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Comment by mindfulhack | Hacker News Reader

I do think it's an important concern, even though I absolutely love Github. Most importantly though, `git` is not centralised, and no service like Github, no matter what it does, can ever stop the decentralisation, roll-your-own-ability, or forkability of open-source software.

So probably it's OK for now for the majority of the community to use MS's platform Github, because other options exist and it's not hard to move to them or create new ones at any time. Github doesn't own our brains, nor can it do any harm to the powerful GNU GPL.

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I would be more sympathetic to this position if GitHub allowed user-provided domains as CNAMES; and I mean in both directions: redirecting you off github.com to the user's domain name, allowing true federated independence from the centralized platform. Without this feature, the argument is nonsense: you may as well be making the same claim about any other hosting service, as you can almost always pick up your content and put it somewhere... the question is how to update the hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of links to your content once you decide to (or are forced to) migrate :/.

As much as I hate that the web, like many memory unsafe languages, permits dangling pointers, I feel like it would be a huge phishing/open redirect/some other web security buzzwords if this happens. Plus, can you even CNAME a specific URL (as opposed to redirecting it)?

I don't understand what "CNAME a specific URL" means. (If you are thinking "can this be done in any reasonable way without GitHub adding the feature", the answer is "no": they would have to provide the feature on their end, to provide the right content given the right hostname, the same way many other companies have over the years, including Medium, which is but one of many possible specific examples I mostly bring up as I hear they recently stopped allowing this and it has correctly made people say others should no longer use the platform due to URL lock-in.)

I'm talking about CNAME, which as I understand lets you do something like "saagarjha.github.com" → "saagarjha.com" but not "github.com/saagarjha" → "saagarjha.com". Of course, GitHub would need to support this on their end, but I don't think the second is possible using CNAMEs, which is what you would really want?

While you are right, there is more than just the code. In general one should be wary for lock-in when sculpting their development processes around the features that GH offers, i.e. the Issue tracker, Projects & Teams, Discussions and not to forget GH Actions. And besides that there is FOMO for many projects to leave GH due to its popularity. Does your contributor base move with you to another platform? Is it as easy to find new contributors, or even to find the project itself?

..which is why I am somewhat convinced that Github single-handedly increased participation in OSS by orders of magnitude.

I never figured out the processes to submit patches in the dark time of sourceforge and mailing lists. Since Github standardized this, I frequently contribute.

I agree with that and I have the same experience however it's important to also recognize the dangerous of the centralization and vendor lock-in not only the convenience.

Hence why running own infrastructure and mirror to Github makes a lot of sense for bigger open-source projects.

Yes, I agree. But I think the GH dominance can become something of a problem, similar to other big tech near-monopolies.

I hope for more decentralization of forges in the future in a more open market, and I have my eye on ForgeFed as means to achieve that.

https://forgefed.peers.community

For the record, I have the complete opposite experience. It used to be possible to just e-mail someone a description of your code fix, with a diff output inlined or attached. Nowadays, when I try that, people ignore the code you wrote and say “No, please patch is a git patch” (actual quote), or they require a pull request on GitHub. (I don’t have an account on GitHub, and I seriously doubt that I’ll ever get one.)

My experience is that they want even more, an actual pull request. And when you do submit it as a PR, they want you to go back and "rebase" over latest again. For someone thats not so familiar with the process it's intimidating.

>>> Most importantly though, `git` is not centralised

Not the most important thing... Basically all project I work on still relies on a "central peer" ...

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