Give Up GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Give Up GitHub

sfconservancy.org

34 pointssmartmic16 comments

I was thinking about this today but maybe not for the reasons the author specified. I feel like I bought into the gamified era of social as I lived it through my 20s and 30s. Part of that meant I became a star chaser. I have a couple projects that exceed 10k and 20k stars. What did I gain for that? Nothing really. I mean some of it helped pay my bills but in reality, I was sucked into some sort of "hype it up" vortex. Even now its a habit hard to break when creating new projects. I'd delete my account but it's still a valuable resource for storing software. I could shift it all elsewhere or maybe just let it all go, not sure yet. But definitely something to think about. Code doesn't need to live on Github. Its a useful way to share, but it's not the be all and end all of code.

Gerrit could use some love, but I'm increasingly in love with it.

I know github is more social platform than code-hosting, but if you'd be looking at Gitlab as an alternative, well, it's equally bad but in different ways.

I’m honestly going to kickback hard on this. I ran a fairly big project which started on Gerrit and over time it just became more and more of a burden to manage and was clearly losing ground every year to Github. We eventually made the switch to GitHub and I remember how it felt like a huge weight had been lifted from the project and everything just got so-SO much easier.

The only “difficulty” we encountered is some of our older developers refused to learn the pull-request/merge model and kept asking if we can do “rebase always” on GitHub to make it “more like Gerrit”… I’m very happy I didn’t cave to that… i do not miss Gerrit Rebase errors..

Worth a click for the image of the octocat strangling user rights while grabbing a sack of cash.

I wish the OP had added to the Title (2022) ....

Interesting enough, the article/opinion is factually correct, up to today.

Yet people still went with Github. Including those who loudly promote FOSS.

Humans...

> giving up GitHub will be even harder than giving up Facebook

For a solo developer it was as simple as installing gitea and running it.

To be fair, I still think hg is king in this area, and it's why it lose the source control battle - because it was so easy to self host, it doesn't need a central service. Git was really complicated to self host.

Now you've confused me. How is Mercurial easier to self-host than git? I've been doing both trivially over SSH to a server I have, but I was under the impression that they both had a good enough HTTP server built in as well?

So I have 2 asks for folks here regarding github, or well, git-related:

* You know how there is ActivityPub as the protocol for decentralized social networks (e.g. Mastodon, etc.)? Is there something like that for git? More specifically, is there a decentralized hosting option for git, but which is decentralized? I'd like to host my own but also have the benefits of sharing, collaboration, but you know not centralized.

* Ok, beyond storing code on github, I'll be honest, i use it almost like a "bookmark manager" for cool, fun code repos. I literally use the stars feature of github to "bookmark" cool apps, tools, code repos and such...What are other people using to save such cool code repos? Is it simply your browser's native bookmarks (and maybe i should just use that, abd be done with it)? Please share :-)

GitLab is better in some ways, worse in others. One thing GitLab is much better at is supporting a rebase strategies, making for a much nicer history. GitHub still doesn't know how to show the difference between the original version and a force-pushed one when reviewing, but that just works on GitLab.

Another good thing about GitLab is that all the CI code is right there, not in a bunch of separate repos. You can reproduce it locally pretty easily.

The main thing GitLab is worse at is refreshing the UI when the underlying state changes, without having to refresh. They're getting better at it, but to be fair GitHub also has plenty of issues with this.

> GitHub still doesn't know how to show the difference between the original version and a force-pushed one when reviewing

They kinda do now, there's a "Compare" link next to the "<user> force-pushed branch <branch> from X to Y" event.

The UX is a bit hidden and the diffs don't always look right to me, but it's there.

Already did and got the T-shirt.

I went to anon ftp on sdf. I also send these items to gitlab in case people cannot deal with ftp.

How long before I give up on gitlab ? Hopefully never. A few months ago I heard gitlab is up for sale, if true I may leave gitlab if it starts doing things like Copilot and/or forcing me to use 2FA on my Cell Phone.

google will almost certainly be acquiring gitlab

I do not like GitHub, but they do not force to use 2FA on a cell phone at least.

> Regardless of your views on ICE and its behavior, GitHub's ongoing dismissive and disingenuous responses to the activists who raised this important issue show that GitHub puts its profits above concerns from the community.

I dont know. Putting activists on a pedestal is a slippery slope to business being driven by the loudest mob. Mobs are fickle and there are multiple sides to any group of people in “the community”

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