GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#141

Post by jeremyjh » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 1:32 AM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #136

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.

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.

Cool story bro. I don't think that describes anyone in the market for an open source software produce to use. Instead, what it means is that before opening an issue or submitting a patch to a project, if I must create a new account on an alternate forge there is a good chance I simply won't. I'll still use the software, I just won't make casual contributions to upstream. If I get invested in it and can see myself making a series of contributions then sure I'll click through and register and put up with all the things I may have to learn (at least Forgejo is a pixel-perfect clone of Github and I don't have to learn anything).

The main issue though, is that I won't star a repo on an alternate forge. That is the main reason many projects will only consider Github - if they have no revenue they must have traction, and GitHub stars are a good substitute for meaningful measures of that.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#142

Post by throwuxiytayq » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 12:57 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #133

throwuxiytayq wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or silently downgraded, as it appears that Oracle now only offers 2 Arm OCPUs and 12 GB RAM.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#143

Post by jeremyjh » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

oooyay wrote: post #121

jeremyjh wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't mind that Tangled is VC funded as long the tech is open (it is) and as far as I can discern it is federated and decentralized. You and I probably have different ideas of what the future may be and that's okay.

In practice it is centralized: you can host your own PDS and knot but if tangled.org decides you don’t align with their values then they stop indexing you and no one will see your work in the only place tangled users look.

ATproto has some real benefits - data sovereignty is possible - but for this particular use case it only makes it possible for you to migrate your connections and history to the next place that everyone is going to.