Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Migrating Dillo from GitHub

dillo-browser.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 219 posts

Re: Migrating Dillo from GitHub

#11

Post by tolerance »

the__alchemist wrote: post #3

We are in the disapora phase; there is a steady stream of these announcements, each with a different GitHub alternative. I speculate that within a few months, the communities will have settled on a single dominant one. I'm curious if it will be one of the existing ones, or something new. Perhaps a well-known company or individual will announce one; it will have good marketing, and dominate.

It looks like all that they’re doing is griping over frontends and interfaces to do all the custodial work other than version control (ie., all baked-in git provisions).

How do you speculate the candidacy for email.

Re: Migrating Dillo from GitHub

#12

Post by the__alchemist »

diath wrote: post #7
the__alchemist wrote: post #3

We are in the disapora phase; there is a steady stream of these announcements, each with a different GitHub alternative. I speculate that within a few months, the communities will have settled on a single dominant one. I'm curious if it will be one of the existing ones, or something new. Perhaps a well-known company or individual will announce one; it will have good marketing, and dominate.

Isn't that pretty much GitLab? But then most people still prefer GitHub anyway.

Gitlab is part of the reason I'm thinking along these lines: It has been around for a while, as a known, reasonably popular alternative to GitHub. So, I expected the announcement to be "We moved to GitLab", Yet, what I observe is "We moved to CodeHouse" or "We moved to Source-Base" The self-hosting here with mirrors to two one I'm not familiar with is another direction.

Re: Migrating Dillo from GitHub

#13

Post by simonw »

superkuh wrote: post #2

>frontend barely works without JavaScript, ... In the past, it used to gracefully degrade without enforcing JavaScript, but now it doesn't. And the github frontend developers are aware of these accessibility problems (via the forums and bug reports). They just don't care anymore. They just want to make the site appear to work at first glance which is why index pages are actual text in html but nothing else is.

I'd love to hear the inside story of GitHub's migration of their core product features to React.

It clearly represents a pretty seismic cultural change within the company. GitHub was my go-to example of a sophisticated application that loaded fast and didn't require JavaScript for well over a decade.

The new React stuff is sluggish even on a crazy fast computer.

My guess is that the "old guard" who made the original technical decisions all left, and since it's been almost impossible to hire a frontend engineer since ~2020 or so that wasn't a JavaScript/React-first developer the weight of industry fashion became too much to resist.

But maybe I'm wrong and they made a technical decision to go all-in on heavy JavaScript features that was reasoned out by GitHub veterans and accompanied by rock solid technical justification.

GitHub have been very transparent about their internal technical decisions in the past. I'd love to see them write about this transition.

Re: Migrating Dillo from GitHub

#14

Post by the__alchemist »

manbash wrote: post #9
the__alchemist wrote: post #3

We are in the disapora phase; there is a steady stream of these announcements, each with a different GitHub alternative. I speculate that within a few months, the communities will have settled on a single dominant one. I'm curious if it will be one of the existing ones, or something new. Perhaps a well-known company or individual will announce one; it will have good marketing, and dominate.

> I speculate that within a few months, the communities will have settled on a single dominant one. The solutions on the roadmap are not centralized as GitHub. There is a real initiative to promote federation so we would not need to rely on one entity.

I love this, and hope it works out this way. Maybe another way to frame it: In 2 years, what will the "Learn Python for Beginners" tutorials direct the user towards? Maybe there will not be a consensus, but my pattern-matching brain finds one!

Re: Migrating Dillo from GitHub

#15

Post by shortrounddev2 »

hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #10
diath wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that pretty much GitLab? But then most people still prefer GitHub anyway.

Gitlab is worse than GitHub in every way. At least GitHub adds new features over time. Gitlab has been removing features in favor of more expensive plans even after explicitly saying they wouldn’t do so.

Gitlab works fine for me. Been using it at work for a few years and recently moved all my personal repos there

Re: Migrating Dillo from GitHub

#16

Post by blibble »

diath wrote: post #7
the__alchemist wrote: post #3

We are in the disapora phase; there is a steady stream of these announcements, each with a different GitHub alternative. I speculate that within a few months, the communities will have settled on a single dominant one. I'm curious if it will be one of the existing ones, or something new. Perhaps a well-known company or individual will announce one; it will have good marketing, and dominate.

Isn't that pretty much GitLab? But then most people still prefer GitHub anyway.

gitlab has also gone full slop

Re: Migrating Dillo from GitHub

#17

Post by shortrounddev2 »

the__alchemist wrote: post #12
diath wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that pretty much GitLab? But then most people still prefer GitHub anyway.

Gitlab is part of the reason I'm thinking along these lines: It has been around for a while, as a known, reasonably popular alternative to GitHub. So, I expected the announcement to be "We moved to GitLab", Yet, what I observe is "We moved to CodeHouse" or "We moved to Source-Base" The self-hosting here with mirrors to two one I'm not familiar with is another direction.

I think people are wary of moving to gitlab because its a similarly large platform and dont want to repeat their mistakes

Re: Migrating Dillo from GitHub

#18

Post by simonw »

simonw wrote: post #13
superkuh wrote: post #2

>frontend barely works without JavaScript, ... In the past, it used to gracefully degrade without enforcing JavaScript, but now it doesn't. And the github frontend developers are aware of these accessibility problems (via the forums and bug reports). They just don't care anymore. They just want to make the site appear to work at first glance which is why index pages are actual text in html but nothing else is.

I'd love to hear the inside story of GitHub's migration of their core product features to React. It clearly represents a pretty seismic cultural change within the company. GitHub was my go-to example of a sophisticated application that loaded fast and didn't require JavaScript for well over a decade. The new React stuff is sluggish even on a crazy fast computer. My guess is that the "old guard" who made the original…

In answer to my own question about in-depth decision making, I just found this presentation from February 2025 by seven-year GitHub veteran Joel Hawksley: https://hawksley.org/2025/02/10/lessons-from-5-years-of-ui-a...

Relevant quote:

> But beyond accessibility and availability, there is also a growing expectation of GitHub being more app-like.

> The first case of this was when we rebuilt GitHub projects. Customers were asking for features well beyond our existing feature set. More broadly, we are seeing other companies in our space innovate with more app-like experiences.

> Which has led us to adoption React. While we don’t have plans to rewrite GitHub in React, we are building most new experiences in React, especially when they are app-like.

> We made this decision a couple of years ago, and since then we’ve added about 250 React routes that serve about half of the average pages used by a given user in a week.

It then goes on to talk about how mobile is the new baseline and GitHub needed to build interfaces that felt more like mobile apps.

(Personally I think JavaScript-heavy React code is a disaster on mobile since it's so slow to load on the median (Android) device. I guess GitHub's core audience are more likely to have powerful phones?)

Re: Migrating Dillo from GitHub

#19

Post by xrd »

I've been messing around with GitLab as a self hosted alternative for a few years. I do like it, but it is resource intensive!

For the past few days I've been playing with Forgejo (from the Codeberg people). It is fantastic.

The biggest difference is memory usage. GitLab is Ruby on Rails and over a dozen services (gitlab itself, then nginx, postgrest, prometheus, etc). Forgejo is written in go and is a single binary.

I have been running GitLab for several years (for my own personal use only!) and it regularly slowly starts to use up the entirety of the RAM on a 16GB VM. I have only been playing with Forgejo for a few days, but I am using only 300MB of the 8 GB of RAM I allocated, and that machine is running both the server and a runner (it is idle but...).

I'm really excited about Forgejo and dumping GitLab. The biggest difference I can see if that Forgejo does not have GraphQL support, but the REST API seems, at first glance, to be fine.

EDIT: I don't really understand the difference between gitea and forgejo. Can anyone explain? I see lots of directories inside the forgejo volume when I run using podman that clearly indicate they are the same under the hood in many ways.

EDIT 2: Looks like forgejo is a soft fork in 2022 when there were some weird things that happened to governance of the gitea project: https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/#why-was-forgejo-create...

Re: Migrating Dillo from GitHub

#20

Post by SoKamil »

ksec wrote: post #8

>The most annoying problem is that the frontend barely works without JavaScript, Not only did they spend years rewriting the frontend from Pjax to I think React? They also manage to lost customer because of it.

GitHub frontend is mostly still their own [1] Web Components based library. They use Turbo to do client side reloading. They have small islands of React based views like Projects view or reworked Pull Request review. The thing is, even if you disable JavaScript, sites still load sloow. Try it yourself. Frontend code doesn’t seem to be the bottleneck.

[1] https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/ho...

Post reply on HN