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The main reason Github is in the news these days is due to its unreliability. If availability is your main concern, Github would be a very odd choice for your O
by crote 2mo ago
The main reason Github is in the news these days is due to its unreliability. If availability is your main concern, Github would be a very odd choice for your One Blessed Source.
Besides, it isn't "self-hosted basement Git server VS Github". There are plenty of other large and reliable forges out there, such as GitLab, Sourcehut, Bitbucket, or Codeberg. Considering how many people - from individual devs to major open-source projects - are abandoning Github, launching a new project in 2026 which only works with Github is a rather odd choice.
It doesn't even make sense from a technical perspective. Git has a standard protocol it uses for cloning repos. You have to go out of your way to make it not work with other forges. And if reliability is critical, surely you'd just mirror it locally? Heck, why not make use of Git's inherent distributed nature and allow defining multiple upstream sources? Integrity is already handled by the commit hash itself, so it doesn't matter if you fetch that commit from Github, GitLab, or some guy's basement server - just take whichever one happens to respond the fastest.
- YetAnotherNick 2mo ago> Considering how many people That is a terrible metric to look into. Github being down is news, but on a long enough time horizon Gitlab or other provider isn't significantly better. It's just they are in news less often.
- steinwinde 2mo ago> on a long enough time horizon Gitlab or other provider isn't significantly better I suspect the same. But do you have any evidence for this? The status pages of Github and Gitlab (more precisely their history pages) don't seem to be a good starting point for comparisons. Anything I find online are people reporting their own experiences, and it's difficult to tell how accurate they are, how many users were truely affected etc. The only thing I can vouch for is that Github has got more unreliable - adding to the hearsay myself...
- orochimaaru 2mo agoThis is for mathematicians and not software engineers. You look for ease of use and familiarity with tooling. If I was a mathematician looking for a simple solution, I would go for GitHub too. Software engineering concerns don’t really apply here.