If it wasn't for GitHub self-hosting and open-source development would be much more difficult. Like the article says open-source development was obviously still happening but it was a smaller space. I appreciate how many apps I've interacted with because of GitHub like OpenGOAL, IINA, and Ghostty along with the services running on my servers at home like Immich, Glance, Filebrowser, and audiobookshelf. I even used GitHub myself for some private repos, but I've since migrated them to a self-hosted Forgejo container.
Before GitHub
191–200 of 255 posts
Re: Before GitHub
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny timing — I've been working on a hosted Fossil service to scratch this exact itch. The integrated wiki+forum+tickets+code is killer for small teams, but most people who'd pick Fossil don't actually want to babysit a server. So we host it. Two things I keep coming back to: (1) The "opinionated / small-teams only" critique others have raised in this thread is real, and I think Fossil should own it instead of fight…
Fossil is very easy to self host. If you already have a web server it needs maybe 10 or 15 lines of server config. If you want to avoid start up you need something to autostart/restart the server process. If you point it at a directory you can add a new repo simply by adding a Fossil file to the directory. You can even run it on shared hosting as a CGI (never done it myself). The only thing that took some setup was s…
And backups. Sqlite makes it easier but no backup process is easy. You always have to backup and restore at least once to have the confidence to rely on it.
It's another (big) point towards paying someone else to host it.
Re: Before GitHub
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny timing — I've been working on a hosted Fossil service to scratch this exact itch. The integrated wiki+forum+tickets+code is killer for small teams, but most people who'd pick Fossil don't actually want to babysit a server. So we host it. Two things I keep coming back to: (1) The "opinionated / small-teams only" critique others have raised in this thread is real, and I think Fossil should own it instead of fight…
Or, hear me out, we learn to host our own shit again and stop giving all our data to $megacorp after the inevitable buyout.
there's a host your own version thats available now https://fossilrepo.dev live server (demo) in fossilrepo.io which is a modern wrapper UI. There's also the standard https://fossil-scm.org/ which you can also host yourself on a $5/mo server on Hertzner or the like.
Re: Before GitHub
#194> For a while, leaving GitHub felt like a symbolic move mostly made by smaller projects or by people with strong views about software freedom. I definitely cringed when Zig moved to Codeberg! But I now see people with real weight and signal talking about leaving GitHub. The most obvious one is Mitchell Hashimoto, who announced that Ghostty will move. I didn't understand this. I perceive the Zig project and Mitchell H…
I agree with you. But I do see one crucial difference between the Zig and Ghostty announcements, namely that Ghostty did it purely for service degradation reasons while Zig did also mention ideological reasons such as GitHub’s relationship with ICE and their push for AI. Those were, naturally, much discussed points on HN. I can’t help but wonder if that contributed to the “cringing”.
Re: Before GitHub
#195If it wasn’t for SourceForge I’m not sure my life would’ve ended up where it is! They use to promote projects they liked and ended up putting Waterfox on their front page a few times. Really sad when they started blasting people with ads and swapping out installers with adware for popular projects. By that time I moved to Microsoft’s CodePlex, if anyone else remembers that? Felt like I was the only one using it at th…
former CodePlex Product Manager here! I wondered if anyone would mention CodePlex in this discussion :)
Re: Before GitHub
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It can still change, I hate the notion that because Git is so culturally embedded we couldn’t ever switch. Fossil makes it super easy to switch and the workflow is actually easier coming from Git. I was exposed to Mercurial before Git and I stubbornly tried to advocate for it over Git for a while. BitBucket, at the time, gave Github a good run for their money and had great Mercurial support and was what I preferred…
You might like pijul if you like darcs
If it got proper tooling this would be true—but the community will need to build it. Darcs has more out of the box & more existing ecosystems to work with. Pijul is barebones by design, ready to be scripted, there’s just not much out there.
Re: Before GitHub
#197I am still so salty that Git won out for the average project over Fossil. Sure Git has some performance advantages for massive codebases like the Linux Kernel, but the vast majority of projects will never run into performance limits from their VCS. Fossil’s internal tools (wiki, forum, tickets , etc) are just so useful to have versioned with your code in one file. I use Fossil for all my freelance work and it so easi…
Funny timing — I've been working on a hosted Fossil service to scratch this exact itch. The integrated wiki+forum+tickets+code is killer for small teams, but most people who'd pick Fossil don't actually want to babysit a server. So we host it. Two things I keep coming back to: (1) The "opinionated / small-teams only" critique others have raised in this thread is real, and I think Fossil should own it instead of fight…
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Re: Before GitHub
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny timing — I've been working on a hosted Fossil service to scratch this exact itch. The integrated wiki+forum+tickets+code is killer for small teams, but most people who'd pick Fossil don't actually want to babysit a server. So we host it. Two things I keep coming back to: (1) The "opinionated / small-teams only" critique others have raised in this thread is real, and I think Fossil should own it instead of fight…
You should continue with a name which is related to fossils, fossillab.io, boneyard.dev and so on…
"countryclub.com" - ie, a bunch of fossils :)
Re: Before GitHub
#199Similar (904 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579
Re: Before GitHub
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny timing — I've been working on a hosted Fossil service to scratch this exact itch. The integrated wiki+forum+tickets+code is killer for small teams, but most people who'd pick Fossil don't actually want to babysit a server. So we host it. Two things I keep coming back to: (1) The "opinionated / small-teams only" critique others have raised in this thread is real, and I think Fossil should own it instead of fight…
Or, hear me out, we learn to host our own shit again and stop giving all our data to $megacorp after the inevitable buyout.
I trust more a megacorp to survive more than 5 years than a personal host, I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a personal server where something I used was hosted and its dead.