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Comment by tetris11 | Hacker News Reader

Prot's thoughts echo some of the fears I had during the "slow leap" of 2018. I never made the jump to sourcehut, but I did leap to Gitlab, and have a general feeling that whatever small following I was building got snapped in half and never recovered.

I just suddenly stopped engaging with the users in my projects. Also a good thing in some cases, but it made my work take on a new private and hidden aspect, which is the opposite of what I wanted (open collab, easy dialogue, connecting with like-minded peers).

Gitlab just doesn't have the audience that Github does, and so my new strategy since a few months has been to develop on Gitlab, but to clone everything onto Github, just to get some audience.

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GitLab’s UI really feels like it steers you towards work inside of a company more than open collaboration like GitHub does. Very segmented UI without discoverability.

I prefer GitLab but I understand why GitHub is the default. Just different products and use cases.

GitLab has some long open tickets about federating instances but the technical implementation of such a thing is really only a small piece of the puzzle.

EDIT— here's a newer epic trying to gather some of that together into a cohesive effort: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/11247

> GitLab’s UI really feels like it steers you towards work inside of a company more than open collaboration like GitHub does.

That's kind of what it was designed for, though. GitLab.com wasn't a popular choice for open projects compared to GitHub until the "big migration" several years ago. Before that, GitLab was very popular for self-hosted internal instances (their customer reel demonstrated that). Even before modifying their OSS org policy for self-hosting, many groups ran their own GitLab CE instance. You couldn't (and still can't) do this with GitHub*. It also had a longstanding unlimited private repos compared to GitHub's free tier (formerly) that enticed developers.

GitLab's UI/UX was made for business workflows and processes (hence it being an "all-in-one DevOps platform." GitHub leans more into the community graph and semi-social media style for orgs/communities (the Discussions section a case example). It has come a long way for the business side, though.

* Yes, GitHub Enterprise Server exists: good luck getting it without paying for it (unless things have changed).

> Very segmented UI without discoverability.

Sometimes it has far too much discoverability.* It seems some searches are global. For instance, when I go to `My Merge Requests` and try and change the author, it shows me every single account on GitLab.

* One could argue this wraps around and becomes undiscoverable. Which I would agree with.

I sheepishly collect analytics, and sourcehut provides similar relative traffic to my website as github does (I host more projects on github). Unfortunately nothing is immensely popular so I cannot say with certainty this will hold true, but I've observed high engagement with popular sourcehut projects.

Did you find out why engagement stopped? Is a preference to the GitHub UI? Or, they simply don't want another site to deal with?

If anything, the only value of GitHub to me personally is this vague rationale that 'people like that more' ... but I host everything on GitLab. But, what I host are really not active projects. That's the big difference possibly.

I can’t speak for most, but for me it’s simply that GitHub operates more like a social media network for developers than a web-based git. As such I evaluate it by number of users because it equates directly to the number of social interactions I’m likely to have.

Morally I would love to stop using Microsoft products, much in the same way I’d like to stop using Meta products, but the problem is that I’m not there for the product, I’m there for the people. I can find products that better align with my values but I can’t bring along all the connections and possibility of connections

how do people use GitHub as a social media network exactly? I know the features are there but I've never talked to anyone who uses it.

a simpler explanation is that GitHub has a simpler/better interface than alternatives, and most people already have an account.

For me, it's two things:

* Whenever I come across an interesting project hosted on Github (On Hacker News, Mastodon or some such place), I usually star it. Then when I'm later looking for a library or piece of software I usually search my Github stars first for a nice pre-filtered list of options.

I know I could also use a bookmark manager to keep track of interesting non-Github projects, but that's way too high-friction and so in practice I usually forget about them.

* There's also the social feed on the homepage where you can see which repositories your friends have starred/contributed to. I don't personally use this super often but frequently I star some repository and then notice a bunch of my friends starred it shortly after, presumably because they saw it in their feed.

For me at least, I presume that the social network comes from the people you talk to, with whatever medium you use, when one is involved in a project, wherever the code is hosted. I never saw GitHub to be special. I got work from meetups, from participating on mailing lists, etc. but not GitHub. There is no tight link to it, but I can presume for myself that can be that case for a particular project. But - to each their own on this matter.

> I can’t speak for most, but for me it’s simply that GitHub operates more like a social media network for developers than a web-based git. As such I evaluate it by number of users because it equates directly to the number of social interactions I’m likely to have.

My final employer blocked GitHub as “social media” and rejected all arguments regarding its many other attributes. New CIO came in, heard of this, agreed it was silly and promised to have the block removed. Apparently somebody dissuaded him, because it never happened. Strange stuff.

> Or they simply don't want another site to deal with?

This, mostly. Some of the contributors make mostly small (but important) documentation changes, and for them "Git" is "Github" since the UI makes all of it seemless.

Asking them to create an account on another service to do the same will leave these new contributors scratching heads

> Asking them to create an account on another service to do the same will leave these new contributors scratching heads

Honestly, this can sometimes be a good thing.

Creating a bit of friction for contributors can separate the signal from the noise, leading to more meaningful contributions. We're all familiar with the fiasco and annoyance of #hacktoberfest on GH, and the incessant spam in popular projects and issue trackers.

That said, the friction of Sourcehut might be too much even for people with good intentions, since it insists on a very opinionated workflow that's alien to most. The choice of hosting ultimately depends on each project's needs, as mentioned elsewhere.

Hacktoberfests will not be stopped by trivial friction, but small important doc changes will, so it's pure waste

Two years ago gitlab.com stopped allowing anonymous users to search issue trackers[1], which is nuts if you want to host anything there for which your users might want to search through existing issues. I don't think I've interacted with gitlab.com again after that. It seems that stupid decision has been overturned now? Anyway they've lost me for the foreseeable future.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252501

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