Hacker News Reader

Comment by hardwaresofton | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I've had my head under a rock, but Github's README[0] is the bigger news to me -- Are we going to finally see the end of technical posting on Medium in ~5 years? I never even knew README existed until seeing this post.

[0]: https://github.com/readme

View on HN

It doesn't look like an alternative to Medium to me – its a collection of posts by nominated open source developers, as opposed to a technical blogging platform

Yeah you're right -- this is very much a curated selection, but the amount of social-ish features that github has taken on lately like the customizable profile pages[0][1] suggests that they might want to occupy this space...

Adding an offering of developer blogging seems like a slam dunk if they want to continue being a fixture of developers world wide. Arguably it's not so great for other alternatives (GitLab, BitBucket, etc) and more lock-in is probably not great, even if the garden aren't locked around us right now.

[0]: https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-yo...

[1]: https://oddblogger.com/personalizing-github-profile

I fully expect Github to go down the dangerous path of becoming a walled garden. Big companies like Microsoft just can't help themselves. Give it 10 years absolutely max. I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts, but don't expect it to last forever. Google Code, Sourceforge, etc. Been there done that. These things rise and fall constantly.

Yeah I agree, but can you blame them? They've almost single-handedly borne the cost of supporting open source in the most tangible way you can (hosting the code, supporting "remixing" and innovation) for so long. As you say, these things never last, but this is what happens when you don't have a Stallman-esque BDFL/figure involved in some product. People (myself included) might under-estimate how insane the free software movement was/is -- it just isn't normal to find something that is free and stays free.

Whether I/we can blame them or not, it does feel good that there are some other business models in the space, I personally am a huge fan of GitLab[0] (I pay for an upgrade membership though it's nothing crazy), and on the more home-brewed front there's HN darling sourcehut[1]. Honestly if I was a GitLab project manager that browses HN... I might try and shark this idea -- you already "pay" for Gitlab Pages, why not streamline it, offer a netlify-like experience on top of it and try to get there ahead of Github?

[EDIT] - the "them" in "can you blame them" is intended to be the early Github team and/or their Microsoft equivalents. People like to put out good PR releases, but selling means something. The people who sold are aware of the the risks of selling and the loss of control/vision. Along with that realization/knowledge I think it's expected for them to have felt some fatigue/been expectant of some recompense for supporting open source as much as they have over the years.

[0]: https://about.gitlab.com/

[1]: https://sourcehut.org/

The article you're looking at is Github ReadME. It's a one-off magazine / project, not a publishing platform.

I just started posting to HashNode this week as an alternative to Medium. So far so good. Can write posts in markdown and even sync them to a git repo.

Interesting -- what made you pick HashNode over dev.to / Medium / self-hosted ?

Probably a lame answer, but just general buzz about it on Twitter.

I was moving from Medium (not a fan of their paywall practices and medium.com posts tend to fare poorly on HN). Didn't know dev.to existed until after I tried out HashNode. Didn't consider self-hosted as I just couldn't be bothered.

IMO dev.to is what will replace Medium for tech posts. It has a better audience and platform for it than Medium.

So they're definitely in the space (I just read a fantastic rust post on there[0] today, thanks to This week in rust[1]) but you can't beat the staying power/massive bags of money/developer goodwill that is already heaped on Github. Github entering this space would be a death sentence for a site like dev.to, unless they massively fuck it up (or dev.to adapts and provides some extra value-add/integration).

[0]: https://dev.to/pnehrer/a-story-of-rusty-containers-queues-an...

[1]: https://this-week-in-rust.org/blog/2020/08/26/this-week-in-r...

imho it looks like dev.to is a cross between twitter and a full blog (seeing it for first time today). Github readme looks more like a magazine where the content is curated.

The difference between user generated content and curated content is a big enough differentiator that I don't think it'd be a death sentence.

Same! It'll be interesting to follow this and see what happens. But in the long run I think we need something distributed but also connected (like diaspora or mastodon maybe, concept wise). And as always, it'd be probably hard to establish.

A blog on your own server with an RSS feed is more than enough

With the (text) sources in Git so they can be easily archived, distributed and indexed for the future.

I've fired up and taken down multiple attempts at blogging, I don't know if anything I've written was worth keeping but still, the information is lost.

True -- but I wonder if Github would be willing to do the "on your own server" bit -- they already let you host Github Pages for free, and you can bring your own RSS support.

Certainly you can have RSS-enabled blogs of Github or Gitlab. I think Netlify (also free for a single-user instance) makes it a bit easier, but isn't strictly necessary.

So I can say I've personally never read the RSS spec, but all you need is a functioning feed.xml/index.xml right? I use Hugo[0] for my statically hosted site[1] and I honestly have never even thought about it (which address is the RSS feed) much until now.

I think this battle could be won in the tooling -- if all/most of the static website tools that you'd use support RSS, you can expect that it will show up (Hugo, Gatsby, VuePress, etc).

[0]: https://gohugo.io/

[1]: https://vadosware.io/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com