Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

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Founder of sr.ht here. I understand these fears, and I have gone to great lengths to give users tangible assurances in this regard. Trust is something that has to be earned, and it is incredibly important to me that we are worthy of yours.

For a start, the company is bootstrapped and we have no private investors. The revenue to maintain the platform comes directly from users, and all users are expected to pay if they have the means for this reason. We are accountable only to them and we do not have to find "creative" ways to monetize them (or their work) because they are already footing the bill themselves. Every cent paid by users stays in open source, either supporting the platform or the dozens of projects our engineers maintain or contribute to in the FOSS ecosystem.

We also seek to be as transparent as possible. Our financial reports, monitoring system & alarms, security reporting, operational documentation, backups, and so on, is all publicly available. We have hard data that you can use to understand our platform's sustainability, security, performance, uptime, and more.

And, unlike GitHub (and GitLab), SourceHut is 100% bona-fide free software, mostly AGPL. You can run it on your own servers, and we make it easy to import and export your data, in standard, interoperable formats that you can use to move between instances or even between software stacks, such as GNU Mailman or other solutions. SourceHut is also not an ivory tower -- we elevate our users to peers, and many parts of our system are officially maintained by independent volunteers.

I work really hard for our user's trust and I'm proud to know that I have it. If anyone has questions or concerns, I'm always prepared to listen to them and do what it takes to make sure our users are confident in the platform. FOSS is my life's passion and I am committed to doing it right.

HN believes this comment is spam and I cannot reply to it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31963630

So I'll reply here instead.

> This is somewhat off topic, but I'm wondering if you've considered offering a pre-paid lifetime plan. sr.ht looks great, and I've considered moving my project over from github, but the thing holding me back is that I don't want the obligation to maintain a subscription into perpetuity. Github's killer feature isn't that it's free, but rather, that I can get hit by a bus (or just become busy with other things in life), and my project will remain hosted indefinitely.

There are currently minimal penalties for non-payment, and in the future, they will remain conservative. We will place your account into a read-only mode after a grace period, but will not remove data without consulting you first. We are people first, free software second, and a business third. We would be honored to set profit aside in the interest of maintaining our users' legacies after they're gone.

Thanks for the reply. I guess the combination of a new account, a link, and talk about plans and payments was enough to set off HN's spam filter.

You're doing such a great job that I subscribed for a year even though I had no need for the service at the time. I just wanted to financially support what I see as a really inspiring project. Not to mention that it is an objectively good product.

I will likely buy another subscription (and actually use it) at some point in the future but until then I'll be recommending sr.ht to anyone in need of lightweight and open development platform.

Keep up the good work!

Thank you :)

This is somewhat off topic, but I'm wondering if you've considered offering a pre-paid lifetime plan. sr.ht looks great, and I've considered moving my project over from github, but the thing holding me back is that I don't want the obligation to maintain a subscription into perpetuity. Github's killer feature isn't that it's free, but rather, that I can get hit by a bus (or just become busy with other things in life), and my project will remain hosted indefinitely.

What if I wanted to try this out?

In the sense that at the moment I don’t pay for Github and my projects remain there hosted for free.

What would happen in sr.ht jf for whatever event I stopped paying for the service?

Right now, there are no consequences for non-payment. In the future, your account may be put into a read-only mode following a grace period. Your projects won't disappear overnight.

I always got the impression that sr.ht was not intended to be social software, but simply a git frontend.

To me, this makes it unsuitable as a frontend for community-focused projects that cater to involving and attracting strangers, and much more something for single-committer repos.

Ultimately, building large software ends up being a team sport, and I never got the impression that your product had the express goal of facilitating (and causing) collaboration; in fact quite the opposite: that those are explicitly out of scope for the project.

SourceHut is designed to facilitate collaboration, of course, but it's done differently from platforms like GitHub and those that seek to emulate it. And of course it is more than a git frontend, providing tools specifically to facilitate collaboration such as mailing lists and bug trackers. SourceHut is an engineering tool, not a social network. It is designed to get your work done and then get out of your way.

GitHub is explicitly designed like a social network, and this is a design that we reject. Counting stars and scrolling through feeds is a distraction from getting work done, not to mention an unhealthy relationship to have with your work. Popularity is not a metric we think that people should be optimizing for, or one that can even be effectively measured.

So our design deliberately skews away from what we think of as "dopamine dispensers" and instead focuses on getting the work done. We make it easy to onboard new collaborators by skipping the account requirement to send patches or file tickets. The UI is simple and accessible for users with any accessibility needs, and free of distractions. Colors are used deliberately to attract your eye to the action items on each page, not to dazzle you with information overload. These are the kinds of motivations which guide the design of the platform.

For the social aspect, we encourage you to branch out. Talk about your project on Hacker News. Maintain a fediverse presence. Put up a marketing page and documentation on SourceHut pages. Cultivate welcoming mailing lists. There are many ways to crack an egg.

> So our design deliberately skews away from what we think of as "dopamine dispensers" and instead focuses on getting the work done.

What about the case where getting the work done involves doubling the number of people involved in the project, and not a single line of code?

Nobody's on the fediverse, and email is not taken seriously by most modern developers. These interactions still happen on the web.

Hundreds of thousands of people are on the fediverse, and many large projects use email every day for their work - Linux, GNU, Postgres, Debian, etc. It might not be for you, but it works for many people.

I don’t think your first assertion is true. Hundreds of thousands of accounts have been created. I think the DAU is in the low thousands.

It’s the only social media I use, and it’s a ghost town. We have to live in the world that is, not the one we wish were.

I used to have a Twitter follower count on my niche little tech/privacy account that is higher than the DAU count of the entire fediverse.

I haven't been on Mastodon in a while, but when I was, it was far from a ghost town. You see what you federate with, and following or engaging with more people will fill your timeline up more. If you don't use it much, then you won't get much out of it.

No, it's nothing like Twitter in terms of DAU. However, your Twitter account compared to your Fediverse account is not a good representation of the entire state of the Fediverse. And: it's not necessary to capture 100% of the market share on attention. It's simply necessary to capture enough that your project is successful.

You can automatically send these patch e-mails with "git send-email" command. So there's no friction involved. It only works differently.

Moreover your mailing list can facilitate discussion, so nothing is lost.

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