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Well it's a tradeoff right? Zero hassle, zero control. Lots of hassle, lots of control.

Part of the complexity is that the effects aren't all immediate, and humans aren't good at thinking long term. People put code on GH for years and then Microsoft took it and undermined those same developers. So it might seem like zero hassle right now, but it's probably big destruction later on.

Personally I'm growing an allergy to these kinds of "no catch, we promise" services. What they usually mean is "we sell your data to other marketers, governments, and potential bad actors", "we try to hypnotize you with ads", "we aren't actually giving you this thing and we'll delist it whenever we want", or worse.

I know this doesn't respond to your issue, my weak effort there is that are a fair number of hosts for things like nextcloud and gitlab. My brother runs a substantial suite of services all through Docker and admins it almost not at all. This stuff is possible, but I agree it's harder than signing into GH with SSO and pushing code. All I'm saying is that there are other costs, you just don't pay until way later.

That's very true. I just wish there was a middle ground. I'd pay for a service that just runs a managed version of Gitea. Something similar to installing WordPress or a PHP bulletin board system to an old-fashioned web host. Hell, I could probably do just that if there was a super low end version of these types of services that will run with just PHP and Apache.

EDIT: Oh my god. I think I understand Sqlite and Fossil a little better now.

https://codeberg.org/ is managed gitea.

Looks like it's open source only.

I know how to set up and manage Gitea pretty well.

... maybe I should start a Gitea-as-a-service company.

Was going to mention Fossil. It's not exactly comparable to Gitea, but as far as hosting code it might fit a lot of people's needs.

While I like (and recently started using) Sourcehut [1], I also hear and read good things about codeberg [2] these days. Haven't used it yet though.

[1] https://sourcehut.org/

[2] https://codeberg.org/

Codeberg is just Gitea hosted in Germany: their Impressum lists the legal address as "Codeberg e.V. Gormannstraße 14 10119 Berlin".

Which may be good because EU privacy protection laws are stronger than US's. German laws specifically can be restrictive in other aspects though; e.g. there's no concept of protected free speech.

> I remember when Gitlab decidedly said they'll do business with anyone back when people were shaming tech companies for helping and cooperating with ICE a few years ago. That left a bad taste in my mouth.

I could see how this would leave a bad taste in your mouth, but I'm not sure it follows that Github is the lesser evil.

I can't think of specific examples (aside from the EEE philosophy brought up in the post and copilot if you consider that to be a Bad Thing), but Microsoft seems to have done plenty of Bad Stuff in the past. Maybe a comparable amount, if not more, Bad Stuff than GitLab?

That's true. But I use VSCode every day. FWIW, I tried the de-Microsofted version and it worked well for almost a year. But then the plugin store split happened and it just made life more difficult than sucking it up and going back to vanilla VSCode. So I'd be a huge hypocrite if I said Github is a step too far.

This is right.

Self-hosting should become absurdly easy to become widely popular, and to become any popular around non-technical users.

Very easy Linux host setup (like that of AWS, Linode, DO, etc) + containers (podman or docker) or stuff like flatpack or appimage should solve most of that problem. What's missing form the picture is an easy (I mean laughably easy) way to connect services. Something like a patch panel should be created to control UFW / traefik / whatever, when apps don't snap together automatically.

> There's Sourcehut. But I have friends with beef with the guy who made it and I don't want to support him.

What's their beef if you don't mind me asking? Drew seems like a nice enough guy. He is very opinionated obviously, but he's created many amazing FOSS projects.

I don’t know the OP’s friends’ beef with Drew, and I don’t have a direct beef with Drew, but I cancelled my paid Sourcehut account after getting a clear message that Drew wasn’t interested in supporting anyone who wants to use the software he writes on non-FOSS systems.

It’s a stricter stance than the FSF, and I won’t support the FSF financially (as I fundamentally do not agree with their mission, their licence, or their leadership). So…Sourcehut gets a year of paid support from me, but that’s it. It fundamentally doesn’t interest me, because I’m not interested in using Linux or FreeBSD as a daily driver.

He might have opinions about his software, but he also made it clear that Source Hut is free from his views, and he sees sr.ht as a serious business.

So, I don't see Drew's views as a reason to not to support Source Hut, because in my perspective while he might not be agreeing with one's view, he's actively protecting these views to allow them to be expressed, and this is great in my view. The relevant comment about this, made by himself is here [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31966313

> So let's say I don't want to self host, but I don't want to use Github. What are my options?

It depends on your requirements, but I found Gitea to be really easy to set up.

The rootless docker image + SQLite storage is pretty damn easy. SQLite's certainly fine for a team of tens, and probably even into the low hundreds.

>But I really don't have enough time in the day to do it.

Things that take time cost money, because time is valuable. You can pay in money to self-host, or you can pay in time, or you can pay in privacy and marketing, but you can't just get it for free.

Github is certainly NOT the lesser evil.

But your post gave me an idea I won't discuss in public, thanks.

you have to band with others to make it .. all the tools are there

I'm sure the tools are out there. But I'm at a point where I have more money than time for this. I empathize with the self-hosting ethos. I want a more decentralized internet. But I don't enjoy the setup and maintenance. I have previous little free time. I even spend much of it writing software, because I enjoy that. I don't enjoy being a sysadmim or my own personal devops.

I think I realized that in college when a friend tried to get me to run Gentoo as my first linux distro. I never made it to a desktop! I still run linux as my daily driver today, but I'm currently using Pop!_OS after having used Ubuntu since college. Because when I'm using my daily driver computer, I want to use it, not maintain it.

> But I'm at a point where I have more money than time for this.

Sorry I'm not trying to stalk you across multiple threads, but this made me wonder if there's a market for contract SREs. Like you own a car but you take it for oil changes and tune-ups, you own a server but some admins SSH into it here and there when it needs fixing (puts an emphasis on encryption, maybe). I think it hasn't happened because there's not a huge difference between this and purchasing hosted services, but, maybe it's an interesting slightly different option.

a competitive engineering group I worked for ten+ years ago definitely had this exactly. Except "ssh from outside" was also carefully monitored, and the primary admin visited a few times a month in person. That computer admin was not the boss, it is a secure environment with a lot of top-down control. Engineers were occasionally terminated, while the executives rarely were. Its a real thing in the city.