Can we be a bit more specific regarding the criticism of gitlab?
GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
131–140 of 143 posts
Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are we using GitHub differently? I don’t understand how the social network part of GitHub has to do with having your code discoverable and to discover. I’ve never stumbled upon a project by browsing GitHub casually. It’s always through finding the product first and trying to find the source code. If the source code is on some other website, I’ll probably figure it out, but it’s be a new muscle. Same with making an is…
Yes, I think many people use GitHub just for code storage, and that's fine. I casually browse GitHub sometimes in the same way I do HN. I follow friends and colleagues and through the feed see what they're building and starring. I use global search to find tools and libraries that do what I want. Sometimes, I come across a repo I like that's on say GitLab, but not GitHub. I quickly forget about such projects because…
If nobody was using GitHub you'd be forced to get used to bookmarks, and that would be good.
Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Remember that your free server can be deleted without notice if Oracle needs the capacity. Always have a current backup.
Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
#134The only reason I keep my projects on it is the Windows and macOS runners.
Yeah I think people vastly underestimate the value of free CI runners - especially free Windows/Mac runners. Big projects with dozens of members can afford the effort to set up their own runners but small one-man projects aren't going to bother and they represent the vast majority of Github. Microsoft spends around $100m/year on free CI runners. Github is going to have to get a lot worse before most people give that…
I think Codeberg offers free CI as long as your project is aimed at improving the free software world and you don't abuse server resources (as evaluated by a human in each individual case). That's one of their selling points over and above git hosting.
Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
#135As 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.
Codeberg offers free CI if your project fits in their ethos.
Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
#136Running 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.
At some point the whole internet switched over from a project-centric to a platform-centric mental model for most people.
It used to be "I want to talk to these people. Oh, they're on IRC" and then it was "I'm on IRC. who can I talk to here?" and while that might not be so bad for IRC, it's catastrophic when it's proprietary platforms with lock-in.
Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
#137Github is not something that should be replaced. Rather, a different kind of model needs to exist. Before Git, there were things like Subversion, for instance. All of that slowed way down after Git showed up to the party because people liked the fact Git was "easier to use" and eventually networking effects. When Microsoft purchased Git, the death knell had all ready sounded, but nobody was listening.
git was harder to use (harder to reason about), but it did something cvs/svn didn't do, so, harder or not, it made something possible vs not possible. Did you confuse github with git? Indeed centralized git in Github is hardly any different from svn.
that thing was not decentralisation, btw - it was cheap branching. Branching in SVN is an ordeal that basically copies the whole project into a new folder with separate history and then good luck merging it later. Branching in Git is trivial and doesn't even require any communication with the server admin.
Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue isn't the technology (git, subversion, cvs, etc), it's that developers FOMO and glom on to what every other developer uses so you end up with these huge silos that they inevitably complain about.
But WHY they glom on to it and not say, Subversion is my point. We can imagine an alternative world in which Subversion mutated into something more like Git. Why doesn't it exist? Because Git came in and everyone decided it was "the answer to all things".
SVN can't branch, not easily.
Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
#139Github is not something that should be replaced. Rather, a different kind of model needs to exist. Before Git, there were things like Subversion, for instance. All of that slowed way down after Git showed up to the party because people liked the fact Git was "easier to use" and eventually networking effects. When Microsoft purchased Git, the death knell had all ready sounded, but nobody was listening.
Git is not, in any way, easy to use. SVN was the major predecessor to Git and its simple linear history model was much easier to understand and use for most people. However, Git is more powerful.
Please by all means, sketch out a version control design that's better than both Subversion and Git.
Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
#140Running 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.
Forgejo is actively developing ActivityPub-based federation support as a set of experimental features ( https://forgejo.org/2023-01-10-answering-forgejo-federation-... ), including federated starring: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/pulls/1680
If by actively you mean: after 3 years, nothing shipped but federated stars (maybe, none of the links in that PR work or contain the content promised, Codeberg still has no actual support for federation with other instances). Forum entirely dormant since August 2025.