Comment by eternityforest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eternityforest | Hacker News Reader

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I'm sure we can, the question is, can we make an alternative to GitHub? I wouldn't be surprised if there are already several better ones, but I've never looked, because I already know Git, and my chances of convincing anyone to use a better one seem low, and they rarely seem to have as big of an ecosystem.

If it doesn't have multiple clouds providers with pull requests, and at least one of those clouds providers isn't a megacorp, it probably won't be the safe boring choice, unless it's fully P2P.

It needs to be packaged in distros, have GUI integrations, etc.

Fossil looks really cool, I really like how they integrate the wikis and issues. But I don't know anyone who uses it, and the cloud providers seem to be smaller "Could go away any time" companies.

I've never really explored any other VCSes, because none ever seem like they're going to be serious competitors.

I'd be more interested in enhancing Git, but it seems a lot of the most interesting git plugins and extensions aren't updated, like GitTorrent.

Re: GitHub alternatives, I've been looking at this for a while as I'm keen to not have everything centralised and Microsoft are hardly the most trustworthy...

There are some GithHub-alikes, the most obvious is GitLab which you can also host yourself but all (or at least some of) the extras you get for free with GitHub are behind payment walls.

My current favourite is Codeberg, it uses Forgejo underneath (which is a fork of Gitea itself a fork of Gogs - all of which you can self host). Codeberg is run by a non-profit and are very much aligned with my ideals. They are also slowly adding nice features like their Woodpecker CI.

One that is growing in popularity and is a little less "GitHub-y" is SourceHut (which also has Mercurial support).

The main issue is that GitHub has really cornered the market. They give so much out for free that is difficult for others to compete with and it has become the de-facto place to host your project. This can mean that hosting anywhere other than GitHub will limit discoverability and contributions from people if they don't want to make an account or work out how to deal with whatever forge you are using.

However one thing that is coming that may help alleviate some of that is forge federation which will allow you to interact with various forges from your "home" forge - which hopefully prevents the need to make an account to make PRs or raise issues.

Edit: I see your other comment now, what could a better GitHub be that supports a better-than-git VCS. Well there did used to be places to host Darcs projects like the Darcs Hub but I don't know if some of the newers ones like Pijul or Jujutsu have any forge support yet.

Edit2: Oh it seems Pijul has "The Nest" for hosting.

Because Jujutsu is Git-compatible, there are lots of supported forges (GitHub, GitLab, etc.).

There's no native forge yet.

Yeah I know it will work with the git backend, still not sure what the native backend can/will bring, documentation on it seems to be pretty sparse.

Good point, we might want to document that. Btw, I've called it "native backend" and "native forge" myself, but maybe those are not the best terms because there are many possible native backends/forges.

For example, our "Piper" backend at Google is a native backend in the sense that it stores all data in its own database. I think the most exciting thing about that backend is that it's cloud-based so users will be able to access each others' commits (e.g. `jj show <commit id from chat>`) without requiring a push.

> the question is, can we make an alternative to GitHub? I wouldn't be surprised if there are already several better ones, but I've never looked, because I already know Git

¿Que?

If you're wondering whether we can make something better than GitHub, there's dozens of git hosting alternatives that you might like better such as Forgejo and GitLab.

If you're saying "but I already know git", then there's still dozens of alternative hosting sites or methods!

GitHub is the one everyone else uses though, which means you can have everything in one place, so they have the advantage.

There are others that are almost as good, I suppose what I should have said is "Can we make something better than GitHub for the hypothetical better non-git VCS", since without that it's hard to imagine using anything but Git.

Pretty sure alternative git services are still larger than alternative source control systems, yet OP is asking about alternatives to git which will be even smaller. The whole point is that the person wants to use something else. If your argument is that Microsoft GitHub is the largest and therefore the best, it's circular reasoning and will forever remain that way.

We should all stay on Facebook also if they're the best because everyone's on Facebook and the network effect has benefits; somehow it seems people have more sense than that and we can actually switch to smaller services which are more aligned with what we want

Close to everyone I know is still on Facebook, and I get the impression none of them have any interest in switching, so... I use it too, even though the algorithmic curation stuff is really bad.

I could imagine people switching if someone made another site with some kind of killer app and promoted it with a million dollars of ads, but... At the moment, the only feature the alternatives focus on is usually privacy, which is clearly not enough to make average people switch.

Network effects aren't the only factor that matters, just a really big one for most.

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