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Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

It's deeply ironic that git, a free distributed VCS, should be so completely pwned by a proprietary centralized service. (And beyond ironic that so many FOSS projects rely on it, especially after it was acquired by Microsoft. Blows my mind every time I think about it.)

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I see nothing mind-blowing about the fact that 99% of the developers on the ground are not willing to take on the challenge of inventing and bootstrapping a completely decentralized network. And that they need to work today and not after 10 years, when such an effort maybe finally takes off.

Do you find these mind-blowing?

As for self-hosting GitHub, yes, that's much more viable and I believe more of us should be doing it (although I personally plan to still have GitHub as a central source of truth and just backup all my repos to several servers under my control). But GitHub is also very socially entrenched and provides a real value-add in terms of good PR interface, Wiki, issues, discussions and whatnot.

I love github. But I host my own grogs. Both is good. Sometimes I use fossil.

The mind-blowing thing is, first, that FOSS projects use a proprietary system (for DVCS and for "good PR interface, Wiki, issues, discussions and whatnot") at all and second that they didn't bail en mass when it was acquired by MS, the traditional bogeyman of FOSS philosophy.

People are busy. They need to get work done today. I'll migrate all my repos tomorrow -- and deprive myself of sleep if I have to -- if a solid GitHub competitor shows up.

(And I'm not counting GitLab, it's worse in almost every way. And is very slow.)

We're way past idealistic slogans. Be the change you want to see. Give example to the rest of us. Many will follow.

In the meantime, I want my free time mostly free of computers.

I feel ya friend. Part of the irony is that an unarguably superior FOSS competitor to GitHub hasn't shown up. (Can you imagine if Linux were worse than Windows? Egad!)

FWIW, I like (and pay for) sr.ht even though it doesn't have feature parity with GH.

> And I'm not counting GitLab, it's worse in almost every way. And is very slow.

Hate to be that person, but GitLab is better than GitHub at everything. UX is different in some places, and it's an entirely subjective question which one is better ( i prefer GitLab but to each their own), but in terms of features it isn't even close - GitLab absolutely blows GitHub out of the water, even with Microsoft's incredible investment and recent deluge of announcements. In terms of speed i think GitLab is slower while doing some things, but it's not ( at least for me) painful like Jira Cloud is.

I use both and I like them both but GitHub strikes me as less cluttered in the UI and easier to navigate. Might be a force of habit, I am not sure.

I manage GitLab just fine but it's way too slow for me.

You'd have a point if it was just git. Issue tracker, PR interface, wiki / documentation tools, actions/webhooks, etc. - that's where Github demonstrates its utility.

Lots a free tools have all I need. Webhooks included. Obs away.

That deepens the irony.

It's the UI. People love the UI

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