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Comment by toastercat | Hacker News Reader

I've got this feeling that the endless feature creep of Github has begun to cause rot of core essential features. Up until only recently, the PR review tab performed so poorly it was practically useless for large PRs.

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GitHub isn't focusing on creating a good Git platform anymore, they are an AI company now

Bets on where everything/everyone goes next? Will it be like the transition from SourceForge to GitHub, where the center of gravity moves from one big place to another big place? Or more like Twitter, where factions split off to several smaller places?

Personally I doubt we will see a huge centralized place like GitHub again. Trust in American companies, and big companies in general has been eroded. I think it would be for the better if it split off, and hopefully more devs decide to self host with tools like Forgejo.

> Personally I doubt we will see a huge centralized place like GitHub again.

I can almost guarentee we will. Consumers love simplicity through centralization.

> Trust in American companies, and big companies in general has been eroded.

Where are you seeing that? I've seen general dislike of large corpos forever, and the anti-US sentiment is more common abroad from places like Europe that have never 'liked' US culture and companies.

I'm all for Forgejo or even a simple forge without any namespaces (I abandoned GitHub when MS acquired them). But the major issue with these alternative platforms is the the discoverability of projects on them. Github doesn't have any noteworthy feature in this regard, but it has the first mover advantage. The users unfortunately ceded that advantage to them.

Many forges are working on a federated development infrastructure. That's great. But I believe that for these platforms to really become popular, we must solve the problem of federated project search and discovery as well. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be paying much attention in this area.

I need an easy way to host a nice UI for mercurial. That's rock solid stable, zero maintenance.

I've been pushing my repos to a random $5 server I have for years now. It's been rock solid. But I have no UI. I can push and pull and it supports exactly 1 user (me) and it's never gone down because I just never touch the server. I did go the extra mile to set up automatic backups but that's it.

An issue tracker and code explorer would be nice.

> I've got this feeling that the endless feature creep of Github has begun to cause rot of core essential features.

Tangential, but... I was so excited by their frontend, which was slowly adopting web components, until after acquisition by Microsoft they started rewriting it in React.

(Design is still very solid though!)

GitHub in essence is still pretty much the same, there's products that have feature creep but I wouldn't say GitHub does that.

I can't say that I'm having issues with the performance either. I work with large PRs too (Especially if there's vendored dependencies) but I never ran into a show stopping performance issue that would make it "useless".

> GitHub in essence is still pretty much the same, there's products that have feature creep but I wouldn't say GitHub does that.

I think we're using two different products. Off the top of my head, I can think of Github Projects (the Trello-like feature), Github Marketplace, Github Discussions, the complete revamp of the file-viewer/editor, and all the new AI/LLM-based stuff baked into yet another feature known as Codespaces.

> I can't say that I'm having issues with the performance either. I work with large PRs too

Good for you. I suffered for maybe 4 years from this, and so have many others: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/39341

> there's products that have feature creep but I wouldn't say GitHub does that.

I remember GitHub from years ago. I still find myself looking for things that were there years ago but have since moved.

Also, GitHub search is (still) comically useless. I just clone and use grep instead.

I've also loaded repositories into a web instance of vscode (with the '.' shortcut) and done Cmd-Sh-F, which also works better than their search.

Gitlab search is even worse, so not surprised.

I noticed this recently too when using Firefox.

Really?

https://github.com/features

The same since when?

The same in the sense that it doesn't get in the way during my daily work with it. Yes they've added features but that didn't mean that existing features got removed or things got in the way.

In this particular case, they definitely did.

I often miss entire files in the review process because the review page collapses them by default and makes them hard to spot. If they’re going to be collapsed by default at least make it very visible. This is critical for security too, you don’t want people sneaking in code.

Still doesn't read email, but it's close to that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20165602

You can interact with a lot of GitHub via email

Yeah i've switched to doing pr reviews in goland because their ui is dogshit slow if there are more than like 10 files to diff.

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