Incident with Github.com [resolved]

So, relatively, not so long ago it was pretty common to host all this stuff yourself. I don't think (or maybe don't remember) Subversion having any Web interface of its own, but, since forever Git came with GitWeb. I remember configuring it for the first time: any extra bit of configuration, especially those that resulted in some added interactive functionality seemed exciting. For a week, I'd push something to my branch and immediately refresh the browser page to see my changes reflected in the remote repository :D

The infatuation wore off very quickly: after a month I have almost forgotten the Web interface even existed.

The cycle repeated with hosted services, the addition of PR interface, the addition of "pages", the bug reports, the built-in Wiki. After discovering the new gadget and associated hype, invariably, came the realization that the predating existing functionality was... better. The PR discussion in the Web page detached from the code is a lot worse than the PR discussion in the PR itself. The built-in issue tracker doesn't come close to the stand-alone product functionality. The built-in Wiki is ridiculously underwhelming when compared to an actual Wiki.

And so was the CI. For me, it started with Gitlab. There are oh so many reasons to hate Jenkins, so, whenever anyone announced an alternative platform, I'd absolutely check it out, and so did a lot of others, I presume. I was super hyped up about the possibility of running CI from the command line, completely locally on my laptop. And then it turned out to be a bait-and-switch kind of thing. I've created monumental dozen-steps and branching pipelines connecting multiple projects only to realize that the best CI is the one that uses as little as possible of the platform tools.

In the end of the day, I came to realization, that beside the social aspect of the platform like GitHub, everything that it offers on top of the essential Git repository storage is too low quality. And so do competitors. If I was ever again tasked with setting up a company code repository storage, I'd go with a physical server attached to the local office network, unless there's no office, in which case, probably, some EC2 VM would do the job...

Places like GitHub or Gitlab lure you in with their free tier offering, where you get the storage space and some other goodies for free, but once you need to upgrade to the paid tier, you inevitably realize that it's not worth the money they charge for it.

Today I was forced to clone one because of "the incident". Which is a good thing.

The value these centralized services provide is the centralization itself - that makes things easy to find. Remember the web before Altavista? Finding anything was detective work, guessing domains, following links through multiple pages, digging in newsgroups, asking around, and so on.

Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely platforms such as GitHub (and Launchpad, and Bitbucket, and Gitlab, etc) that added useful functionality such as bug trackers and project management on top of a version control system.

Now, if we could do something like GitHub on top of a network such as Mastodon, then we would have something that's centralized enough to be useful and distributed enough to be indestructible.