GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#111

Post by thataccount » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

el_io wrote: post #91

thataccount wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Did you confuse github with git? Indeed centralized git in Github is hardly any different from svn. I used shorthand since I assumed people here were smart enough to assume that Microsoft buying Git would be understood as Github and not Git. It has proven to be a bad assumption.

I don't know, maybe that's because people are somewhat used to see other people confusing Git with GitHub. There's no way everyone knew you're so smart.

>There's no way everyone knew you're so smart.

Could be because everyone is so eager to assume I'm so dumb. ;) Regardless, the communication wasn't clear enough to convey the meaning, and that much is on me. I won't make that mistake again.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#112

Post by throwuxiytayq » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #108

throwuxiytayq wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

I 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.

24 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.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#113

Post by inigyou » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 6:37 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #106

progval wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I'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…

my God, even 11 years ago, people had the same stupid political arguments as today:

> I think the fundamental misunderstanding we're having here is that people on the left side of the political spectrum believe the solution to all answers is more government control.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#114

Post by inigyou » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 6:38 PM UTC

cedws wrote: post #76

inigyou wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much do you actually use social features of GitHub besides bug reporting? Your stars list is browser bookmarks. You can see what others are doing even if you don't have accounts on their sites.

>You can see what others are doing even if you don't have accounts on their sites Not practically. That works up to a number like three. Are you really going to manually poll every account you care about?

How were you doing it on GitHub?

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#115

Post by dijit » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #113

dijit wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'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…

my God, even 11 years ago, people had the same stupid political arguments as today: > I think the fundamental misunderstanding we're having here is that people on the left side of the political spectrum believe the solution to all answers is more government control.

Yes, its really similar and unsurprisingly its still inflammatory.

My girlfriend mentioned that this year is an election year in sweden, which made me realise how bad the propaganda was in 2016- but its all the same stuff.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#116

Post by stevekemp » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 6:54 PM UTC

t1234s wrote: post #15

cedws wrote: post #13

Running 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.

In the end GitHub will be a dating site

We already have linkedin for that!

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#117

Post by stevekemp » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #7

> 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.

I'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".)

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#118

Post by jeremyjh » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 7:20 PM UTC

oooyay wrote: post #74

As 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.

Tangled is a de facto centralized platform and it is VC funded. It is not the future.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#119

Post by jeremyjh » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 7:25 PM UTC

taminka wrote: post #34

99% 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

I 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.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#120

Post by jeremyjh » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 7:31 PM UTC

Let’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.