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Comment by prabinlamsal19 | Hacker News Reader

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It is quite common for larger open-source organisations to self-host their repositories and issue trackers. After all, they would quite literally stop existing if Github were to do an oopsie. Voluntarily putting the keys of your entire existence in the hands of a third party isn't exactly an attractive option.

Pretty sure GitHub will go out of their way to avoid mishandling such important projects (i.e. they'll reach into their backups if things go awry)

"Literally stop existing"? Having broken links and notifying everyone when a migration happens is for sure a hassle, but migrating a git repo is the easiest thing in the world.

That's kinda the whole point of a distributed VCS.

Migrating the repo is easy, migrating issues and MRs and whatever other ancillary features you’re using is not.

I invite you to migrate all your GH workflows to GitLab pipelines as the "easiest thing in the world" as an exercise for the reader.

Lemme guess: you might think that everyone should just write their blogs on Substack, right?

The web thrives on diversity. More forges is good.

Furthermore, GitHub has been making moves that understandably worry some and so it’s great that there are some excellent alternatives.

Bit of a side note, but nobody should use Substack for anything.

For those out of the loop, Substack has been overlooking Nazis on their platform for a few years, and recently pushed a notification to all subscribers to check out a blog with a Nazi swastika.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/substacks-nazi-p...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e...

Don't use the most used platform for blogging reach in 2025 because .0000001% of users are people you hate?

Sounds silly. Don't use wordpress because a store I don't like uses it? I hate to tell you this but friend and foe are using Google search.. time to move on.

What does it tell about you when you dismiss concern about Nazis "as people you hate"?

> Don't use wordpress because a store I don't like uses it?

Store I do not like have not murdered half of my family.

My family was killed by Vikings.. who should I boycott?

The difference is the Substack owners have actively recommended Nazi substacks, and ignored calls to deplatform Nazi content.

They're not a common carrier like the phone company, and could kick off the nazis at any moment if they wanted to.

If they kicked off Nazis wouldn't that make them Nazis. Isn't that exactly what they would do.

No. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

WordPress isn't a platform.

Also, downvoted for being a platform shill.

Wordpress is a hosting platform.

When you get more upvotes than downvotes you might be on to something

> I mean, everyone is using it.

Throughout my entire life this has been a reliable sign to move elsewhere. Monocultures and monopolies tend to have negative long term outcomes.

> this just means that the devs at FFmpeg are having so much fun

A real problem. This should be dealt with immediately.

> Trying around github alternatives for memes.

I have a feeling that if this attitude pervaded the open source community then Gérard Lantau (a.k.a. Fabrice Bellard) would have never started work on or released publicly ffmpeg in the first place.

There's a real feeling of modern corporate entitlement encoded into your comment.

The FFmpeg culture is… very different. It’s hard to explain. But one hard requirement they had is that they did not want to give someone else control over their infrastructure. And it had to be open source. Only self hosting options were considered.

[It should be overly clear that] there's nothing special in wanting to have control in one's own processes, in wanting to avoid monopolies, and for free software projects to want to rely on free software. There are also many other reasons to want to avoid github specifically (there's at least a "github is down" thread every month on HN these days - having something that works at all is one of them).

Many important free software projects use there own self hosted solution.

I don't even understand how this is a question, and your parent comment is needlessly inflammatory and didn't deserve any answer.

Well github is very much owned by Microsoft, and with the recent changes of the CEO there are a lot of reasons to prefer a non closed source and non-gigant-tech-corp-controlled software forge.

Many big successful open source projects host their own code. They also join/create foundations and create lasting legacy. Get real sponsorship dollars.

So do some smaller projects.

Culturally hosting yourself is one of the key elements of the hacker ethos.

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