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GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
- arikrahman 2mo agoI don't know, tangled.org seems promising.
- colesantiago 2mo agoTangled is VC funded and owned by investors, not the community like Codeberg or Forgejo. https://blog.tangled.org/seed/ https://blog.tangled.org/seed/ Avoid.
- blackqueeriroh 2mo agoBro. It’s FOSS. It’s owned by the users. You can run tangled all on your own. If VC somehow ruins it, it’ll still be running just fine.
- colesantiago 2mo ago> Bro. It’s FOSS. It’s owned by the users... Can you show me where can I donate to the Tangled Non Profit Foundation? > If VC somehow ruins it, it’ll still be running just fine I would prefer if it wasn't funded by VCs.
- mococa 2mo agoThe only reason I keep my projects on it is the Windows and macOS runners.
- embedding-shape 2mo agoNot saying it doesn't come with downsides and the hassle of maintenance, but at home I have a Linux server (running a Windows VM) + Mac Mini + Forgejo + Forgejo workers on each one of them. With NixOS it was relatively painless to get setup correctly, everything in a reproducible manner, and now I can have a ~10 line YAML file that adds cross-platform builds+signing+publishing when needed, and performance is much better than the free/cheap CI workers you get from Microsoft and others.
- apple1417 2mo agoLast time I looked into self hosting Windows CI, it seemed like everything kind of expected you to install all your tools ahead of time, rather than anything containerised. I assume Nix helps with that? Are there any docs you can point me at?
- highpost 2mo agohttps://github.com/highpost/forgejo-appliance https://github.com/highpost/forgejo-appliance
- throwuxiytayq 2mo agoThey’re free, too. If your project is public, you can spin up dozens (hundreds?) of jobs (10 or so of which will run in parallel) on every push and Microsoft casually pays for it. I’d love to move off GH but I would have to significantly reduce my CI usage (before you ask - already more optimized than anything you usually see) or pay quite a lot for my hobby projects.
- tombert 2mo agoGenuine question: Have you considered moving to your own server? I ran Forejo for a bit, but I made the mistake of trying to use Jenkins for CI, which is very annoying for someone who really doesn't doesn't enjoy devops work.
- throwuxiytayq 2mo agoI have - both considered it and actually did it for a while. A few years, one hack, and a couple of apartment changes later, my server is behind on maintenance and lying somewhere waiting for me to set it up and update it. Meanwhile, my free action workflows just keep working. On a good day, at least - Microsoft’s SLA is like one 9 and it’s on the wrong side of the comma.
- tombert 2mo agoI have one of those free Oracle cloud instances with 24 gigs of RAM; I've considered hosting there, but for now I just use Sourcehut. There definitely is value in "it's hosted somewhere that's not my house" though.
- throwuxiytayq 2mo ago24 GB does sound pretty sweet. I’ll check if they still offer that, thanks. The price of having to accept an Oracle EULA might just be higher than anything else mentioned thus far, though.
- 2mo ago
- IshKebab 2mo agoYeah I think people vastly underestimate the value of free CI runners - especially free Windows/Mac runners. Big projects with dozens of members can afford the effort to set up their own runners but small one-man projects aren't going to bother and they represent the vast majority of Github. Microsoft spends around $100m/year on free CI runners. Github is going to have to get a lot worse before most people give that up. Also the post correctly mentions the importance of stacked PRs and how it's crazy that it has taken Github this long to get them. But it fails to mention that it's taking its competitors even longer. Gitlab doesn't have them. Forgejo has no plans. The only other forges I know that support them are Phabricator/Phorge (I think anyway; it's been a while), and Tangled, which tbh looks like it has blown its weirdness budget way too much to be a viable Github competitor.
- inigyou 2mo agoI think Codeberg offers free CI as long as your project is aimed at improving the free software world and you don't abuse server resources (as evaluated by a human in each individual case). That's one of their selling points over and above git hosting.
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- pmontra 2mo ago> Bitbucket is the obvious existing counterexample: a conventional commercial forge that has never developed into a shared open-source community comparable to GitHub Agreed. All my customers are on Bitbucket. All the libraries used by their projects (Ruby, Python, JS) are on GitHub.
- ValdikSS 2mo agoIn the early days of github, it offered private repositories only for paid users. Bitbucket allowed private repositories for free.
- stevekemp 2mo agoI've worked in a couple of companies who used bitbucket, and I've been glad when each of them migrated elsewhere. Bitbucket managed to be slow, annoying, and suffer more outages than github ever did. (Though perhaps that has changed, we're all aware that github has been struggling "recently".)
- anankaie 2mo agoGitSocial? https://github.com/gitsocial-org/gitsocial https://github.com/gitsocial-org/gitsocial
- thataccount 2mo agoGithub is not something that should be replaced. Rather, a different kind of model needs to exist. Before Git, there were things like Subversion, for instance. All of that slowed way down after Git showed up to the party because people liked the fact Git was "easier to use" and eventually networking effects. When Microsoft purchased Git, the death knell had all ready sounded, but nobody was listening.
- tombert 2mo agoHow would subversion fix this problem exactly? It would still be a centralized forge that Microsoft could still control/ruin. In fact, more centralized than Git, which itself was designed to be decentralized (though admittedly most people don't use it that way). Microsoft didn't purchase "Git", they purchased Github, the largest forge for Git. Git will continue to exist no matter what Microsoft does. Also, I have absolutely no desire to ever, ever go back to SVN. When I was a junior engineer in my first software job, every Friday I would have to do The Merge, which would usually take most of the day because it would be spent solving all the merge conflicts. When I discovered the git-svn thing, it was like manna from heaven since it made a 4+ hour job take around ~45 minutes.
- 010101010101 2mo agoYour apparent problems with Git the source control system aren’t what any of this is talking about, this is about GitHub as a platform. SourceForge is your better “pre-git” analogue here, and it, like SVN, still exists and is actively maintained and used.
- thataccount 2mo agoI am aware of what this article is talking about in terms of platforms. Sourceforge might be a better analogy. What I was saying is that development of other source control like Subversion halted as Git entered the scene. Git was first version control, subsequently a platform.
- tombert 2mo ago
- selectively 2mo ago[dead]
- cedws 2mo agoRunning a git forge is easy, I find the social coding/network effect the stickiest part of GitHub. I want my code to be discoverable, and I want to discover others' code. I wanted to leave GitHub but I'm still stuck there. What it would take for me to finally leave is some kind of federation of the social features, so I can port my stars over, see what others are working on, etc.
- t1234s 2mo agoIn the end GitHub will be a dating site
- Gander5739 2mo agoGithub for lesbians: https://xkcd.com/624/ https://xkcd.com/624/
- DesaiAshu 2mo agoOr a music making platform
- Scandiravian 2mo agoOr a bimonthly curated box of snacks
- stevekemp 2mo agoWe already have linkedin for that!
- Pxtl 2mo agoFediverse all the things.
- worldsayshi 2mo agoI remember there's at least one serious effort for forge federation. But don't know what it's called or how to search for it. Edit: here's one: https://forgefed.org/ https://forgefed.org/
- 2mo ago
- t1234s 2mo agoIf your a small company developing something closed source is there any reason to use GitHub over just setting up a git infrastructure on your private server?
- hungryhobbit 2mo agoConvenience.
- hungryhobbit 2mo agoTo be a little less flippant, small companies don't have an IT department to setup and maintain a git server ... and more. GitHib is also an issue tracker. It's also a (minimal) static webhost. And it's also a way to run actions on your builds. All that isn't trivial to setup or maintain, so small folks especially will often find it cheaper and faster to pay M$ for all that.
- Brian_K_White 2mo agoThis makes sense for small companies that are pizza shops and barbers. It does not make sense for small companies that are in any sector of IT.
- Marsymars 2mo agoAnd once you’re no longer a small company, setting up any server comes with a pile of bureaucracy. As a dev, I don’t want to set up a server when 80% of the work is filling out SOC 2 change management forms and dealing with crowdstrike. (And nobody wants to spend time debugging why crowdstrike makes the CI pipeline slow or arguing with your auditors about why your ephemeral images don’t actually need crowdstrike.)
- FpUser 2mo agoThis is what I do. If however I wanted to do some open source I would definitely copy releases to GitHub as well
- alerighi 2mo ago
- hungryhobbit 2mo agoThis guy is defining himself into a corner: >GitLab is capable, but it feels incredibly corporate, even more so than GitHub.3 Nor have I found it as good as GitHub at helping people stumble across projects and developers. So it's not enough for an alternative to do everything you want ... it ALSO has to look "not incredibly corporate", and it has to bring millions of users to your project. Otherwise it's not viable.
- no_wizard 2mo agoIt’s really another way of saying: it needs to meet GitHub’s current utility and functions today. And one of them is ease of discovery. GitHub make’s it really easy to do that. Same with contribution. As far as looks go? That’s more subjective. But the discovery and contributions piece is easy to prove, just look at how much traction a project gets when it’s hosted there versus elsewhere. Even really large projects that has many contributors have moved there like WebKit
- hungryhobbit 2mo agoRight, I'm not saying "there are no differences between GitLab and GitHub". They have all the same core functionality, but obviously GitHub has a unique community with more OSS folks. What I'm saying is, you could pick almost any popular Internet site, craft your requirements to describe it exactly, and write a blog post lamenting how there's no alternative. It doesn't mean there's really no alternative (for you or anyone else) ... it just means you're announcing to the world that you are a big fan of that site, and you personally will never be happy with any other site no matter what.
- otterley 2mo ago> And one of them is ease of discovery. GitHub make’s it really easy to do that. Same with contribution. At the end of the day, this seems to be the author's ultimate decision factor. None of the alternatives--open-source, self-hosted, or commercial--have the social gravitational pull GitHub does. Popularity begets popularity.
- dietr1ch 2mo ago
- ckcheng 2mo agoHow’s about radicle.dev ? Apparently like GitHub, but decentralized like Git.
- hirako2000 2mo agoIt's mentioned in the article. I tried it, years apart. It's forever experimental, and requires hosting for forever online repo anyway. Forgejo is also mentioned, to me it's a valid alternative, without the community aspect.
- markmental 2mo ago[flagged]
- manlymuppet 2mo agoI think people trying to move off GitHub are being over righteous. There are far worse companies than GitHub. People acting like this company is the Nazi regime are being ridiculous. GitHub (like most of tech) is rather progressive, and trivial differences in perspective should not be taken so seriously. Of course, you can choose whichever service you'd like, for whatever reason you'd like, but acting like allies that agree with you on almost everything are enemies is no way to make progress. This is something that should not be high on the list of priorities.
- phinnaeus 2mo agoI might have moved off for self righteousness but my company might be more interested in moving off because their reliability is absolutely garbage
- vkou 2mo agoA devops friend of mine raises an intriguing point - he does not aim for many-nines reliability with dev infrastructure. He aims for people being able to keep doing their work when whatever service they regularly use is down. (Which also means that he is able to go on vacation.)
- phinnaeus 2mo agoYeah seems like six of one, half a dozen of another. GitHub’s downtime blocks devs
- manlymuppet 2mo agoI hear you, and that's a perfectly valid reason to leave. Even if your company left for righteousness reasons rather than reliability, supporting businesses based on your morals is a commendable thing. I just think GitHub is a long way from Tammany Hall.
- greysonp 2mo agoWhile many have ethical issues with GitHub, my understanding is that the current wave of people leaving are doing so because of _reliability_ reasons.
- tombert 2mo agoI hadn't ever used the email-based pull request until I started using Sourcehut, but ever since I did I've honestly grown to prefer it. People shouldn't require an account at a for-profit company to make contributions to FOSS. Sourcehut is pretty niche but I like it a lot, and I don't really mind paying for things relative to the value they provide me.
- TruthRevealed 2mo ago[flagged]
- tombert 2mo agoI don't know why you censored "underage". People are weird. Anyway, the only source I've really heard trying to make Devault a sex-pest comes from Bryan Lunduke, who's an idiot that isn't opposed to embellishing or flatout lying about people he doesn't like, so I am afraid that I'm skeptical of that claim.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- inigyou 2mo agoI always confuse him with DHH. Apologies to DeVault.
- dwroberts 2mo agoI really like sourcehut but I do find it frustrating that it does not offer LFS. I know I could point at another providers’ LFS, but then I may as well use their entire git offering too
- tombert 2mo agoAgreed; I occasionally have to awkwardly work around the lack of support for large files by hard-coding S3 links and the like. That kind of sucks. Honestly I mostly just kind of wish that Git had proper support for binary files. I really need to play with that Lore VCS that Epic made.
- sylware 2mo agoMy projects are gone from microsoft github.com. Not because I decided to move away, but mostly because github.com is now blocking noscript/basic HTML browsers for most of its basic functions, then it was actually them who did boot me away. Small Tech Discrimination.
- taminka 2mo ago99% of commits on a project come from 1% of contributors, so the main issue w/ migrating to an alternative isn't the networking effect of github, rather that you can't carry over github specific stuff (prs/issues) i personally like how radicle.xyz managed that, where they manage issues/prs/user identities as git objects, so your entire project is self contained as git repository
- jolaflow 2mo agoAs for issue tracking, there are also other git-native alternatives out there. Epiq is entirely git-backed, vendor agnostic and persists state as a versioned log in your repo. Im its creator, for full disclosure.
- jeremyjh 2mo agoI agree and I will go further: radicle has the only competent federation model. They are the only designers who understood from the beginning that issues and PRs belong to the repo, not to a bunch of random servers hosting every issue opened by a different user. It also allows for arbitrary levels of redundancy without passively saturating the network with ActivityPub traffic that no one looks at. There needs to be some kind of shared infrastructure to make it easier for new contributors.
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoCodeberg is a perfect drop-in 1:1 replacement. I find this article to be pretentious nonsense.
- inigyou 2mo agoCodeberg recently made HN very angry by banning vibecoded projects. It's opinionated. GitHub isn't.
- dijit 2mo agoGithub is opinionated. I recall some time in 2016 when they were regex replacing variable names in peoples repositories and pestering them if they didn’t accept the request. They also worked very hard to change the default branch name for everyone, eventually compromising. Github definitely has opinions, they might align with yours, for now.
- progval 2mo ago> I recall some time in 2016 when they were regex replacing variable names in peoples repositories and pestering them if they didn’t accept the request. Do you have more details about that?
- dijit 2mo agoI'm conflating multiple things over 5 years, my memory seems imperfect. Apologies. What I've mixed together: 1) The "Alex" bot, which was opt-in and seemed to be everywhere. [0] 2) The "inclusive-coding-bot" which was not opt-in and just inserted itself into everything (which came out later). [1] 3) Github disabling a popular repository for using the word "Retard". [2] Neither of the first two were actually endorsed by github, I just conflated them because of the "WebM for Retards" controversy and because they'd been very public about other inclusive things like not interviewing white people [3] or calling white women "some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women". [4] [0]: https://github.com/get-alex/alex https://github.com/get-alex/alex [1]: https://github.com/inclusive-coding-bot https://github.com/inclusive-coding-bot [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118 [3]: https://i.insider.com/56b3d2f12e526555008b505e?width=791 https://i.insider.com/56b3d2f12e526555008b505e?width=791 [4]: https://www.businessinsider.com/diversity-guru-discusses-white-women-2016-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/diversity-guru-discusses-whi...
- HumblyTossed 2mo agoThat's so sad. Maybe if devs weren't so FOMO, they wouldn't tie themselves so tightly to things like github, chrome, etc.
- inigyou 2mo agoBefore we can talk about a replacement we need to know what is being replaced. If your criteria is a carbon copy of GitHub then of course only GitHub suffices. You have to be more specific about your needs before you can find something else.
- abc42 2mo agoSourcehut: https://sr.ht https://sr.ht Not a drop-in replacement for GitHub admittedly. Requires a bit more skills from the contributors. Which might be a fine gate, actually.
- luciana1u 2mo ago[flagged]
- oooyay 2mo agoAs a maintainer of an open source project I largely care about CI, discoverability on the web, and the sign up burden being small so that issues continue to be reported. I think Radicle and Tangled are probably the future in that way. Tangled needs to support private repositories and Radicle needs a real CI solution. We're not far off from either.
- jeremyjh 2mo agoTangled is a de facto centralized platform and it is VC funded. It is not the future.
- oooyay 2mo agoI don't mind that Tangled is VC funded as long the tech is open (it is) and as far as I can discern it is federated and decentralized. You and I probably have different ideas of what the future may be and that's okay.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- jeremyjh 2mo agoIn practice it is centralized: you can host your own PDS and knot but if tangled.org decides you don’t align with their values then they stop indexing you and no one will see your work in the only place tangled users look. ATproto has some real benefits - data sovereignty is possible - but for this particular use case it only makes it possible for you to migrate your connections and history to the next place that everyone is going to.
- inigyou 2mo agoCodeberg offers free CI if your project fits in their ethos.
- rvz 2mo ago6 Years later, a priceless comment and aged like fine pristine wine. [0] The time to self-host over GitHub is now since they do not even have a CEO of GitHub anymore to help. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406
- merelydev 2mo agoThere is a view where developers think of a forge as a place where they host their code. Than there is another view where the forge is where you go to get code others have written, and this is where GitHub shines. Because of the collective audit.
- ruszki 2mo agoDidn’t we have these also without GitHub? If you wanted to share code, you could that even without GitHub.
- kloud 2mo agoGitHub is really two separate products: a code forge for teams and a social coding platform to collaborate on open source. When I use the social platform, it is mostly as a read-only website. I am occasionally commenting, opening issues, PRs etc. The slowness and annoyances do not matter that much. But I live in the team tool, where the annoyances and paper cuts are painful. Besides poor craftsmanship, there is often tension between the simpler design for social which sacrifices usability for pro use cases. The social platform, which has huge network effects and is really hard to replace, is basically a loss leader for marketing the team product. I wonder if it would be viable for another company to create a team tool that stands on its own by outclassing Github like Linear outclasses Jira? That should be easier to replace. And Microsoft could keep running the social platform for the time being, where the adoption of alternatives is much slower and requires a much longer time frame.
- jeremyjh 2mo agoLet’s be completely honest: When we say it’s about “discovery”, it’s not about people anonymously obtaining and using the software. What we really mean is that lots of users need to have accounts so that star count go up.
- senand 2mo agoCan we be a bit more specific regarding the criticism of gitlab?