So without the benefit of being able to add code for things I care about, and without an interest in helping more niche software projects the benefits over GitHub seemed to just evaporate.
- necrotic_comp 3y ago
  It's really a drag. I really really really want to like sourcehut and I like Drew Devault's stance on things, but it seems like it's one of those projects that's almost there but not quite. Github is great. However, it would be wonderful if there were true viable alternatives, and if the global ecosystem played nicely together. (e.g. sourcehut took in patches from github and visa versa) I idly worry that with the state of things on the internet now, there's gonna eventually be a github-only version of git that ends up drifting and then wham lock-in.
  - 1337shadow 3y ago
    gitea, drone
    - ffsm8 3y ago
      Gitea is commercial now though. historically speaking, it's likely just a question of time until they switch to a more restrictive licence to extract more money. They also added their own CI system the other day. Haven't tried it myself, but I don't think drone-ci is necessary anymore.
      - vetrom 3y ago
        IMO Gitea is fairly protected against a 'random' relicensing, as the project does not use a contributor licensing agreement. While license and quality shenanigans can still happen, say if their technical oversight committee went bad, they cant do the same sort of rugpull done by projects that made contributors give all ownership interest to a single party. GOGS (gitea's origin project) is still around and keeps moving at its own pace, as well.
whalesalad 3y ago
sourcehut UI is atrocious I’m not sure why anyone uses it when codeberg, GitHub and GitLab exist.
silent_cal 3y ago
Is this the most Hacker News title ever?
- mdaniel 3y ago
  document.title += " in Rust using ChatGPT"
slow_typist 3y ago
If you have a choice what to use, I can only recommend to compare the terms and conditions of gitlab, GitHub and sourcehut. Last time I checked, sourcehut‘s terms were much better for the customer. As an example, check out paragraphs 8.6 and 10.2 here: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/legal/subscription-agreement/ https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/legal/subscription-agre...
johno2 3y ago
hope this doesn't sound sarcastic, what's the problem with github?
johno2 3y ago
i've always defaulted to github, what are some the reasons not to use it?
josebama 3y ago
And why not use Codeberg instead of GitHub? AFAIK it solves the problems the post mentions while staying in a libre platform
blacklight 3y ago
I raised many of the author's point about Sourcehut several times. I'm an, enthusiastic FOSS supporter who has always advocated for alternatives to Github. But Sourcehut seems to take the worst out of everything. It strips down all the features, provides a web interface that seems to come out of the 1990s, removes anything that is even vaguely interactive in favour of emails, and it turns reviews and PRs a mess of emails and patch files that is impossible to browse. Seriously, when we say that Github is bad, it doesn't mean that the solution is to get back to the software development cycles of the early 2000s and throw out of the window all the innovations made in the past two decades. Sourcehut's extremely elitist and proudly feature-poor approach is only pushing away potential users and contributors, and I don't think it's doing a good favour to the community. I would advise the author to give Forgejo a try (Gitea has almost become fully enshittified with its business plans and vision, so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone anymore). Everything is very similar to Github, but FOSS and self-hosted, and it takes a tiny fraction to run than the resources required by that shapeless beast called Gitlab.
- busterarm 3y ago
  > I raised many of the author's point about Sourcehut several times. I'm an, enthusiastic FOSS supporter who has always advocated for alternatives to Github. But Sourcehut seems to take the worst out of everything. It strips down all the features, provides a web interface that seems to come out of the 1990s, removes anything that is even vaguely interactive in favour of emails, and it turns reviews and PRs a mess of emails and patch files that is impossible to browse. That's exactly what its goals are. Sourcehut is for people who want to do everything out of email. All of this is a feature. Stop trying to make it GitHub. If it's not for you, it's not for you. For some of us, Sourcehut is a revelation. Sourcehut works for its users rather than its users work for it.
  - pinto-marco 3y ago
    As someone who's found Sourcehut to be a great fit for my workflow, I fully agree that it's been a "revelation."
jmclnx 3y ago
I left githup due to how Microsoft enabled 2FA, now back to anon ftp via gemini. I would like to find something like github and was thinking about sourcehut. But now I may think of looking elsewhere. But to be honest, anon ftp is good enough for me since my things are about as far from earth shattering as something can get :)
Decabytes 3y ago
I love Emacs and have used it since the start of my programming career. It is so powerful and I consider it more like a portable programming environment than a text editor. But I find it's performance frustratingly slow. I accept that it will never be as fast as Vim, but when it takes as long or longer to boot up as a regular IDE it makes me question why I'm not using that. Plus there are large json files I can open up no problem in NeoVim that Emacs chokes on. With that being said, there is no program that has come along that is a sufficient modern replacement for Emacs like Neovim is for Vim. Unless you've used Emacs heavily then it's just hard to understand. And it's not just being able to use a terminal or write some markdown/org notes in it. It's built in support for IRC. Reading email. Emacs Speaks Statistics. It's being able to make functions and bind just about anything to a set of key chords. It's using things like restclient to send rest requests, and many other awesome things. Using Emacs kind of feels like programming in Smalltalk in a way.
- ashton314 3y ago
  > but when it takes as long or longer to boot up as a regular IDE it makes me question why I'm not using that How many packages do you have? I have over 200 enabled but my startup time is consistently >2 seconds on average. The `use-package` macro really helps here. (And now it’s built-in to Emacs 29!) Yeah, performance is a bit of an issue. But recent development has put it on a good trajectory with native comp and better JSON handling.
- teddyh 3y ago
  For startup speed, use an Emacs server. For speed in JSON files, the new fixes for long lines in Emacs 29 should improve the situation markedly.
- gaws 3y ago
  > I accept that it will never be as fast as Vim, but when it takes as long or longer to boot up as a regular IDE it makes me question why I'm not using that. You can significantly increase startup speed by running the emacs daemon on boot and using `emacsclient` for each new instance.
MeowKing 3y ago
I cannot see active development of Sourcehut. You can see the latest closed `beta` label is two years ago: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/todo.sr.ht?search=status%3Aclosed+label%3Abeta https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/todo.sr.ht?search=status%3Aclos...
- aesh2Xa1 3y ago
  That's a to-do list. You've filtered tickets for two tags (status:closed label:beta). I think you can look at the actual project development here: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn?search=sr.ht https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn?search=sr.ht If you're just after "the number/recency of closed tickets equates to development activity," then you could look here: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/todo.sr.ht?search=status%3Aclosed https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/todo.sr.ht?search=status%3Aclos...
sph 3y ago
The issue I had with Sourcehut was minor yet very annoying: My memory might fail me, but I remember I had a hard time navigating from a project's home page to its source code or mailing list. IIRC they are hosted on separate subdomains, and not linked with each other, which is terrible UX. I had to manually change the URL host to git.sr.ht to get to the code. Also, user error, I paid for it to learn that they forbid commercial projects — I like my code host to be free of any restrictions. Sadly Codeberg is the same, so the choice is either the awful Git(Hub|Lab), or self hosting. I guess my payment served as donation to a FOSS-friendly service, which isn't too bad karma-wise.
llmblockchain 3y ago
I tangoed with Fossil[1].. it was a nice experience. In the end, I self host everything in bare git repos on my own server. I don't have or want contributors so it's fine... plus, I have the server in the cloud anyway for backups, etc. [1]: https://www.fossil-scm.org https://www.fossil-scm.org
aidenn0 3y ago
> Users replying to mailing list threads frequently do not “reply to all”, so the filter I have for SourceHut lists does not apply and my inbox is noisy again. The major webmail clients defaulting to "Reply to Sender" rather than "Reply to List" really broke mailing lists as a sane workflow for corroboration. Most traditional e-mail clients will reply to the list if you hit the "reply" button. This is probably due to people accidentally sending company-wide replies to announcement lists (e.g. I did this when our company wide e-mail target changed from an alias to a list). I'm guessing most list-servers don't make it easy to put a reply-to header on announcement lists where list-reply is typically wrong? Or if they do, most list administrators don't know about it? I'm not sure I have a point to this other than "this is why we can't have nice things" as I find e-mail to be one of the better collaboration tools; everybody can use the client they prefer, and for the most part, things "just work" which is rather amazing.
- blacklion 3y ago
  Good mailing list management software substitute list address to "Reply-To" header, so even simple "Reply" works fine (all known MUIs respect "Reply-To"). But it is typically breaks DKIM signature :-(
urda 3y ago
I really want forgejo and their federation to make a dent in the git world.

168 points by goranmoomin 3y ago

brianzelip 3y ago

Thanks Drew et al for Sourcehut, Hare Lang, principles, and more!

NeutralForest 3y ago

Completely understandable and yet another example that practicality beats purity.

pelagicAustral 3y ago

At least for me, the article keeps going offline intermittently. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240308111845/https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-01-27-sourcehut-no-more/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240308111845/https://protesila...

tetris11 3y ago

Prot's thoughts echo some of the fears I had during the "slow leap" of 2018. I never made the jump to sourcehut, but I did leap to Gitlab, and have a general feeling that whatever small following I was building got snapped in half and never recovered. I just suddenly stopped engaging with the users in my projects. Also a good thing in some cases, but it made my work take on a new private and hidden aspect, which is the opposite of what I wanted (open collab, easy dialogue, connecting with like-minded peers). Gitlab just doesn't have the audience that Github does, and so my new strategy since a few months has been to develop on Gitlab, but to clone everything onto Github, just to get some audience.

internetter 3y ago
I sheepishly collect analytics, and sourcehut provides similar relative traffic to my website as github does (I host more projects on github). Unfortunately nothing is immensely popular so I cannot say with certainty this will hold true, but I've observed high engagement with popular sourcehut projects.
overstay8930 3y ago
GitLab’s UI really feels like it steers you towards work inside of a company more than open collaboration like GitHub does. Very segmented UI without discoverability. I prefer GitLab but I understand why GitHub is the default. Just different products and use cases.
- mikepurvis 3y ago
  GitLab has some long open tickets about federating instances but the technical implementation of such a thing is really only a small piece of the puzzle. EDIT— here's a newer epic trying to gather some of that together into a cohesive effort: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/11247 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/11247
- mroche 3y ago
  > GitLab’s UI really feels like it steers you towards work inside of a company more than open collaboration like GitHub does. That's kind of what it was designed for, though. GitLab.com wasn't a popular choice for open projects compared to GitHub until the "big migration" several years ago. Before that, GitLab was very popular for self-hosted internal instances (their customer reel demonstrated that). Even before modifying their OSS org policy for self-hosting, many groups ran their own GitLab CE instance. You couldn't (and still can't) do this with GitHub*. It also had a longstanding unlimited private repos compared to GitHub's free tier (formerly) that enticed developers. GitLab's UI/UX was made for business workflows and processes (hence it being an "all-in-one DevOps platform." GitHub leans more into the community graph and semi-social media style for orgs/communities (the Discussions section a case example). It has come a long way for the business side, though. * Yes, GitHub Enterprise Server exists: good luck getting it without paying for it (unless things have changed).
- jmholla 3y ago
  > Very segmented UI without discoverability. Sometimes it has far too much discoverability.* It seems some searches are global. For instance, when I go to `My Merge Requests` and try and change the author, it shows me every single account on GitLab. * One could argue this wraps around and becomes undiscoverable. Which I would agree with.
bigpeopleareold 3y ago
Did you find out why engagement stopped? Is a preference to the GitHub UI? Or, they simply don't want another site to deal with? If anything, the only value of GitHub to me personally is this vague rationale that 'people like that more' ... but I host everything on GitLab. But, what I host are really not active projects. That's the big difference possibly.
- zarathustreal 3y ago
  I can’t speak for most, but for me it’s simply that GitHub operates more like a social media network for developers than a web-based git. As such I evaluate it by number of users because it equates directly to the number of social interactions I’m likely to have. Morally I would love to stop using Microsoft products, much in the same way I’d like to stop using Meta products, but the problem is that I’m not there for the product, I’m there for the people. I can find products that better align with my values but I can’t bring along all the connections and possibility of connections
  - raziel2p 3y ago
    how do people use GitHub as a social media network exactly? I know the features are there but I've never talked to anyone who uses it. a simpler explanation is that GitHub has a simpler/better interface than alternatives, and most people already have an account.
    - lutoma 3y ago
      For me, it's two things: * Whenever I come across an interesting project hosted on Github (On Hacker News, Mastodon or some such place), I usually star it. Then when I'm later looking for a library or piece of software I usually search my Github stars first for a nice pre-filtered list of options. I know I could also use a bookmark manager to keep track of interesting non-Github projects, but that's way too high-friction and so in practice I usually forget about them. * There's also the social feed on the homepage where you can see which repositories your friends have starred/contributed to. I don't personally use this super often but frequently I star some repository and then notice a bunch of my friends starred it shortly after, presumably because they saw it in their feed.

couchand 3y ago

To some extent there's a horses for courses argument here: which projects stand to benefit from a high proportion of drive-by contributions? Which projects can appropriately leverage nuanced textual discussion? If the Linux kernel had been hosted on GitHub from the start it would have turned out very different.

oldandboring 3y ago
> If the Linux kernel had been hosted on GitHub from the start it would have turned out very different. Of course I get the point you're making and agree, but this is still an amusing statement to read :)

noobermin 3y ago

Should I put up the sircmpwn signal? Would be nice to see his take.

lupusreal 3y ago
I thought he was banned for having unpopular opinions. Or was that just on lobsters?
- DaSHacka 3y ago
  On lobsters he was banned for shilling sourcehut, and knowing Drew, I find it hard to believe he's not already in this thread one way or another.
  - lupusreal 3y ago
    That's farcical. He was banned for having strong opinions about many things, meaning that nearly everybody would disagree with him about at least something, if not everything. The result was that nobody liked him so a pretext for banning him was devised. Hell, I disagree with him on many if not most things, but I don't think he should be banned for it. Drew, if you're in this thread: I've argued with you several times before but the way you get 'canceled' for having strong convictions is an injustice. Stay true to you.

alberth 3y ago

My decision tree for selecting source control: Q: Do I want contributors? A: Yes, use GitHub. A: No, use whatever I want.

abound 3y ago
This is pretty much where I'm at. If I want visibility and people to contribute, GitHub. If it's a truly private project (dotfiles dump, esoteric highly personalized tools), self-hosted Gitea. Everything else I put on Sourcehut.
DonHopkins 3y ago
Q: Do I want to actively antagonize contributors while torturing myself? A: Yes, use SCCS.
Havoc 3y ago
Definitely path of least resistance but also bound to get us a monoculture
- Tuna-Fish 3y ago
  The monoculture already exists, and it was always going to be formed. The one good thing is that git makes it relatively easy to move, so that if Github suffers excessive enshittification, something else can steal their lunch.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    Git makes it relatively easy to move the code itself and its commit history, but not the other things people use Github for: issues, automation, CI... The lock-in is there.
    - zelphirkalt 3y ago
      Maybe this is making a good argument for managing these things as commits in a directory in the git tree?

xinayder 3y ago

> The SourceHut web interface does not show any kind of indication that a message has an attachment. Last time I tried it, I had to download an mbox file and extract the patch from there. This was helped by the fact that I knew what I was searching for, but the experience was not pleasant anyway. If it doesn't work as they expect, why not submit a PR to fix the issue on srht? I'm pretty sure all of the 4 points the author listed can be easily fixed either by code or by talking to some veteran sourcehut users and finding the best solution for the issues. The blog post make it seem like the author is just expecting srht to be exactly like GitHub, which it isn't, plus it does seem like they're lazy to try to fix this issues and have decided to jump ship instead.

Timshel 3y ago
Or maybe he is busy maintaining his own projects and does not have time/ don't want to onboard and contribute to SourceHut ...
- lopkeny12ko 3y ago
  Then he does not have a right to complain about SourceHut.
  - gray_-_wolf 3y ago
    Right, how dare he, complaining about a paid service.
infecto 3y ago
Because something is opensource and "easy to fix" are we expected to not talk about it?
- xinayder 3y ago
  No, it's just that srht was built with this in mind. If I were the author I would talk to some srht maintainers or people that have projects in srht to brainstorm solutions for my issues instead of just writing a blog post and jumping ship. The author doesn't mention at any time that they tried to talk to other maintainers about these problems.

phpnode 3y ago

Github has network effects that will always be difficult for challengers to overcome. Even Gitlab is nowhere near taking over. GH is effectively a professional resume for many people, and if they're contributing to something they want that recorded on their profile. When was the last time a recruiter asked to see your Gitlab or Sourcehut profile? As far as they're concerned those contributions might as well not exist, and like it or not that really matters to people. In short, it's the people, not the code that counts.

Cloudef 3y ago
In my experience github has no value in your cv/resume at all
- anacrolix 3y ago
  I have to agree a stubborn portion of companies refuse to look at it. It's their loss. If a company does not respect open source contributions I think it's a good filter.
  - tomxor 3y ago
    I have so far found it to be a very good filter, helping eliminate BS or candidates grossly exaggerating their abilities. I've yet to experience the opposite but I have hope.
- phpnode 3y ago
  I'm really surprised to hear that. My GH profile has got me plenty of jobs over the years and also allowed me to skip things like programming tests that are usually part of the interview process.
  - bigpeopleareold 3y ago
    Seems like you lucked out, because this never really happened for me. I wish this was the case! I have a ton of half-finished projects I could show instead of doing tests.

mardifoufs 3y ago

Is there any reason to use mailing lists for a new project? I totally get why you'd want to keep the mailing list structure for existing ones especially if your contributors are used to it, but it's such an off putting experience that I don't get why a newer project would want to use it. I read the article about why mailing lists are still good from sourcehut, but I think it just isn't convincing. So I'm genuinely wondering what I'm missing? I'm glad sourcehut is taking a different approach to other git services but I can't help but think that there's got to be a better way even if you don't want "GitHub style" pull requests.

bigpeopleareold 3y ago
A mailing list is not the greatest thing in my opinion: 1. You have to subscribe to it 2. The interface for finding old issues can be bad (like long densely-packed threads with no search feature) 3. It forces me to manage my inbox (well, that's my problem) They can all be solvable though. I never used sourcehut - are these all the same issues?
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  > threads with no search feature If it's a mailing list then surely the mail is searchable using your choice of mail client?
  - ryukafalz 3y ago
    Presuming you were subscribed to the mailing list at the time the issue was reported. Which may be true for your own projects, but is much less likely for arbitrary projects that you may be looking to report an issue on yourself.
  - theamk 3y ago
    Not for emails that were sent before you subscribed. (and that means new contributors get the worse experience.. not ideal)
    - 3y ago

martingxx 3y ago

I just interpret this whole thing as "developer realises their preferred set of trade-offs matches host A more than host B, so they are switching hosts". This happens fairly frequently in various directions for many different reasons. Slightly off topic, but related: I wish we could focus less on which git host is "best" and more on figuring out workable interoperability between them. Sadly, it seems less of a technical challenge and more a question of motive.

nine_k 3y ago
But it's not about a git host. It's about a discussion / issues / code review host. All it takes to host git proper is a network-accessible machine with git and ssh. It's the trivial part. Making it convenient for you to communicate with other varied humans contributing to, or otherwise interested in the code, is the key differentiator. And apparently this is not the part SourceHut prioritizes. No wonder, because it's the hardest part.
- taion 3y ago
  It's also not entirely a technical issue, anyway. In a vacuum the Sourcehut UX might be fine, but if people are used to GitHub-style UX, then they will have a hard time with Sourcehut and end up doing the wrong thing, like emailing the maintainer directly rather than using the mailing lists – through no fault of the mailing lists themselves!
- couchand 3y ago
  > Making it convenient for you to communicate with other varied humans contributing to, or otherwise interested in the code, is the key differentiator. And apparently this is not the part SourceHut prioritizes. No wonder, because it's the hardest part. Just because you don't seem to understand or agree with another person's priorities doesn't mean that they don't have them. By my reading, contributors to SourceHut absolutely do prioritize tools that humans use to communicate, and in particular ones that have been demonstrated to support complex and nuanced technical discussions.
  - 3y ago

pachico 3y ago

I am puzzled by the fact that he provides private lessons about life in general...

YuukiRey 3y ago
Maybe it would be less puzzling if he called it coaching, since it sounds like that’s what is it.

moody__ 3y ago

I really wanted to like sourcehut, the premise of a code forge that you could submit PR's into that had enough-ish traction was nice, even if always a subsection of GitHub. At some point sourcehut had added a 9front runner to their ci system but it was a bit limited and never updated. So I took it upon myself to try and help out and fix this, make things better. Long story short on that was that I got lead on for 8 months with moving goal posts and then eventually told "sorry not interested". So without the benefit of being able to add code for things I care about, and without an interest in helping more niche software projects the benefits over GitHub seemed to just evaporate.

necrotic_comp 3y ago
It's really a drag. I really really really want to like sourcehut and I like Drew Devault's stance on things, but it seems like it's one of those projects that's almost there but not quite. Github is great. However, it would be wonderful if there were true viable alternatives, and if the global ecosystem played nicely together. (e.g. sourcehut took in patches from github and visa versa) I idly worry that with the state of things on the internet now, there's gonna eventually be a github-only version of git that ends up drifting and then wham lock-in.
- 1337shadow 3y ago
  gitea, drone
  - ffsm8 3y ago
    Gitea is commercial now though. historically speaking, it's likely just a question of time until they switch to a more restrictive licence to extract more money. They also added their own CI system the other day. Haven't tried it myself, but I don't think drone-ci is necessary anymore.
    - vetrom 3y ago
      IMO Gitea is fairly protected against a 'random' relicensing, as the project does not use a contributor licensing agreement. While license and quality shenanigans can still happen, say if their technical oversight committee went bad, they cant do the same sort of rugpull done by projects that made contributors give all ownership interest to a single party. GOGS (gitea's origin project) is still around and keeps moving at its own pace, as well.

whalesalad 3y ago

sourcehut UI is atrocious I’m not sure why anyone uses it when codeberg, GitHub and GitLab exist.

silent_cal 3y ago

Is this the most Hacker News title ever?

mdaniel 3y ago
document.title += " in Rust using ChatGPT"

slow_typist 3y ago

If you have a choice what to use, I can only recommend to compare the terms and conditions of gitlab, GitHub and sourcehut. Last time I checked, sourcehut‘s terms were much better for the customer. As an example, check out paragraphs 8.6 and 10.2 here: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/legal/subscription-agreement/ https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/legal/subscription-agre...

johno2 3y ago

hope this doesn't sound sarcastic, what's the problem with github?

johno2 3y ago

i've always defaulted to github, what are some the reasons not to use it?

josebama 3y ago

And why not use Codeberg instead of GitHub? AFAIK it solves the problems the post mentions while staying in a libre platform

blacklight 3y ago

I raised many of the author's point about Sourcehut several times. I'm an, enthusiastic FOSS supporter who has always advocated for alternatives to Github. But Sourcehut seems to take the worst out of everything. It strips down all the features, provides a web interface that seems to come out of the 1990s, removes anything that is even vaguely interactive in favour of emails, and it turns reviews and PRs a mess of emails and patch files that is impossible to browse. Seriously, when we say that Github is bad, it doesn't mean that the solution is to get back to the software development cycles of the early 2000s and throw out of the window all the innovations made in the past two decades. Sourcehut's extremely elitist and proudly feature-poor approach is only pushing away potential users and contributors, and I don't think it's doing a good favour to the community. I would advise the author to give Forgejo a try (Gitea has almost become fully enshittified with its business plans and vision, so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone anymore). Everything is very similar to Github, but FOSS and self-hosted, and it takes a tiny fraction to run than the resources required by that shapeless beast called Gitlab.

busterarm 3y ago
> I raised many of the author's point about Sourcehut several times. I'm an, enthusiastic FOSS supporter who has always advocated for alternatives to Github. But Sourcehut seems to take the worst out of everything. It strips down all the features, provides a web interface that seems to come out of the 1990s, removes anything that is even vaguely interactive in favour of emails, and it turns reviews and PRs a mess of emails and patch files that is impossible to browse. That's exactly what its goals are. Sourcehut is for people who want to do everything out of email. All of this is a feature. Stop trying to make it GitHub. If it's not for you, it's not for you. For some of us, Sourcehut is a revelation. Sourcehut works for its users rather than its users work for it.
- pinto-marco 3y ago
  As someone who's found Sourcehut to be a great fit for my workflow, I fully agree that it's been a "revelation."

jmclnx 3y ago

I left githup due to how Microsoft enabled 2FA, now back to anon ftp via gemini. I would like to find something like github and was thinking about sourcehut. But now I may think of looking elsewhere. But to be honest, anon ftp is good enough for me since my things are about as far from earth shattering as something can get :)

Decabytes 3y ago

I love Emacs and have used it since the start of my programming career. It is so powerful and I consider it more like a portable programming environment than a text editor. But I find it's performance frustratingly slow. I accept that it will never be as fast as Vim, but when it takes as long or longer to boot up as a regular IDE it makes me question why I'm not using that. Plus there are large json files I can open up no problem in NeoVim that Emacs chokes on. With that being said, there is no program that has come along that is a sufficient modern replacement for Emacs like Neovim is for Vim. Unless you've used Emacs heavily then it's just hard to understand. And it's not just being able to use a terminal or write some markdown/org notes in it. It's built in support for IRC. Reading email. Emacs Speaks Statistics. It's being able to make functions and bind just about anything to a set of key chords. It's using things like restclient to send rest requests, and many other awesome things. Using Emacs kind of feels like programming in Smalltalk in a way.

ashton314 3y ago
> but when it takes as long or longer to boot up as a regular IDE it makes me question why I'm not using that How many packages do you have? I have over 200 enabled but my startup time is consistently >2 seconds on average. The `use-package` macro really helps here. (And now it’s built-in to Emacs 29!) Yeah, performance is a bit of an issue. But recent development has put it on a good trajectory with native comp and better JSON handling.
teddyh 3y ago
For startup speed, use an Emacs server. For speed in JSON files, the new fixes for long lines in Emacs 29 should improve the situation markedly.
gaws 3y ago
> I accept that it will never be as fast as Vim, but when it takes as long or longer to boot up as a regular IDE it makes me question why I'm not using that. You can significantly increase startup speed by running the emacs daemon on boot and using `emacsclient` for each new instance.

MeowKing 3y ago

I cannot see active development of Sourcehut. You can see the latest closed `beta` label is two years ago: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/todo.sr.ht?search=status%3Aclosed+label%3Abeta https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/todo.sr.ht?search=status%3Aclos...

aesh2Xa1 3y ago
That's a to-do list. You've filtered tickets for two tags (status:closed label:beta). I think you can look at the actual project development here: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn?search=sr.ht https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn?search=sr.ht If you're just after "the number/recency of closed tickets equates to development activity," then you could look here: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/todo.sr.ht?search=status%3Aclosed https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/todo.sr.ht?search=status%3Aclos...

sph 3y ago

The issue I had with Sourcehut was minor yet very annoying: My memory might fail me, but I remember I had a hard time navigating from a project's home page to its source code or mailing list. IIRC they are hosted on separate subdomains, and not linked with each other, which is terrible UX. I had to manually change the URL host to git.sr.ht to get to the code. Also, user error, I paid for it to learn that they forbid commercial projects — I like my code host to be free of any restrictions. Sadly Codeberg is the same, so the choice is either the awful Git(Hub|Lab), or self hosting. I guess my payment served as donation to a FOSS-friendly service, which isn't too bad karma-wise.

llmblockchain 3y ago

I tangoed with Fossil[1].. it was a nice experience. In the end, I self host everything in bare git repos on my own server. I don't have or want contributors so it's fine... plus, I have the server in the cloud anyway for backups, etc. [1]: https://www.fossil-scm.org https://www.fossil-scm.org

aidenn0 3y ago

> Users replying to mailing list threads frequently do not “reply to all”, so the filter I have for SourceHut lists does not apply and my inbox is noisy again. The major webmail clients defaulting to "Reply to Sender" rather than "Reply to List" really broke mailing lists as a sane workflow for corroboration. Most traditional e-mail clients will reply to the list if you hit the "reply" button. This is probably due to people accidentally sending company-wide replies to announcement lists (e.g. I did this when our company wide e-mail target changed from an alias to a list). I'm guessing most list-servers don't make it easy to put a reply-to header on announcement lists where list-reply is typically wrong? Or if they do, most list administrators don't know about it? I'm not sure I have a point to this other than "this is why we can't have nice things" as I find e-mail to be one of the better collaboration tools; everybody can use the client they prefer, and for the most part, things "just work" which is rather amazing.

blacklion 3y ago
Good mailing list management software substitute list address to "Reply-To" header, so even simple "Reply" works fine (all known MUIs respect "Reply-To"). But it is typically breaks DKIM signature :-(

urda 3y ago

I really want forgejo and their federation to make a dent in the git world.