Github.com's promise is that it can be the central broker of open source code because it is reliable.
That promise hasn't been kept recently.
That said, Github is hard to displace and it is similar to the era of the Twitter Fail Whales. It was a sign of growth that couldn't be properly managed but there was not viable alternative.
Hard but not impossible. Being unreliable might nudge a few people. Also, Twitter had their fail whale in their early phase (mostly), not twenty years or so into their existence.
The issue with replacing Github is that it takes more than version control and issue tracking to replace the network that is Github. It's effectively the largest social network for software developers on this planet.
Tangled (tangled.org) is built on the at protocol (bluesky) and seems like an interesting take on this. Most other solutions seem to just move the problem to another much smaller silo (gitlab, codeberg, etc) or throw out the baby with the bathwater by focusing on self hosting without attempt at networking with other instances.
A federated approach seems like it is directionally right. Tangled is far from feature complete but I like the direction and it probably is a bit more resilient against global outages like this. I'm not a user yet but I'm keeping an eye on it.
May I ask what networking with other instances brings? Git is decentralised, so it works with self-hosted instances, right?
But if you want more than what email can offer, social networking is a thing with Github and it's a big reason for its success. It added a friendly UI and a way for users to engage with each other via issue trackers, pull requests, and all the rest. It has tens of millions of users that have accounts that each can each create issues, pull requests, fork each other's projects, etc. These people collaborate with each other on many millions of projects. The network effect of all these people being in one place where they can collaborate is vital to a lot of open source projects.
It's effectively the largest developer centric social network around. If the open source community fragments over a gazillion self hosted servers that each require a signup that don't really federate any signins and that don't allow aggregating notifications from all the projects you contributed to, etc. it would be a big loss for the open source world.
Tangled by making use of the atproto replicates much of this functionality. While also allowing people to run their own nodes and while allowing users and their projects to be moved between those nodes. That makes it the best of both worlds. You can self host it but without completely disconnecting from the community.
Assuming that everybody moves to your community (in this case the atproto one). Then the ActivityPub people ask you to join their community, and so does every new community that wants to become the new standard.
That's the thing with every new social network: "You don't want to be locked into the current community that is not my community, instead you want to move to my community, which is the best! And if you do, and convince everyone around you to join as well, then you will only ever need one account for everything!".
And now, assuming that most people leave GitHub and join Tangled, it will be to the detriment of the minority that is not using Tangled. If I host a repo on SourceHut, nobody will contribute because they want GitHub. If Tangled replaces GitHub, will that change? I don't think so, people will just refuse to use anything other than Tangled.
What I find interesting is that you advocate for a federated system that everyone should use, because "it would be better for everybody", but the fact is that everybody has an email already. No need to create an account, we can send each other patches, it just works.
Why don't you promote email? Because it's not your preference.
PS: I do realise that email has a lot of issues. My point is just that I avoid the entire issue by just being open to sharing my code however it works. And I feel like patches are easier to share "universally" than pull requests. Maybe I would be in favour of a new, "richer" patch format that would make it even nicer to share over whatever system I want (email, atproto, activitypub, signal, ...)?
Tangled is kind of there as an alternative that has most of the comforts of Github but is federated and can be self hosted. And there are a lot of Bluesky users that have access to it even if they might not be aware of that yet. If enough projects switch over, their contributors might follow along. If something else shows up, more power to them. But I'm not really aware of (m)any other properly federated alternatives.
The beauty of federated protocols of course is that they can be bridged and connected in all sorts of ways. Some hybrid at proto / email based bridge could be pretty doable. And if somebody wants to expose at proto feeds as activity feeds, that's probably not too technically hard either. These things aren't actually mutually exclusive.
And I am using alternatives to GitHub like SourceHut and Codeberg (and I will try Tangled).
I was just saying that federated systems don't necessarily federate well with each other.
Email is federated, and XMPP is federated, but it's not exactly nice to communicate on XMPP via email. Or between Matrix and XMPP, etc.
But of course I would be happier if Tangled (or something else federated) was the default instead of GitHub. Now to be pragmatic, a big advantage of GitHub is that open source projects get free CI runners (including macOS), and it's hard to compete with that.