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Comment by zaarn | Hacker News Reader

This looks suspiciously like a spam campaign to fish for users desperate enough to go anywhere but bitbucket.

SourceHut / Sir_Cmpwn deserves all the support he can get. I don't know if you realize that this guy is earning 10 times less that what he could earn by accepting any of the job knocking at his door. But instead he chose to be a full time free & open source developer financed only by people donations and SourceHut (which is 100% open source too)

Moreover there is very frequently on HN "Github is introducing feature X" or "Company Y is announcing product Z" where those company are multi billlionaire making money by exploiting people data and abusing their monopoly. And all you find to do is be rude about SourceHut, developed by an independent, which is 100% open source, which contains no analytics and respects you

Obviously independent developers are supposed to slave away at big companies that pradvertise their products on HN, not make attempts to escape and work for themselves - at most they can work passionately for a VC-backed startup on some free product until that is bought by one of said big companies for reasons unknown. But working for oneself independently is immoral and something to be frowned upon.

That's... really rude. Sourcehut has been around for a while:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sourcehut&sort=byPopularity&pr...

Doesn't mean you're not fishing for users there.

Isn't literally everyone fishing for users? Relax dude. People need somewhere to go and maybe they'll find Sourcehut suitable to their needs. I don't know what your definition of spam is but this definitely doesn't qualify for my (unusually strict) definition of it.

Well, the page contains nothing but a tool to import data from a competitor in order to get users of the competitor to sign up for your service. That meets my definition of spam to a certain extend.

The competitor is leaving the market, which hardly makes them a competitor at all. Any users who don't want to be left out in the cold need tools like this.

Then why not make the tool open source + standalone and compatible with other alternatives like GitHub/GitLab/Gitea/Gogs/etc. so the users can pick the competitor or tool they like?

The tool is open source, and none of the services you listed support Mercurial, so...

But it's not standalone so everyone can use it privately, it only works for your service.

If it's open source then surely you, or someone, could modify it for other services.

Moaning when someone gave you free apples because you want apple pie; maybe make your own pastry.

I'm moaning because someone wants to sell me their entire apple tree in order to get the free apple pie while I would be happy to get a few apple to make my own. The service is deeply connected to SirCmpwns paid service and an obvious spam bait.

You can run it privately: https://man.sr.ht/installation.md

It still only works for sourcehut.

Why are you stating that the tool is not open source? Did you even check that?

Open source + standalone, it's not standalone.

None of them support Mercurial. Everything is open source. You’re behaving incredibly weirdly.

OMG dude, just let it go. You've dug your heels in so much that HN won't even let me reply to your latest comment because you've hit a depth limit. This is just a marketing page. It wasn't sent to you as an email. Nobody erected a billboard outside your house. It's on the internet, where people are free to create and ignore stuff as they please. Do you really think you're bringing something to the table at this point or are you just trolling for fun?

I just don't like spam on the frontpage.

That’s the point. That’s the point for half of the Internet.

Doesn't mean we have to let spam campaigns on the frontpage.

BitBucket is discontinuing Mercurial, forcing users thereof to jump ship. Sourcehut is just doing a bit of marketing around their continued support for those needing new hosting.

Agreed on this. Opened the page and it immediately made me think of a phishing campaign or a cheap knock off site.

I can't quite put my finger on which design detail is contributing to that impression, but the page as a whole is definitely giving that feeling.

More power to him. This is hardly a social media blast.

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