Comment by ragelink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ragelink | Hacker News Reader

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Funny timing — I've been working on a hosted Fossil service to scratch this exact itch. The integrated wiki+forum+tickets+code is killer for small teams, but most people who'd pick Fossil don't actually want to babysit a server. So we host it.

Two things I keep coming back to: (1) The "opinionated / small-teams only" critique others have raised in this thread is real, and I think Fossil should own it instead of fighting it. The 5,000-engineer monorepo market is a solved problem (Git won). Fossil should own the 1-50 person bracket — where having issues, wiki, forum, and code in one self-contained, syncable SQLite file is a huge unfair advantage.

(2) AI agents are a brand-new reason to look at Fossil that didn't exist when Git won. Every repo is a queryable SQLite file. An agent reads tickets + wiki + code + history with one SELECT — not 47 GraphQL calls and a rate limit. RAG and MCP setups against the repo become trivial.

We're stuck on the name (fossilforge vs fossilhub). If you have an opinion: https://fossilhub.io | https://fossilforge.io — vote, get early access.

The self-hosted side is already shipping at fossilrepo.io if you'd rather run your own.

--- Disclosure: founder, so grain of salt accordingly.

Maybe something fossil-adjacent:

- amber.dev

- quarry.sh

You’ll probably need to play with gTLDs to find something that works.

Can also echo “scm” from fossil’s domain:

- amberscm.dev

Along with useX.com, Xhq.com, etc., patterns.

Of the two you have listed, I’d choose fossilforge, but would vote for an alternative TLD since .io has an expected meaning coming from GitHub.

You should continue with a name which is related to fossils, fossillab.io, boneyard.dev and so on…

fossilised.dev .. maybe british spelling.

palaeontology.dev ... too awkward.

museum.dev has a sort of "this is dead" ring to it.

Ironically what fossils are stored in within a museum is referred to as a "repository"..

Well, there's only 2 hard problems in computer science right?

The best know hosted Fossil service is https://chiselapp.com/

> Well, there's only 2 hard problems in computer science right?

Yes there are only 2 hard problems in computer science - caching, naming things, and off by one errors.

precisely

Yeah, museum sounds like dead and rot… However on my small site [1] that’s the name of the fossil repos page

[1]: https://hdrz.cc/museum

FYI your cert is expired.

> what fossils are stored in within a museum is referred to as a "repository"

I own a cute domain for that: repositoryum.com. I had the plans for it, but it's one of those that never came to a realization.

boneyard.dev evokes something dead but that name kinda goes hard

"countryclub.com" - ie, a bunch of fossils :)

Or, hear me out, we learn to host our own shit again and stop giving all our data to $megacorp after the inevitable buyout.

I trust more a megacorp to survive more than 5 years than a personal host, I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a personal server where something I used was hosted and its dead.

there's a host your own version thats available now https://fossilrepo.dev live server (demo) in fossilrepo.io which is a modern wrapper UI. There's also the standard https://fossil-scm.org/ which you can also host yourself on a $5/mo server on Hertzner or the like.

Fossil is very easy to self host. If you already have a web server it needs maybe 10 or 15 lines of server config. If you want to avoid start up you need something to autostart/restart the server process. If you point it at a directory you can add a new repo simply by adding a Fossil file to the directory.

You can even run it on shared hosting as a CGI (never done it myself).

The only thing that took some setup was sending email notifications.

> The "opinionated / small-teams only" critique others have raised in this thread is real, and I think Fossil should own it instead of fighting it.

I agree I use Fossil for multiple personal and small projects. Anywhere I can, really. It is very simple and everything is distributed.

And backups. Sqlite makes it easier but no backup process is easy. You always have to backup and restore at least once to have the confidence to rely on it.

It's another (big) point towards paying someone else to host it.

Its less of a worry given ts distributed.

a lot of other commenters point out the dead connotation, so you could pivot the semantics and go for something like fossil.fuel? has some "oomph" to it, and represents a high energy density carrier, a feedstock that can go in many directions, oils, plastics, ...

being a software project makes the environmental connotation less important (using a different project would also cost server energy etc...) so its more clearly tongue in cheek

For the name: Use something with amber in the name.

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