5 ms·

During one of the x threads where Mitchell was (legitimately) complaining about Github, there were a couple replies suggesting that GitHub should hire him to be

by atonse 6mo ago

During one of the x threads where Mitchell was (legitimately) complaining about Github, there were a couple replies suggesting that GitHub should hire him to be their CEO. And I remember seeing that and thinking "huh... not at all a bad idea." There is a specific kind of leader that can turn such ships around, and they are strong in their convictions, and aren't just "managers", but visionaries coupled with strong execution and power to attract talent. I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub.

MarsIronPI 6mo ago
> I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub. Really? I can only think of two: Codeberg and Sourceforge. Which are both great, but that's not what I'd call "many".
- Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
  Gitlab, Bitbucket, Gitea
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - MarsIronPI 6mo ago
    Oh, I'd forgotten about GitLab and Bitbucket. How is Bitbucket doing these days?
- NewJazz 6mo ago
  Gitlab? Three distinct codebases is quite a lot to be honest. Especially when Forgejo has the lineage of Gitea and Gogs in its wake.
  - saghm 6mo ago
    At least as far as I can tell, Gitlab seems to be used a lot more than the other two. I don't think I've ever gone to a page for a SourceForge project that was created after maybe 2012 or so, and although it's possible I've looked at a project on Codeberg or Forgejo, I can't think of a single one off the top of my head. Meanwhile, I've run into projects on Gitlab (either gitlab.com itself or a self-hosted version) at multiple employers and various Linux codebases and packages (Plasma and Gnome desktop environments and other various windowing-related software, Arch Linux package sources, etc.). I guess it's possible that my experience is wildly different than others, but if we're talking about volume of usage today rather than individual preferences, it's kind of shocking for me that someone wouldn't think to reference Gitlab at all in the list of potential successors, let alone not mention it literally first.
    - MarsIronPI 6mo ago
      Note that SourceForge is very different from Sourcehut. Sourcehut is a self‑hostable software forge that can be interacted with by email even without an account. I'd forgotten about GitLab. I guess it's annoying enough that I repressed it.
      - saghm 6mo ago
        I'm a bit confused; from what I'm seeing, no one mentioned SourceHut until now. Did you make a typo before? > Really? I can only think of two: Codeberg and Sourceforge. Which are both great, but that's not what I'd call "many".
        MarsIronPI 6mo ago
        Oh shoot, I must have been more tired than I thought. I definitely meant Sourcehut, not Sourceforge.
  - foresto 6mo ago
    Gitlab's interface makes me want to cry every time I have to use it. I would not recommend it to someone who misses classic GitHub. Codeberg/Forgejo/Gitea would be a much better match.
- palata 6mo ago
  Sourceforge???
  - NewJazz 6mo ago
    I am pretty sure they were talking about sourcehut...
    - MarsIronPI 6mo ago
      I was yes, I must have been more tired than I realized.
- gamander 6mo ago
  AtomGit
estimator7292 6mo ago
I'm still holding out hope for distributed and federated git forges. The only compelling reason for everyone to centralize on GitHub is collaboration on issues/PRs without everyone allowing signups on their self-hosted forges. That could be achieved without hosting every line of code everyone's ever written in the same crumbling infrastructure. It'll probably never happen. But it'd be really nice if it did.
- jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
  Jeremie (of XMPP) has a neat project, v-it, which uses atproto (Bluesky) to let people socialize their changes to projects. https://v-it.org/ https://v-it.org/ It's a bit short of actual PRs, but in some ways, especially with agents, the lo-fi approach has some advantages.
  - Woodi 6mo ago
    Interesting project, thanx. Also nice language evolutions: "socialize their changes to projects", "lo-fi approach" :)
- skydhash 6mo ago
  > I'm still holding out hope for distributed and federated git forges. Do you know that you can just send a patch via email (assuming you're not using the gmail web client)? You can even save the diff on some hosting website and send the link via any text medium.
  - kstrauser 6mo ago
    I say this as someone who actually ran mailservers for about 25 years, who can telnet to port 25 and type SMTP to send an email, and who is hugely found of plaintext: I'd rather quit coding than move to that workflow. I loathe every bit of the pipeline of getting a clean patch from machine A to machine B, where I control at most one of them, and having it come out the other side with the same SHA256 digest. I don't look down on people who prefer it: to each their own! But I'll never in a million years understand it. Say what you will about the GitHub-style PR process, and there's plenty to say about it!, but there's a reason that devs outside LKML and the *BSD mailing lists pretty much immediately leapt onto GitHub the moment it became widely known. It was a revelation.
mamcx 6mo ago
The problem is that Github does a lot. However, I consider that there is still not a great UI for the core service, in special for a complex project. In the other hand, I bet jujutsu has the best basic take, and is still missing a good forge.
- fragmede 6mo ago
  Unfortunately, naming things is hard, and JujitsuHub just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way that GitHub does. jjhub? forgesu?
  - shit_game 6mo ago
    Dojo is such an obvious thing, but its such an obvious thing that there are dozens of software trying to call themselves that.
    - magicalhippo 6mo ago
      Dojjo then?
      - pythonaut_16 6mo ago
        Dojjjo, pronounced do-jj-jo
        magicalhippo 6mo ago
        Now we're talking! At first I thought the KDE apps all playing on the K was kinda weird and awkward, but as time went on I really appreciated how easy it was to search for them due to this. So I really think it's a benefit to play on traditional words rather than use them as-is.
  - dannyfreeman 6mo ago
    jub
zaphar 6mo ago
Maybe it's time for fossil to get another look... It's effectively distributed code, wiki, and issues all using the same tool.
- bigstrat2003 6mo ago
  Every time Fossil comes up, people's big objection is that you can't squash commits. Personally, I'm fine with that - I tend to agree with Hipp that the repo history should not sacrifice truth for the sake of pettiness in the timeline. But a lot of people seem to disagree, which limits the audience for Fossil. I use Fossil for my own projects but I wouldn't expect it to become big like git is.
  - tcoff91 6mo ago
    Mailing patches is the same as squashing commits. The Linux kernel would be much harder to maintain without messy history being carefully distilled down to well crafted patches. But mailing patches is a pain in the ass. VCSes should support squashing and rebasing.
bsimpson 6mo ago
The problem is that what users want GitHub to be and what their owners (Microsoft) want them to be are disjoint. If AI replaces software development the way that big tech company management wants it to, maybe they'll converge again. In the mean time, people want a git remote and they're getting an unstable host diluted with some flaky vibecoding bullshit.
znpy 6mo ago
Gitlab is pretty cool to be honest, and it’s generally underrated.
- zacmps 6mo ago
  I agree, but it does have faults. Performance is woeful, and managing an on-prem instance is (literally) a full time job.
  - Hendrikto 6mo ago
    > managing an on-prem instance is (literally) a full time job. Hosting a Docker container is a full-time job? I have worked at several employers self-hosting their own instances without issues or a lot of effort. Many FOSS projects do, that definitely do not have a full-time guy for that. What are you talking about?
    - user34283 6mo ago
      Hundreds or 10k+ users? I imagine requirements and integrations may differ a lot. I have seen many incidents with a large instance.
  - znpy 6mo ago
    yeah that is true. i did manage a gitlab instance for ~100 developers (between 2019 and 2022) and yeah performance was shit. not gonna lie, i blame ruby for that. if you accept the performance hit, it's great quality software though. however, a fairly large company with 100-120 users (developers, devops engineers, QAs etc) and ~600 gitlab runners ran happily on a 8 core / 64gb virtual machine (hosted on a local vmware cluster). so it is (was?) also fairly cheap.
  - kelnos 6mo ago
    gitlab.xfce.org is absolutely not a full-time job. It's run by one guy in his spare time, and that spare time doesn't even amount to a part-time job. I do agree about performance, though.
ec109685 6mo ago
He would pull them away from co-pilot and the unlimited spigot of money that agentic coding brings, which is contrary to the best interests of Microsfot.
egorfine 6mo ago
> GitHub should hire him to be their CEO And then impose the same requirements that killed GitHub in the first place.
- pluc 6mo ago
  - "Ok guys first thing is move off Azure and ditch Copilot to get back to the level of stability we had before all that mess" - "Uuh, no" Be a pretty quick story
kelnos 6mo ago
> GitHub should hire him to be their CEO. Not really the fix you think it might be. That wouldn't change Microsoft's ownership, and he'd still be hamstrung by whatever cost-cutting, anti-competitive, user-unfriendly bullshit Microsoft wants to shove down Github users' throats.

by atonse 6mo ago

MarsIronPI 6mo ago

> I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub. Really? I can only think of two: Codeberg and Sourceforge. Which are both great, but that's not what I'd call "many".

Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
Gitlab, Bitbucket, Gitea
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- MarsIronPI 6mo ago
  Oh, I'd forgotten about GitLab and Bitbucket. How is Bitbucket doing these days?
NewJazz 6mo ago
Gitlab? Three distinct codebases is quite a lot to be honest. Especially when Forgejo has the lineage of Gitea and Gogs in its wake.
- saghm 6mo ago
  At least as far as I can tell, Gitlab seems to be used a lot more than the other two. I don't think I've ever gone to a page for a SourceForge project that was created after maybe 2012 or so, and although it's possible I've looked at a project on Codeberg or Forgejo, I can't think of a single one off the top of my head. Meanwhile, I've run into projects on Gitlab (either gitlab.com itself or a self-hosted version) at multiple employers and various Linux codebases and packages (Plasma and Gnome desktop environments and other various windowing-related software, Arch Linux package sources, etc.). I guess it's possible that my experience is wildly different than others, but if we're talking about volume of usage today rather than individual preferences, it's kind of shocking for me that someone wouldn't think to reference Gitlab at all in the list of potential successors, let alone not mention it literally first.
  - MarsIronPI 6mo ago
    Note that SourceForge is very different from Sourcehut. Sourcehut is a self‑hostable software forge that can be interacted with by email even without an account. I'd forgotten about GitLab. I guess it's annoying enough that I repressed it.
    - saghm 6mo ago
      I'm a bit confused; from what I'm seeing, no one mentioned SourceHut until now. Did you make a typo before? > Really? I can only think of two: Codeberg and Sourceforge. Which are both great, but that's not what I'd call "many".
      - MarsIronPI 6mo ago
        Oh shoot, I must have been more tired than I thought. I definitely meant Sourcehut, not Sourceforge.
- foresto 6mo ago
  Gitlab's interface makes me want to cry every time I have to use it. I would not recommend it to someone who misses classic GitHub. Codeberg/Forgejo/Gitea would be a much better match.
palata 6mo ago
Sourceforge???
- NewJazz 6mo ago
  I am pretty sure they were talking about sourcehut...
  - MarsIronPI 6mo ago
    I was yes, I must have been more tired than I realized.
gamander 6mo ago
AtomGit

estimator7292 6mo ago

I'm still holding out hope for distributed and federated git forges. The only compelling reason for everyone to centralize on GitHub is collaboration on issues/PRs without everyone allowing signups on their self-hosted forges. That could be achieved without hosting every line of code everyone's ever written in the same crumbling infrastructure. It'll probably never happen. But it'd be really nice if it did.

jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
Jeremie (of XMPP) has a neat project, v-it, which uses atproto (Bluesky) to let people socialize their changes to projects. https://v-it.org/ https://v-it.org/ It's a bit short of actual PRs, but in some ways, especially with agents, the lo-fi approach has some advantages.
- Woodi 6mo ago
  Interesting project, thanx. Also nice language evolutions: "socialize their changes to projects", "lo-fi approach" :)
skydhash 6mo ago
> I'm still holding out hope for distributed and federated git forges. Do you know that you can just send a patch via email (assuming you're not using the gmail web client)? You can even save the diff on some hosting website and send the link via any text medium.
- kstrauser 6mo ago
  I say this as someone who actually ran mailservers for about 25 years, who can telnet to port 25 and type SMTP to send an email, and who is hugely found of plaintext: I'd rather quit coding than move to that workflow. I loathe every bit of the pipeline of getting a clean patch from machine A to machine B, where I control at most one of them, and having it come out the other side with the same SHA256 digest. I don't look down on people who prefer it: to each their own! But I'll never in a million years understand it. Say what you will about the GitHub-style PR process, and there's plenty to say about it!, but there's a reason that devs outside LKML and the *BSD mailing lists pretty much immediately leapt onto GitHub the moment it became widely known. It was a revelation.

mamcx 6mo ago

The problem is that Github does a lot. However, I consider that there is still not a great UI for the core service, in special for a complex project. In the other hand, I bet jujutsu has the best basic take, and is still missing a good forge.

fragmede 6mo ago
Unfortunately, naming things is hard, and JujitsuHub just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way that GitHub does. jjhub? forgesu?
- shit_game 6mo ago
  Dojo is such an obvious thing, but its such an obvious thing that there are dozens of software trying to call themselves that.
  - magicalhippo 6mo ago
    Dojjo then?
    - pythonaut_16 6mo ago
      Dojjjo, pronounced do-jj-jo
      - magicalhippo 6mo ago
        Now we're talking! At first I thought the KDE apps all playing on the K was kinda weird and awkward, but as time went on I really appreciated how easy it was to search for them due to this. So I really think it's a benefit to play on traditional words rather than use them as-is.
- dannyfreeman 6mo ago
  jub

zaphar 6mo ago

Maybe it's time for fossil to get another look... It's effectively distributed code, wiki, and issues all using the same tool.

bigstrat2003 6mo ago
Every time Fossil comes up, people's big objection is that you can't squash commits. Personally, I'm fine with that - I tend to agree with Hipp that the repo history should not sacrifice truth for the sake of pettiness in the timeline. But a lot of people seem to disagree, which limits the audience for Fossil. I use Fossil for my own projects but I wouldn't expect it to become big like git is.
- tcoff91 6mo ago
  Mailing patches is the same as squashing commits. The Linux kernel would be much harder to maintain without messy history being carefully distilled down to well crafted patches. But mailing patches is a pain in the ass. VCSes should support squashing and rebasing.

bsimpson 6mo ago

The problem is that what users want GitHub to be and what their owners (Microsoft) want them to be are disjoint. If AI replaces software development the way that big tech company management wants it to, maybe they'll converge again. In the mean time, people want a git remote and they're getting an unstable host diluted with some flaky vibecoding bullshit.

znpy 6mo ago

Gitlab is pretty cool to be honest, and it’s generally underrated.

zacmps 6mo ago
I agree, but it does have faults. Performance is woeful, and managing an on-prem instance is (literally) a full time job.
- Hendrikto 6mo ago
  > managing an on-prem instance is (literally) a full time job. Hosting a Docker container is a full-time job? I have worked at several employers self-hosting their own instances without issues or a lot of effort. Many FOSS projects do, that definitely do not have a full-time guy for that. What are you talking about?
  - user34283 6mo ago
    Hundreds or 10k+ users? I imagine requirements and integrations may differ a lot. I have seen many incidents with a large instance.
- znpy 6mo ago
  yeah that is true. i did manage a gitlab instance for ~100 developers (between 2019 and 2022) and yeah performance was shit. not gonna lie, i blame ruby for that. if you accept the performance hit, it's great quality software though. however, a fairly large company with 100-120 users (developers, devops engineers, QAs etc) and ~600 gitlab runners ran happily on a 8 core / 64gb virtual machine (hosted on a local vmware cluster). so it is (was?) also fairly cheap.
- kelnos 6mo ago
  gitlab.xfce.org is absolutely not a full-time job. It's run by one guy in his spare time, and that spare time doesn't even amount to a part-time job. I do agree about performance, though.

ec109685 6mo ago

He would pull them away from co-pilot and the unlimited spigot of money that agentic coding brings, which is contrary to the best interests of Microsfot.

egorfine 6mo ago

> GitHub should hire him to be their CEO And then impose the same requirements that killed GitHub in the first place.

pluc 6mo ago
- "Ok guys first thing is move off Azure and ditch Copilot to get back to the level of stability we had before all that mess" - "Uuh, no" Be a pretty quick story

kelnos 6mo ago

> GitHub should hire him to be their CEO. Not really the fix you think it might be. That wouldn't change Microsoft's ownership, and he'd still be hamstrung by whatever cost-cutting, anti-competitive, user-unfriendly bullshit Microsoft wants to shove down Github users' throats.