6 ms·

This is starting to feel like Twitter. For a variety of reasons, we had a centralized place where everyone of a particular set of persuasions could connect, and

by Arubis 2mo ago

This is starting to feel like Twitter. For a variety of reasons, we had a centralized place where everyone of a particular set of persuasions could connect, and this had outsize benefits for the community as a whole. That place is becoming untenable, and with the loss of goodwill and stability, the community’s started to dissipate. But there isn’t one obvious transition candidate, so the diaspora is finding itself spread across a bunch of disparate places and services. The stated need they satisfy (source control with a web interface and some technical features, like pull requests with reviews) will be fulfilled. But those emergent features like a core community and default expectation of where you can find someone will fade. And that is a very real loss for all of us.

noosphr 2mo ago
Luckily we already have a distributed version control system that can take over github: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki I suppose people can use git too if they ever figure out how to send emails from a dedicated client.
- AlexandrB 2mo ago
  > Luckily we already have a distributed version control system that can take over github Surprised that this wasn't just a link to Git. The biggest benefit of Git over predecessors was that it enabled decentralization. Github re-centralized the common case for the sake of convenience.
  - jeremyjh 2mo ago
    Yes but on Earth every project needs a canonical main branch. Most also need a way to manage and review changes to that branch that all project members have direct access to.
    - Sanzig 2mo ago
      Gitea (and its popular fork, Forgejo) are very lightweight. You can easily stand up an instance on a cheap VPS.
      - jeremyjh 2mo ago
        Agreed. Just moved some of my projects to codefloe.com (Forgejo) this weekend. FYI - it provides a lot more than a link to git.
    - skydhash 2mo ago
      It's on the project to decide which is canonical and export a read only accessible version. Change review only requires a communication medium (the patches are mostly plain text) and that can be done in a lot of way. As for merging those changes, it's an organizational issue.
      - jeremyjh 2mo ago
        If it’s on the project to determine their requirements, why are you doing it?
  - poisonborz 2mo ago
    Github and other providers before proved that git itself is just a small part of managing code, there's a lot more needed for a full workflow, and it's meaningful for it all to be tightly coupled.
  - Arubis 2mo ago
    > "Crypto had attracted grifters from the beginning, even though its most respected figures were more interested in changing the world. As Silicon Valley investors piled in after them, they wanted to fund companies that would become essential to the crypto economy, allowing them to make vast amounts of money. Entrepreneur after entrepreneur discovered that the best way to turn a profit in a decentralized economy was to figure out ways to centralize parts of it again." (Henry Farrell, Underground Empire)
  - Xirdus 2mo ago
    The biggest benefits of Git over predecessors were branching, 3-way merge, and history rewrites (in particular, rebase and squash). As much as Git fans wanted decentralization to be a major selling point, decentralization has never been a major selling point.
    - prerok 2mo ago
      Not exactly decentralization but distribution was the main selling point. In comparison to SVN and other non-DVCs git did not need to continuously talk to the central server for history, "branch" creations, unlocking/locking files before changes, etc. Linus wanted a DVCS, but they wanted centralization and licenses were expensive, so he decided to launch the git initiative where he provided scaffolding and the rest came from contributions.
      - Xirdus 2mo ago
        It was a selling point. Maybe even intended selling point. But it absolutely isn't the main selling point. Never was, never will. The big thing, the reason people ever started talking about Git outside Linux dev team, has always been branches. It's branches, not distribution, that made every SVN user in the world abandon it in exchange for Git. Saying distribution has been more important than branching is like saying automobiles replaced horses because of smell. Which, admittedly, was a big problem with horses, but come on.
        prerok 2mo ago
        It seems our experiences are different. Back then, when working with SVN, we had sites in various countries, with under provisioned VPNs between them. Loading up a single file history could take 15 minutes. I am not joking. Every single operation took ages, so really, any DVCS would have won in that situation, regardless of its approach to branches. If the SVN server would sit in the same building then I guess the branching would have been the main selling point, but it was not the main selling point for us in that situation.
    - AlexandrB 2mo ago
- MoreQARespect 2mo ago
  There are plenty of alternatives for git hosting. The last thing which needs to be migrated before we get an exodus off this vibe coded monstrosity is reputation (i.e. github stars) which are inherently sticky.
  - ryandrake 2mo ago
    Git doesn't even need to be "hosted" anywhere. That's the point of it being distributed. What needs to be hosted somewhere are all the barnacles (like issue tracking, code reviewing, CI, and so on) that have grown out around git, that people and businesses have become dependent on.
    - seanc 2mo ago
      Which is why they cleverly moved the central story of a software change from the commit to the PR. Commits migrate automatically with the repo. But migrating PR descriptions and comments takes engineering effort.
      - kortex 2mo ago
        Rhetorically, why can't folks add the feature of PRs to Git? Git is fundamentally just a graph manipulation engine and data structure. It would just be another object type, in a layer which sits above the normal commit graph. Obviously there is no "just make X" in software, but this feels reasonably achievable, and would have tremendous benefit for the cost.
        pwdisswordfishq 2mo ago
        https://git-scm.com/docs/git-request-pull https://git-scm.com/docs/git-request-pull
      - dannyw 2mo ago
        Where would you put comments then? Sure, there’s always mailing lists, but even so, someone still has to host Mailman. I do think GitHub has positively contributed to the software industry and open source. It’s been enshittified for sure, but it has had a golden era.
- graemep 2mo ago
  I like Fossil, but there are good reasons to use git too. There are many git hosting options, including some for self hosting. its a lot easier to switch to a different version control host than to a different version control system.
- rbanffy 2mo ago
  We had Launchpad before Github (IIRC).
dimgl 2mo ago
Twitter is unstable? I can't remember the last time it had an outage.
- BryanBeshore 2mo ago
  ~2007-12?!
- sunaurus 2mo ago
  Are you potentially in the US? I think the experience is very different globally. Ever since the Twitter -> X rebranding, every time I open Twitter links, I have a very high chance of hitting a "Something went wrong" type page, with a retry button that just does nothing. It's been like this for ages. I barely open Twitter links anymore as a result.
- obeattie 2mo ago
  I think they may mean Twitter's 'Fail Whale' era – late 2000s/early 2010s, when it regularly fell over under load.
duxup 2mo ago
And like Twitter most people will keep using it anyway?
- OtomotO 2mo ago
  Just in the US. I have ONE European client... ONE of dozens who use GitHub. EVERY other client I've ever worked with used their own gitforge or at least bitbucket...
  - nixgeek 2mo ago
    Selection bias then as the majority of European companies are for sure not hosting their own Forgejo or GitForge.
    - OtomotO 2mo ago
      I've asked around in my circles, because I am genuinely interested: Everyone not working in startup space IS hosting their own instances. Hell, even I do it.
    - mechazawa 2mo ago
      Where I work we're hosting our own gitlab instance and the previous company I worked for hosted their own Bitbucket. For most developers I know it's either a self hosted git platform instance or Github enterprise.
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - xigoi 2mo ago
      Even my faculty, which otherwise licks Microsoft’s boots at all opportunities, uses self-hosted GitLab.
  - 2mo ago
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
icepush 2mo ago
I think that, exactly how 95% of the people that left Twitter eventually returned, we will see a similar outflux of people from Github and the vast majority of them will quietly be back in a few months.
- xnorswap 2mo ago
  That was a political decision, this is an operational one. A lot of companies have become dependent on a working github and effectively have to down tools when it is down.
  - icepush 2mo ago
    Being down for a few hours 2-3 times a month is obviously garbage from a reliability standpoint, but I think they will keep it going at just the level necessary to barely hold on to these customers.
- mort96 2mo ago
  Do you have numbers to back that statement up? I don't necessarily doubt it, but I haven't seen anything to support it. Note that raw user numbers won't really cut it; if 1 million people left Twitter, it's possible that 500 000 of those people joined and 500 000 new people joined; the user numbers would look like everyone returned, but really only 50% did in this hypothetical.
- giaour 2mo ago
  Was this reported and quantified somewhere, or does 95% reflect your experience? My experience was the opposite -- everybody I cared to follow left and never went back -- but I'd be willing to believe I'm in the 5%.
- xpct 2mo ago
  I'd say about a third of software engineers whose blogs I stumble upon and end up liking aren't active on twitter. Their accounts typically have nothing posted for 3-4 years, but they're active on bluesky or mastodon.
- CSMastermind 2mo ago
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
hliyan 2mo ago
"Protocols, not platforms" should have remained the philosophy of the Internet. Alas, we are here.
- MarkBennett 2mo ago
  This is why I'm so interested in https://tangled.org/ https://tangled.org/ Even if the platform itself doesn't take off, the protocol and the data ownwership (you host your repo artifacts, issues, prs, etc on your ATproto server) mean that a competitor could come in easily if you were no longer satisfied with performance, reliability, or monetization.
- zoobab 2mo ago
  "Protocols" now that everything has been moved to a master-slave protocol (HTTP), we are all slaves of the masters.
bewareofscams 2mo ago
[flagged]
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
lxgr 2mo ago
It is, but a single point of failure is itself also an unstable equilibrium, given that a lot of things have to continuously go right for its continued existence in terms of governance of all kinds (technical, moderation policies, commercial/pricing etc.)
IncandescentGas 2mo ago
Good. That's a gain, not a loss. We're better off without social media psyop manipulations and subscription services bolted onto our code repositories. We're better off without a giant evilcorp getting wholesale access to a large majority of the world's source code.
- dkdbejwi383 2mo ago
  I just use GitHub for the basics: repo hosting, reviews and actions - what are the "social media psyop manipulations"? I've never really paid much attention to the other features.
  - chicken1991 2mo ago
    But now the users who only use core functions (re: repo hosting, reviews and actions) suffer when the service is down due to overreach with feature implementation.
  - MisterTea 2mo ago
    All the metrics based around how many commits you have made, how many stars your repo has, etc. Why is that info gamified? Its a dopamine addiction channel.
    - mirekrusin 2mo ago
      Seriously?
    - tokioyoyo 2mo ago
      It’s for subset of people who cares about that. You can just blanket-ignore everyone who cares about that, and move on.
      - shimman 2mo ago
        Yeah but then VC use these metrics to fund projects and suddenly what was previously a joke now becomes a way to make wealth.
sp4ke 2mo ago
At least this will wake up more people to the existing alternative efforts such as Forgejo and its progress with federation protocol. https://forgejo.org/2023-01-10-answering-forgejo-federation-questions https://forgejo.org/2023-01-10-answering-forgejo-federation-...
- jaen 2mo ago
  Do you have any more insight into its progress? Seems like it's far from production-ready and there hasn't been much activity this year?
krunck 2mo ago
> spread across a bunch of disparate places and services. This is the way. Stop centralizing everything.
watwut 2mo ago
I think that especially when it comes to hosting, competition is good. Everything centered on github was the bad state previously. I remember people on HN claiming they wont hire someone without github account. This splintering should happen more often.
CivBase 2mo ago
Good. Git is a decentralized version control solution. It's built for this. The centralization around GitHub was beneficial for the initial proliferation of Git, but has long since become a net negative. The "community" you speak of was never bound to GitHub. Better alternatives have emerged and for many it's time to move to greener pastures.
LelouBil 2mo ago
Use Tangled ! https://tangled.org/ https://tangled.org/ It's a social network with github-like social features and git hosting, but you can still self host your git and have all the features like issues, PRs and so on just like GitHub. And it's built on ATProto so you can also have your issues PRs and so on hosted on your infra, but everything interconnects nicely with your single account, just like using GitHub. They even added a vouching system for users, to know who to trust based on who you already trusted.
Gud 2mo ago
Personally I don't agree at all that these centralized monoliths are a good thing. On the contrary, I believe it's been detrimental to the open internet and only serves to control us by the powerful. I never trusted Github and never will.
logicchains 2mo ago
It's becoming the Microsoft Teams of Git hosting providers.
DonHopkins 2mo ago
TwitHub

by Arubis 2mo ago

noosphr 2mo ago

Luckily we already have a distributed version control system that can take over github: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki I suppose people can use git too if they ever figure out how to send emails from a dedicated client.

AlexandrB 2mo ago
> Luckily we already have a distributed version control system that can take over github Surprised that this wasn't just a link to Git. The biggest benefit of Git over predecessors was that it enabled decentralization. Github re-centralized the common case for the sake of convenience.
- jeremyjh 2mo ago
  Yes but on Earth every project needs a canonical main branch. Most also need a way to manage and review changes to that branch that all project members have direct access to.
  - Sanzig 2mo ago
    Gitea (and its popular fork, Forgejo) are very lightweight. You can easily stand up an instance on a cheap VPS.
    - jeremyjh 2mo ago
      Agreed. Just moved some of my projects to codefloe.com (Forgejo) this weekend. FYI - it provides a lot more than a link to git.
  - skydhash 2mo ago
    It's on the project to decide which is canonical and export a read only accessible version. Change review only requires a communication medium (the patches are mostly plain text) and that can be done in a lot of way. As for merging those changes, it's an organizational issue.
    - jeremyjh 2mo ago
      If it’s on the project to determine their requirements, why are you doing it?
- poisonborz 2mo ago
  Github and other providers before proved that git itself is just a small part of managing code, there's a lot more needed for a full workflow, and it's meaningful for it all to be tightly coupled.
- Arubis 2mo ago
  > "Crypto had attracted grifters from the beginning, even though its most respected figures were more interested in changing the world. As Silicon Valley investors piled in after them, they wanted to fund companies that would become essential to the crypto economy, allowing them to make vast amounts of money. Entrepreneur after entrepreneur discovered that the best way to turn a profit in a decentralized economy was to figure out ways to centralize parts of it again." (Henry Farrell, Underground Empire)
- Xirdus 2mo ago
  The biggest benefits of Git over predecessors were branching, 3-way merge, and history rewrites (in particular, rebase and squash). As much as Git fans wanted decentralization to be a major selling point, decentralization has never been a major selling point.
  - prerok 2mo ago
    Not exactly decentralization but distribution was the main selling point. In comparison to SVN and other non-DVCs git did not need to continuously talk to the central server for history, "branch" creations, unlocking/locking files before changes, etc. Linus wanted a DVCS, but they wanted centralization and licenses were expensive, so he decided to launch the git initiative where he provided scaffolding and the rest came from contributions.
    - Xirdus 2mo ago
      It was a selling point. Maybe even intended selling point. But it absolutely isn't the main selling point. Never was, never will. The big thing, the reason people ever started talking about Git outside Linux dev team, has always been branches. It's branches, not distribution, that made every SVN user in the world abandon it in exchange for Git. Saying distribution has been more important than branching is like saying automobiles replaced horses because of smell. Which, admittedly, was a big problem with horses, but come on.
      - prerok 2mo ago
        It seems our experiences are different. Back then, when working with SVN, we had sites in various countries, with under provisioned VPNs between them. Loading up a single file history could take 15 minutes. I am not joking. Every single operation took ages, so really, any DVCS would have won in that situation, regardless of its approach to branches. If the SVN server would sit in the same building then I guess the branching would have been the main selling point, but it was not the main selling point for us in that situation.
  - AlexandrB 2mo ago
MoreQARespect 2mo ago
There are plenty of alternatives for git hosting. The last thing which needs to be migrated before we get an exodus off this vibe coded monstrosity is reputation (i.e. github stars) which are inherently sticky.
- ryandrake 2mo ago
  Git doesn't even need to be "hosted" anywhere. That's the point of it being distributed. What needs to be hosted somewhere are all the barnacles (like issue tracking, code reviewing, CI, and so on) that have grown out around git, that people and businesses have become dependent on.
  - seanc 2mo ago
    Which is why they cleverly moved the central story of a software change from the commit to the PR. Commits migrate automatically with the repo. But migrating PR descriptions and comments takes engineering effort.
    - kortex 2mo ago
      Rhetorically, why can't folks add the feature of PRs to Git? Git is fundamentally just a graph manipulation engine and data structure. It would just be another object type, in a layer which sits above the normal commit graph. Obviously there is no "just make X" in software, but this feels reasonably achievable, and would have tremendous benefit for the cost.
      - pwdisswordfishq 2mo ago
        https://git-scm.com/docs/git-request-pull https://git-scm.com/docs/git-request-pull
    - dannyw 2mo ago
      Where would you put comments then? Sure, there’s always mailing lists, but even so, someone still has to host Mailman. I do think GitHub has positively contributed to the software industry and open source. It’s been enshittified for sure, but it has had a golden era.
graemep 2mo ago
I like Fossil, but there are good reasons to use git too. There are many git hosting options, including some for self hosting. its a lot easier to switch to a different version control host than to a different version control system.
rbanffy 2mo ago
We had Launchpad before Github (IIRC).

dimgl 2mo ago

Twitter is unstable? I can't remember the last time it had an outage.

BryanBeshore 2mo ago
~2007-12?!
sunaurus 2mo ago
Are you potentially in the US? I think the experience is very different globally. Ever since the Twitter -> X rebranding, every time I open Twitter links, I have a very high chance of hitting a "Something went wrong" type page, with a retry button that just does nothing. It's been like this for ages. I barely open Twitter links anymore as a result.
obeattie 2mo ago
I think they may mean Twitter's 'Fail Whale' era – late 2000s/early 2010s, when it regularly fell over under load.

duxup 2mo ago

And like Twitter most people will keep using it anyway?

OtomotO 2mo ago
Just in the US. I have ONE European client... ONE of dozens who use GitHub. EVERY other client I've ever worked with used their own gitforge or at least bitbucket...
- nixgeek 2mo ago
  Selection bias then as the majority of European companies are for sure not hosting their own Forgejo or GitForge.
  - OtomotO 2mo ago
    I've asked around in my circles, because I am genuinely interested: Everyone not working in startup space IS hosting their own instances. Hell, even I do it.
  - mechazawa 2mo ago
    Where I work we're hosting our own gitlab instance and the previous company I worked for hosted their own Bitbucket. For most developers I know it's either a self hosted git platform instance or Github enterprise.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - xigoi 2mo ago
    Even my faculty, which otherwise licks Microsoft’s boots at all opportunities, uses self-hosted GitLab.
- 2mo ago

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

icepush 2mo ago

I think that, exactly how 95% of the people that left Twitter eventually returned, we will see a similar outflux of people from Github and the vast majority of them will quietly be back in a few months.

xnorswap 2mo ago
That was a political decision, this is an operational one. A lot of companies have become dependent on a working github and effectively have to down tools when it is down.
- icepush 2mo ago
  Being down for a few hours 2-3 times a month is obviously garbage from a reliability standpoint, but I think they will keep it going at just the level necessary to barely hold on to these customers.
mort96 2mo ago
Do you have numbers to back that statement up? I don't necessarily doubt it, but I haven't seen anything to support it. Note that raw user numbers won't really cut it; if 1 million people left Twitter, it's possible that 500 000 of those people joined and 500 000 new people joined; the user numbers would look like everyone returned, but really only 50% did in this hypothetical.
giaour 2mo ago
Was this reported and quantified somewhere, or does 95% reflect your experience? My experience was the opposite -- everybody I cared to follow left and never went back -- but I'd be willing to believe I'm in the 5%.
xpct 2mo ago
I'd say about a third of software engineers whose blogs I stumble upon and end up liking aren't active on twitter. Their accounts typically have nothing posted for 3-4 years, but they're active on bluesky or mastodon.
CSMastermind 2mo ago

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

hliyan 2mo ago

"Protocols, not platforms" should have remained the philosophy of the Internet. Alas, we are here.

MarkBennett 2mo ago
This is why I'm so interested in https://tangled.org/ https://tangled.org/ Even if the platform itself doesn't take off, the protocol and the data ownwership (you host your repo artifacts, issues, prs, etc on your ATproto server) mean that a competitor could come in easily if you were no longer satisfied with performance, reliability, or monetization.
zoobab 2mo ago
"Protocols" now that everything has been moved to a master-slave protocol (HTTP), we are all slaves of the masters.

bewareofscams 2mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

lxgr 2mo ago

It is, but a single point of failure is itself also an unstable equilibrium, given that a lot of things have to continuously go right for its continued existence in terms of governance of all kinds (technical, moderation policies, commercial/pricing etc.)

IncandescentGas 2mo ago

Good. That's a gain, not a loss. We're better off without social media psyop manipulations and subscription services bolted onto our code repositories. We're better off without a giant evilcorp getting wholesale access to a large majority of the world's source code.

dkdbejwi383 2mo ago
I just use GitHub for the basics: repo hosting, reviews and actions - what are the "social media psyop manipulations"? I've never really paid much attention to the other features.
- chicken1991 2mo ago
  But now the users who only use core functions (re: repo hosting, reviews and actions) suffer when the service is down due to overreach with feature implementation.
- MisterTea 2mo ago
  All the metrics based around how many commits you have made, how many stars your repo has, etc. Why is that info gamified? Its a dopamine addiction channel.
  - mirekrusin 2mo ago
    Seriously?
  - tokioyoyo 2mo ago
    It’s for subset of people who cares about that. You can just blanket-ignore everyone who cares about that, and move on.
    - shimman 2mo ago
      Yeah but then VC use these metrics to fund projects and suddenly what was previously a joke now becomes a way to make wealth.

sp4ke 2mo ago

At least this will wake up more people to the existing alternative efforts such as Forgejo and its progress with federation protocol. https://forgejo.org/2023-01-10-answering-forgejo-federation-questions https://forgejo.org/2023-01-10-answering-forgejo-federation-...

jaen 2mo ago
Do you have any more insight into its progress? Seems like it's far from production-ready and there hasn't been much activity this year?

krunck 2mo ago

> spread across a bunch of disparate places and services. This is the way. Stop centralizing everything.

watwut 2mo ago

I think that especially when it comes to hosting, competition is good. Everything centered on github was the bad state previously. I remember people on HN claiming they wont hire someone without github account. This splintering should happen more often.

CivBase 2mo ago

Good. Git is a decentralized version control solution. It's built for this. The centralization around GitHub was beneficial for the initial proliferation of Git, but has long since become a net negative. The "community" you speak of was never bound to GitHub. Better alternatives have emerged and for many it's time to move to greener pastures.

LelouBil 2mo ago

Use Tangled ! https://tangled.org/ https://tangled.org/ It's a social network with github-like social features and git hosting, but you can still self host your git and have all the features like issues, PRs and so on just like GitHub. And it's built on ATProto so you can also have your issues PRs and so on hosted on your infra, but everything interconnects nicely with your single account, just like using GitHub. They even added a vouching system for users, to know who to trust based on who you already trusted.

Gud 2mo ago

Personally I don't agree at all that these centralized monoliths are a good thing. On the contrary, I believe it's been detrimental to the open internet and only serves to control us by the powerful. I never trusted Github and never will.

logicchains 2mo ago

It's becoming the Microsoft Teams of Git hosting providers.

DonHopkins 2mo ago

TwitHub