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Comment by tetris11 | Hacker News Reader

The network effect really is important if you don't use email for patches and want to capture an audience greater than your typical zealot coder (of which I am one).

Github makes it easy for non-coders to submit documentation, test their changes, and genuinely be part of something that they are not an expert in. Sure there are disadvantages there too in terms of the quality of the submissions, but the benefits of a busy community outweigh the drawbacks of too many PRs in my opinion

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Shouldn't we call it a "network prison" in that case? :)

well it's one where the inmates can leave, but have to come back out of solidarity to the other prisoners :-)

It's not a prison, you can leave whenever you want and take with you everything that's supported outside github. Git clone and go. The features that attracted you to begin with still attract you, though, so maybe you don't want to.

Compared to e.g. moving a team from one mail server to another, moving from github is remarkably simple.

Thank you sensei, I think that I do understand now.

This presents a false dichotomy (Github vs email patches), when there exist a whole host of self-hosted options (Gitea for one).

> This was the case even when SourceHut was the “official” source and GitHub was a mirror (I also have a GitLab mirror, which probably never received a single contribution): the vast majority of the contributions were on the GitHub mirror, while SourceHut was adding friction to my maintenance work.

The grandparent does not present a dichotomy, let alone a false one. It says that when you are not using email patches, the network effect of the platform (like Gitea which you present as if it was explicitly excluded by the grandparent) is important.

Why wouldn't this possible on, say, GitLab or Bitbucket?

don't forget CodeBerg

All of my new stuff is on GitLab. I have seen zero interest in any of my projects, even the ones that were carried over from Github (which are archived). It could just be that I am a dull coder, but I'm leaning more on the notion that discovery is hard in GitLab.

This, and worse: I’ve stopped using libraries that migrated to GitLab in my own personal projects, because I just can’t be bothered to check for updates there, or deal with the UX, or log in to report bugs because I don’t really want to create another account.

I remember when SourceForge was a thing, and GitHub was just tremendously superior feature-wise and community-wise, with new issues and PRs for stuff coming in daily. GitLab, Codeberg, etc. may have 90% feature parity, but they’re not anywhere near the ease of interaction.

(I’ve also set up a Gitea instance on my NAS to mirror my own stuff, some GitHub projects that might be controversial—like emulators-and stuff from GitLab and Codeberg. And guess what, I seldom use that as well to keep track of external projects.)

Sounds like you don't have w GitLab account and don't visit it frequently enough to get used to it?

I mean we can't really complain when alternatives exist, have 90%+ be feature parity but they are slightly different in terms of UX. Isn't that basically summarising FOSS? You trade a bit of UI/UX for the freedom and openness.

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