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It is not working at all, I can not load any repo pages. Github.com's promise is that it can be the central broker of open source code because it is reliable.

It is not working at all, I can not load any repo pages. Github.com's promise is that it can be the central broker of open source code because it is reliable. That promise hasn't been kept recently. That said, Github is hard to displace and it is similar to the era of the Twitter Fail Whales. It was a sign of growth that couldn't be properly managed but there was not viable alternative.

hedgehog 2mo ago
It's a bit of a different situation though, in many cases the unit of adoption is a team or organization that is free to switch platforms without consideration of what anyone else is doing. At this point I'm going to move my personal projects, it's not bad enough to be a priority at work yet but it's trending that way.
jillesvangurp 2mo ago
> Github is hard to displace and it is similar to the era of the Twitter Fail Whales Hard but not impossible. Being unreliable might nudge a few people. Also, Twitter had their fail whale in their early phase (mostly), not twenty years or so into their existence. The issue with replacing Github is that it takes more than version control and issue tracking to replace the network that is Github. It's effectively the largest social network for software developers on this planet. Tangled (tangled.org) is built on the at protocol (bluesky) and seems like an interesting take on this. Most other solutions seem to just move the problem to another much smaller silo (gitlab, codeberg, etc) or throw out the baby with the bathwater by focusing on self hosting without attempt at networking with other instances. A federated approach seems like it is directionally right. Tangled is far from feature complete but I like the direction and it probably is a bit more resilient against global outages like this. I'm not a user yet but I'm keeping an eye on it.
- palata 2mo ago
  > throw out the baby with the bathwater by focusing on self hosting without attempt at networking with other instances May I ask what networking with other instances brings? Git is decentralised, so it works with self-hosted instances, right?
  - jillesvangurp 2mo ago
    Git is decentralized in the sense that you can clone your repository wherever. But there is no real networked community on top. The first versions actually piggy backed on the social network that is email. Linux still is managed via email. It's social network was mailing lists. By decentralizing, they could avoid the pesky topic of having to give each other read write access to each other's git servers. But if you want more than what email can offer, social networking is a thing with Github and it's a big reason for its success. It added a friendly UI and a way for users to engage with each other via issue trackers, pull requests, and all the rest. It has tens of millions of users that have accounts that each can each create issues, pull requests, fork each other's projects, etc. These people collaborate with each other on many millions of projects. The network effect of all these people being in one place where they can collaborate is vital to a lot of open source projects. It's effectively the largest developer centric social network around. If the open source community fragments over a gazillion self hosted servers that each require a signup that don't really federate any signins and that don't allow aggregating notifications from all the projects you contributed to, etc. it would be a big loss for the open source world. Tangled by making use of the atproto replicates much of this functionality. While also allowing people to run their own nodes and while allowing users and their projects to be moved between those nodes. That makes it the best of both worlds. You can self host it but without completely disconnecting from the community.
    - palata 2mo ago
      > That makes it the best of both worlds Assuming that everybody moves to your community (in this case the atproto one). Then the ActivityPub people ask you to join their community, and so does every new community that wants to become the new standard. That's the thing with every new social network: "You don't want to be locked into the current community that is not my community, instead you want to move to my community, which is the best! And if you do, and convince everyone around you to join as well, then you will only ever need one account for everything!". And now, assuming that most people leave GitHub and join Tangled, it will be to the detriment of the minority that is not using Tangled. If I host a repo on SourceHut, nobody will contribute because they want GitHub. If Tangled replaces GitHub, will that change? I don't think so, people will just refuse to use anything other than Tangled. What I find interesting is that you advocate for a federated system that everyone should use, because "it would be better for everybody", but the fact is that everybody has an email already. No need to create an account, we can send each other patches, it just works. Why don't you promote email? Because it's not your preference. PS: I do realise that email has a lot of issues. My point is just that I avoid the entire issue by just being open to sharing my code however it works. And I feel like patches are easier to share "universally" than pull requests. Maybe I would be in favour of a new, "richer" patch format that would make it even nicer to share over whatever system I want (email, atproto, activitypub, signal, ...)?
dv_dt 2mo ago
github replaced sourceforge, so something or things can at least offset github
beached_whale 2mo ago
github's value is that it has a lot of eyes and visibility for smaller projects(thought many get lost too). More and more this value is going down and that stability is getting more important. More so when the story of github these days is copilot(good or bad) and their downtime. AI is giving a lot of project owners second thoughts and being so open with an AI company too.
pkulak 2mo ago
I'll keep my open source stuff there forever, because I like the eyeballs. But this has got to be making corporate customers flee in droves. Of course, that's exactly what GitHub _doesn't_ want.

hedgehog 2mo ago

It's a bit of a different situation though, in many cases the unit of adoption is a team or organization that is free to switch platforms without consideration of what anyone else is doing. At this point I'm going to move my personal projects, it's not bad enough to be a priority at work yet but it's trending that way.

jillesvangurp 2mo ago

> Github is hard to displace and it is similar to the era of the Twitter Fail Whales Hard but not impossible. Being unreliable might nudge a few people. Also, Twitter had their fail whale in their early phase (mostly), not twenty years or so into their existence. The issue with replacing Github is that it takes more than version control and issue tracking to replace the network that is Github. It's effectively the largest social network for software developers on this planet. Tangled (tangled.org) is built on the at protocol (bluesky) and seems like an interesting take on this. Most other solutions seem to just move the problem to another much smaller silo (gitlab, codeberg, etc) or throw out the baby with the bathwater by focusing on self hosting without attempt at networking with other instances. A federated approach seems like it is directionally right. Tangled is far from feature complete but I like the direction and it probably is a bit more resilient against global outages like this. I'm not a user yet but I'm keeping an eye on it.

palata 2mo ago
> throw out the baby with the bathwater by focusing on self hosting without attempt at networking with other instances May I ask what networking with other instances brings? Git is decentralised, so it works with self-hosted instances, right?
- jillesvangurp 2mo ago
  Git is decentralized in the sense that you can clone your repository wherever. But there is no real networked community on top. The first versions actually piggy backed on the social network that is email. Linux still is managed via email. It's social network was mailing lists. By decentralizing, they could avoid the pesky topic of having to give each other read write access to each other's git servers. But if you want more than what email can offer, social networking is a thing with Github and it's a big reason for its success. It added a friendly UI and a way for users to engage with each other via issue trackers, pull requests, and all the rest. It has tens of millions of users that have accounts that each can each create issues, pull requests, fork each other's projects, etc. These people collaborate with each other on many millions of projects. The network effect of all these people being in one place where they can collaborate is vital to a lot of open source projects. It's effectively the largest developer centric social network around. If the open source community fragments over a gazillion self hosted servers that each require a signup that don't really federate any signins and that don't allow aggregating notifications from all the projects you contributed to, etc. it would be a big loss for the open source world. Tangled by making use of the atproto replicates much of this functionality. While also allowing people to run their own nodes and while allowing users and their projects to be moved between those nodes. That makes it the best of both worlds. You can self host it but without completely disconnecting from the community.
  - palata 2mo ago
    > That makes it the best of both worlds Assuming that everybody moves to your community (in this case the atproto one). Then the ActivityPub people ask you to join their community, and so does every new community that wants to become the new standard. That's the thing with every new social network: "You don't want to be locked into the current community that is not my community, instead you want to move to my community, which is the best! And if you do, and convince everyone around you to join as well, then you will only ever need one account for everything!". And now, assuming that most people leave GitHub and join Tangled, it will be to the detriment of the minority that is not using Tangled. If I host a repo on SourceHut, nobody will contribute because they want GitHub. If Tangled replaces GitHub, will that change? I don't think so, people will just refuse to use anything other than Tangled. What I find interesting is that you advocate for a federated system that everyone should use, because "it would be better for everybody", but the fact is that everybody has an email already. No need to create an account, we can send each other patches, it just works. Why don't you promote email? Because it's not your preference. PS: I do realise that email has a lot of issues. My point is just that I avoid the entire issue by just being open to sharing my code however it works. And I feel like patches are easier to share "universally" than pull requests. Maybe I would be in favour of a new, "richer" patch format that would make it even nicer to share over whatever system I want (email, atproto, activitypub, signal, ...)?

dv_dt 2mo ago

github replaced sourceforge, so something or things can at least offset github

beached_whale 2mo ago

github's value is that it has a lot of eyes and visibility for smaller projects(thought many get lost too). More and more this value is going down and that stability is getting more important. More so when the story of github these days is copilot(good or bad) and their downtime. AI is giving a lot of project owners second thoughts and being so open with an AI company too.

pkulak 2mo ago

I'll keep my open source stuff there forever, because I like the eyeballs. But this has got to be making corporate customers flee in droves. Of course, that's exactly what GitHub _doesn't_ want.