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The truth is that I publish OSS projects on GitHub because that's where the community is, and the issues/pull requests/discussions are a bonus. If I just want

by ronsor 7mo ago

The truth is that I publish OSS projects on GitHub because that's where the community is, and the issues/pull requests/discussions are a bonus. If I just want to host my code, I can self host or use an SSH/SFTP server as a git remote, and that's usually what I do.

embedding-shape 7mo ago
> I publish OSS projects on GitHub because that's where the community is And so we go, forever in circles, until enough of us move to other platforms regardless of where the existing community is. Just like how GitHub found its community in the early days, when most people (afaik) was using SourceForge, if anything. "The community" will always remain on GitHub, if everyone just upload code to where "the community" already is. If enough of us stop using GitHub by default, and instead use something else, eventually "the community" will be there too, but it is somewhat of a chicken-and-egg problem, I admit. I myself workaround this by dropping the whole idea that I'm writing software for others, and I only write it for myself, so if people want it, go to my personal Gitea instance and grab it if you want, I couldn't care less about stars and "publicity" or whatever people nowadays care about. But I'm also lucky enough to already have a network, it might require other's to build their network on GitHub first, then also be able to do something similar, and it'll all work out in the end.
- ronsor 7mo ago
  > "The community" will always remain on GitHub, if everyone just upload code to where "the community" already is. If enough of us stop using GitHub by default, and instead use something else, eventually "the community" will be there too, but it is somewhat of a chicken-and-egg problem, I admit. SourceForge was abandoned due to UX issues and the adware debacle; at the same time, GitHub started making changes which made it more viable to use the platform to distribute binary releases. The deficiencies of GitHub are not critical enough for me to care, and if it ever gets that bad, pushing somewhere else and putting a few "WE HAVE MOVED" links isn't a big deal. And "the community" isn't moving to Codeberg because Codeberg can't support "the community" without a massive scale up.
  - zerkten 7mo ago
    >> And "the community" isn't moving to Codeberg because Codeberg can't support "the community" without a massive scale up. People have a superficial knowledge of the space (I think this extends beyond Codeberg) but feel strongly that they need to advocate for something. Codeberg themselves seem to have opinions about what they want to do but people are suggesting they can do more simply because it gives them an outlet. The constraints that Codeberg set seem to, on the surface at least, ensure they can scale based on their needs and protect them from external threats. Hosting random sites comes with a range of liabilities they probably understand and want to avoid right now. There are EU regulations which can be challenging to handle.
  - mech422 7mo ago
    "SourceForge was abandoned due to UX issues and the adware debacle" I'd say SourceForge was abandoned due to VA Linux going under. I remember the pain/panic as large numbers of OSS projects were suddenly scrambling to find alternatives to SF. I actually started a subscription to GitHub just to try and help ensure they had the money to stay in business, and we didn't have to go thru that again.
- account42 7mo ago
  There are plenty of projects that did just fine for decades without the network effects of a centralized forge. If you project is valuable, people will come to you.
LinXitoW 7mo ago
Considering that "the community" is now filled with vibe coding slop pull requesters, and non-coders bitching in issues, the filter that not-github provides becomes better and better. Of course, that mostly goes for projects big enough to already have an indepedent community.
- goku12 7mo ago
  Not to contradict you, but there's another important aspect to 'community' besides the bad contributors and the entitled complainers. That's discoverability. How do you discover a project that may be hosted anywhere on the dozens of independent forges out there? Searching each one individually is not a viable proposition. The search often ends on the biggest platform - Github. I'm not trying defend github here. The largest platform could have been anyone who took advantage of the early opportunities in the space, which just happens to be Github. But discoverability is still a nagging problem. I don't think that even a federated system (using activitypub, atproto or whatever else out there) is going to solve that problem. We need a solution that can scour the entire code hosting space like search engines do (but collaboratively, not aggressively like LLM scrapers).
  - andybak 7mo ago
    Ideally this should be something search engines handle - but they do a poor job in specialised areas like code repos. It's helpful to have a github mirror of your "real" repo (or even just a stub pointing to the real repo if you object to github strongly enough that mirroring there is objectionable to you). One day maybe there will be an aggregator that indexes repos hosted anywhere. But in many ways that will be back to the square one - a single point of failure. The Fediverse seems to dislike global search. Or is that just a mastodon thing?
    - goku12 7mo ago
      > The Fediverse seems to dislike global search. Or is that just a mastodon thing? Lemmy seems to do a decent enough job at global searches. It's most likely just a mastodon problem.
JuniperMesos 7mo ago
In particular a number of other projects assume that you have a GitHub account. https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/326 https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/326 has been open for literally a decade without any meaningful work. If you want to publish a Lean software packages on Reservoir, the official Lean package registry, their requirements (https://reservoir.lean-lang.org/inclusion-criteria https://reservoir.lean-lang.org/inclusion-criteria) not only specify a GitHub project specifically, but having at least two stars on GitHub as a "basic quality filter". Microsoft is a big funder of Lean and I can't help but think this is a deliberate restriction to increase lock-in on a Microsoft-owned platform.
- account42 7mo ago
  That's one advantage of using "obsolete" programming languages - the community isn't designed about what online services are currently hip.
ncruces 7mo ago
GitHub also generously gives me a bunch of free CI, in exchange for whatever they benefit from me being there. It's worth $50 just this month, according to them, but I don't see anyone else offering the mac runners that account for most of it. For all the complaints, I test my packages that actually need it across dozens of architecture and OS combinations with a mix of runners, nested virtualization and qemu binfmt, all on their free platform.
- AbanoubRodolf 7mo ago
  [flagged]
sc68cal 7mo ago
I have been struggling with this, myself. I used to push everything to GitHub, but a couple months ago I switched over to using my small low-power home server as a Git host. I used to really enjoy the feeling of pushing commits up to GitHub, and that little dopamine rush hasn't really transferred to my home machine yet. It's a shame. The people who control the money successfully committed enshittification against open source.
- ecliptik 7mo ago
  If you're running forgejo you can setup mirrors [1]. Mine syncs a few repos to github to make them public, and planning to add Codeberg in as well ala POSSE [2]. 1. https://forgejo.org/docs/next/user/repo-mirror/ https://forgejo.org/docs/next/user/repo-mirror/ 2. https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
  - sc68cal 7mo ago
    I mean, more around the reluctance to publish any more code publicly since it just gets sucked up by companies to train their models.
WhyNotHugo 7mo ago
> that's where the community is The part of the FOSS community that embraces proprietary dependencies are there, but there’s a lot of the community outside of it. Fortunately, GitHub is pushing hard for folks to want to move away.
Aldipower 7mo ago
Which community? Organic traffic to your GitHub exclusively coming from external references and links. There is no reason the same isn't working with Codeberg. If you link to Codeberg instead of GitHub it still works the same.

by ronsor 7mo ago

embedding-shape 7mo ago

> I publish OSS projects on GitHub because that's where the community is And so we go, forever in circles, until enough of us move to other platforms regardless of where the existing community is. Just like how GitHub found its community in the early days, when most people (afaik) was using SourceForge, if anything. "The community" will always remain on GitHub, if everyone just upload code to where "the community" already is. If enough of us stop using GitHub by default, and instead use something else, eventually "the community" will be there too, but it is somewhat of a chicken-and-egg problem, I admit. I myself workaround this by dropping the whole idea that I'm writing software for others, and I only write it for myself, so if people want it, go to my personal Gitea instance and grab it if you want, I couldn't care less about stars and "publicity" or whatever people nowadays care about. But I'm also lucky enough to already have a network, it might require other's to build their network on GitHub first, then also be able to do something similar, and it'll all work out in the end.

ronsor 7mo ago
> "The community" will always remain on GitHub, if everyone just upload code to where "the community" already is. If enough of us stop using GitHub by default, and instead use something else, eventually "the community" will be there too, but it is somewhat of a chicken-and-egg problem, I admit. SourceForge was abandoned due to UX issues and the adware debacle; at the same time, GitHub started making changes which made it more viable to use the platform to distribute binary releases. The deficiencies of GitHub are not critical enough for me to care, and if it ever gets that bad, pushing somewhere else and putting a few "WE HAVE MOVED" links isn't a big deal. And "the community" isn't moving to Codeberg because Codeberg can't support "the community" without a massive scale up.
- zerkten 7mo ago
  >> And "the community" isn't moving to Codeberg because Codeberg can't support "the community" without a massive scale up. People have a superficial knowledge of the space (I think this extends beyond Codeberg) but feel strongly that they need to advocate for something. Codeberg themselves seem to have opinions about what they want to do but people are suggesting they can do more simply because it gives them an outlet. The constraints that Codeberg set seem to, on the surface at least, ensure they can scale based on their needs and protect them from external threats. Hosting random sites comes with a range of liabilities they probably understand and want to avoid right now. There are EU regulations which can be challenging to handle.
- mech422 7mo ago
  "SourceForge was abandoned due to UX issues and the adware debacle" I'd say SourceForge was abandoned due to VA Linux going under. I remember the pain/panic as large numbers of OSS projects were suddenly scrambling to find alternatives to SF. I actually started a subscription to GitHub just to try and help ensure they had the money to stay in business, and we didn't have to go thru that again.
account42 7mo ago
There are plenty of projects that did just fine for decades without the network effects of a centralized forge. If you project is valuable, people will come to you.

LinXitoW 7mo ago

Considering that "the community" is now filled with vibe coding slop pull requesters, and non-coders bitching in issues, the filter that not-github provides becomes better and better. Of course, that mostly goes for projects big enough to already have an indepedent community.

goku12 7mo ago
Not to contradict you, but there's another important aspect to 'community' besides the bad contributors and the entitled complainers. That's discoverability. How do you discover a project that may be hosted anywhere on the dozens of independent forges out there? Searching each one individually is not a viable proposition. The search often ends on the biggest platform - Github. I'm not trying defend github here. The largest platform could have been anyone who took advantage of the early opportunities in the space, which just happens to be Github. But discoverability is still a nagging problem. I don't think that even a federated system (using activitypub, atproto or whatever else out there) is going to solve that problem. We need a solution that can scour the entire code hosting space like search engines do (but collaboratively, not aggressively like LLM scrapers).
- andybak 7mo ago
  Ideally this should be something search engines handle - but they do a poor job in specialised areas like code repos. It's helpful to have a github mirror of your "real" repo (or even just a stub pointing to the real repo if you object to github strongly enough that mirroring there is objectionable to you). One day maybe there will be an aggregator that indexes repos hosted anywhere. But in many ways that will be back to the square one - a single point of failure. The Fediverse seems to dislike global search. Or is that just a mastodon thing?
  - goku12 7mo ago
    > The Fediverse seems to dislike global search. Or is that just a mastodon thing? Lemmy seems to do a decent enough job at global searches. It's most likely just a mastodon problem.

JuniperMesos 7mo ago

In particular a number of other projects assume that you have a GitHub account. https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/326 https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/326 has been open for literally a decade without any meaningful work. If you want to publish a Lean software packages on Reservoir, the official Lean package registry, their requirements (https://reservoir.lean-lang.org/inclusion-criteria https://reservoir.lean-lang.org/inclusion-criteria) not only specify a GitHub project specifically, but having at least two stars on GitHub as a "basic quality filter". Microsoft is a big funder of Lean and I can't help but think this is a deliberate restriction to increase lock-in on a Microsoft-owned platform.

account42 7mo ago
That's one advantage of using "obsolete" programming languages - the community isn't designed about what online services are currently hip.

ncruces 7mo ago

GitHub also generously gives me a bunch of free CI, in exchange for whatever they benefit from me being there. It's worth $50 just this month, according to them, but I don't see anyone else offering the mac runners that account for most of it. For all the complaints, I test my packages that actually need it across dozens of architecture and OS combinations with a mix of runners, nested virtualization and qemu binfmt, all on their free platform.

AbanoubRodolf 7mo ago
[flagged]

sc68cal 7mo ago

I have been struggling with this, myself. I used to push everything to GitHub, but a couple months ago I switched over to using my small low-power home server as a Git host. I used to really enjoy the feeling of pushing commits up to GitHub, and that little dopamine rush hasn't really transferred to my home machine yet. It's a shame. The people who control the money successfully committed enshittification against open source.

ecliptik 7mo ago
If you're running forgejo you can setup mirrors [1]. Mine syncs a few repos to github to make them public, and planning to add Codeberg in as well ala POSSE [2]. 1. https://forgejo.org/docs/next/user/repo-mirror/ https://forgejo.org/docs/next/user/repo-mirror/ 2. https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
- sc68cal 7mo ago
  I mean, more around the reluctance to publish any more code publicly since it just gets sucked up by companies to train their models.

WhyNotHugo 7mo ago

> that's where the community is The part of the FOSS community that embraces proprietary dependencies are there, but there’s a lot of the community outside of it. Fortunately, GitHub is pushing hard for folks to want to move away.

Aldipower 7mo ago

Which community? Organic traffic to your GitHub exclusively coming from external references and links. There is no reason the same isn't working with Codeberg. If you link to Codeberg instead of GitHub it still works the same.