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Comment by Arubis | Hacker News Reader

This is starting to feel like Twitter. For a variety of reasons, we had a centralized place where everyone of a particular set of persuasions could connect, and this had outsize benefits for the community as a whole. That place is becoming untenable, and with the loss of goodwill and stability, the community’s started to dissipate. But there isn’t one obvious transition candidate, so the diaspora is finding itself spread across a bunch of disparate places and services. The stated need they satisfy (source control with a web interface and some technical features, like pull requests with reviews) will be fulfilled. But those emergent features like a core community and default expectation of where you can find someone will fade. And that is a very real loss for all of us.

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Good. That's a gain, not a loss. We're better off without social media psyop manipulations and subscription services bolted onto our code repositories. We're better off without a giant evilcorp getting wholesale access to a large majority of the world's source code.

I just use GitHub for the basics: repo hosting, reviews and actions - what are the "social media psyop manipulations"? I've never really paid much attention to the other features.

But now the users who only use core functions (re: repo hosting, reviews and actions) suffer when the service is down due to overreach with feature implementation.

All the metrics based around how many commits you have made, how many stars your repo has, etc. Why is that info gamified? Its a dopamine addiction channel.

Seriously?

It’s for subset of people who cares about that. You can just blanket-ignore everyone who cares about that, and move on.

Yeah but then VC use these metrics to fund projects and suddenly what was previously a joke now becomes a way to make wealth.

It's good you can isolate yourself from it. But there's plenty of cases.

Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues. Or being feed AI slop to review endlessly. Or recruiters filtering resumes via Github activity graphs or repository stars.

And obviously the side shady market of all of the above (e.g. buying/selling popularity).

Like the parent comment, I can't wait for social media to be completely obliterated from code repositories.

> Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues

This isn't "psyops". Sure, it's a bad side of social interactions, but when you interact with other people, there's always some of this - in person as well as online.

The lead-off argument here seems more like "interacting with society can be bad".

I have no argument that selling popularity is bad and filtering by stars is stupid, but I don't blame Github for any of that.

You could equally well assign the success of certain coders to YouTube because they came to attention by showing off their work in livestreams. Which I do not. They found a way to advertise their own success, but it's theirs.

> The lead-off argument here seems more like "interacting with society can be bad".

The argument is that there's no need for that much social interaction to produce quality code, quite the contrary, the more social interaction, the more focus is lost.

I know it's an unpopular opinion, but there's a reason why the Linux Kernel communication is still done through acerbic email threads.

None of this is specific to GitHub. The exact same problems will sometimes happen any time users and developers communicate, which is a basic requirement of developing useful software. I doubt GitHub issues are worse than mailing lists or any other mechanism.

They almost have to be - which users will be able to get to your issues page and which will be able to find a mailing list? You'll have a much more selective audience in the latter

Demanding work isn't really an issue. Anyone can do that, and also reject the work. Dishonest actors on the other hand would take money for someone else's work.

You outlined what it (and all git hosting other services) are for: repository hosting, optionally issue tracker, mandatorily pull requests (for syncing with master or other branches), Actions for automated steps on merge to a tracked branch.

If there are no subscription services, what will fund the free open source repositories?

Could be argued to be both a gain and a loss...

"Replicants are either a benefit or a hazard."

Personally I never engaged in the community aspect of GitHub.

In my eyes it would be a ginormous gain to our colective mental health to not have the expectation to contribute to open source projects for free, or to have "green squares" every day on a public GitHub profile.

This seems to be such a non issue to me, I always ignored this and its strange to hear others feel compelled.

That's the point of it though. It's designed to be gamified and addictive to coerce users into spending more time Engaging with the site.

Great that it doesn't work on you, but it works really well on a depressingly large number of people.

Especially now with LLMs. My hand coded github activity is through the roof the last two years just because of a job change, but I assume everyone's activity is up in the last 2 years for other reasons and if it meant anything in the past it definitely doesn't now

Who the hell uses GitHub socially?

"Protocols, not platforms" should have remained the philosophy of the Internet. Alas, we are here.

This is why I'm so interested in https://tangled.org/

Even if the platform itself doesn't take off, the protocol and the data ownwership (you host your repo artifacts, issues, prs, etc on your ATproto server) mean that a competitor could come in easily if you were no longer satisfied with performance, reliability, or monetization.

"Protocols" now that everything has been moved to a master-slave protocol (HTTP), we are all slaves of the masters.

Use Tangled ! https://tangled.org/

It's a social network with github-like social features and git hosting, but you can still self host your git and have all the features like issues, PRs and so on just like GitHub.

And it's built on ATProto so you can also have your issues PRs and so on hosted on your infra, but everything interconnects nicely with your single account, just like using GitHub.

They even added a vouching system for users, to know who to trust based on who you already trusted.

At least this will wake up more people to the existing alternative efforts such as Forgejo and its progress with federation protocol.

https://forgejo.org/2023-01-10-answering-forgejo-federation-...

Do you have any more insight into its progress?

Seems like it's far from production-ready and there hasn't been much activity this year?

> spread across a bunch of disparate places and services.

This is the way. Stop centralizing everything.

Luckily we already have a distributed version control system that can take over github: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

I suppose people can use git too if they ever figure out how to send emails from a dedicated client.

> Luckily we already have a distributed version control system that can take over github

Surprised that this wasn't just a link to Git. The biggest benefit of Git over predecessors was that it enabled decentralization. Github re-centralized the common case for the sake of convenience.

Yes but on Earth every project needs a canonical main branch. Most also need a way to manage and review changes to that branch that all project members have direct access to.

Gitea (and its popular fork, Forgejo) are very lightweight. You can easily stand up an instance on a cheap VPS.

Agreed. Just moved some of my projects to codefloe.com (Forgejo) this weekend. FYI - it provides a lot more than a link to git.

It's on the project to decide which is canonical and export a read only accessible version. Change review only requires a communication medium (the patches are mostly plain text) and that can be done in a lot of way. As for merging those changes, it's an organizational issue.

If it’s on the project to determine their requirements, why are you doing it?

Github and other providers before proved that git itself is just a small part of managing code, there's a lot more needed for a full workflow, and it's meaningful for it all to be tightly coupled.

> "Crypto had attracted grifters from the beginning, even though its most respected figures were more interested in changing the world. As Silicon Valley investors piled in after them, they wanted to fund companies that would become essential to the crypto economy, allowing them to make vast amounts of money. Entrepreneur after entrepreneur discovered that the best way to turn a profit in a decentralized economy was to figure out ways to centralize parts of it again." (Henry Farrell, Underground Empire)

The biggest benefits of Git over predecessors were branching, 3-way merge, and history rewrites (in particular, rebase and squash). As much as Git fans wanted decentralization to be a major selling point, decentralization has never been a major selling point.

Not exactly decentralization but distribution was the main selling point.

In comparison to SVN and other non-DVCs git did not need to continuously talk to the central server for history, "branch" creations, unlocking/locking files before changes, etc.

Linus wanted a DVCS, but they wanted centralization and licenses were expensive, so he decided to launch the git initiative where he provided scaffolding and the rest came from contributions.

It was a selling point. Maybe even intended selling point. But it absolutely isn't the main selling point. Never was, never will. The big thing, the reason people ever started talking about Git outside Linux dev team, has always been branches. It's branches, not distribution, that made every SVN user in the world abandon it in exchange for Git. Saying distribution has been more important than branching is like saying automobiles replaced horses because of smell. Which, admittedly, was a big problem with horses, but come on.

It seems our experiences are different.

Back then, when working with SVN, we had sites in various countries, with under provisioned VPNs between them. Loading up a single file history could take 15 minutes. I am not joking. Every single operation took ages, so really, any DVCS would have won in that situation, regardless of its approach to branches.

If the SVN server would sit in the same building then I guess the branching would have been the main selling point, but it was not the main selling point for us in that situation.

I think you understate what a big deal the decentralization was when Git came out. Back in the early 2000s, getting internet while out of the office was hard. 3G was in its infancy and expensive so you were at the mercy of finding a WiFi hotspot. Git's predecessors, such as SVN, were unusable without an internet connection to the server. Git (and Mercurial) allowed doing version control without an internet connection for the first time, which is a massive benefit for some types of development or doing work on the road. This aspect of Git definitely became less important as always-on internet connections became ubiquitous, but it's still super helpful sometimes. I can't imagine going back.

I think you understate what a big deal branching was when Git came out. Back in the early 2000s, branching was hard. Git's predecessors, such as SVN, didn't have branching at all until much later, and even then the implementation was riddled with problems and quite often the repo entered state where branches cannot merge back to main (which was called trunk back then).

No matter how beneficial the ability to work offline was, branching was still far more important. It's a completely different order of magnitude. Git without offline capabilities would still be a massive success. Git without branching would not.

There are plenty of alternatives for git hosting. The last thing which needs to be migrated before we get an exodus off this vibe coded monstrosity is reputation (i.e. github stars) which are inherently sticky.

Git doesn't even need to be "hosted" anywhere. That's the point of it being distributed. What needs to be hosted somewhere are all the barnacles (like issue tracking, code reviewing, CI, and so on) that have grown out around git, that people and businesses have become dependent on.

Which is why they cleverly moved the central story of a software change from the commit to the PR. Commits migrate automatically with the repo. But migrating PR descriptions and comments takes engineering effort.

Rhetorically, why can't folks add the feature of PRs to Git? Git is fundamentally just a graph manipulation engine and data structure. It would just be another object type, in a layer which sits above the normal commit graph. Obviously there is no "just make X" in software, but this feels reasonably achievable, and would have tremendous benefit for the cost.

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-request-pull

Where would you put comments then? Sure, there’s always mailing lists, but even so, someone still has to host Mailman.

I do think GitHub has positively contributed to the software industry and open source. It’s been enshittified for sure, but it has had a golden era.

LFS files sorta do need to be hosted. At least, it exists because full clones are untenable for many projects.

It doesn't have to be. But without a hosted "source of truth", it's kinda hard to actually distribute it, and have a way to accept pull/merge requests/patches.

In regards to issue tracking there are alternatives. Epiq is a git-native (vendor agnostic) issue tracker you self-host: https://ljtn.github.io/epiq/

Github stars are a metric of what?

If I build something that satisfies me and say 100 users (who all star me) does that really say anything. Are those 100 stars even "real" any more?

All the old problems of the web are new again, and still remain unsolved.

github stars are a metric of investability.

some investors use stars (and star growth velocity) to determine which projects they invest or don't invest in. (not saying it's good or bad - just saying it's a real thing.)

I don't think GitHub stars are what makes GitHub sticky. Having a single UI / account and being able to jump between work projects, private projects and random open source projects where I want to open a quick issue or submit a PR is much more sticky.

The reason why GitHub is sticky was exactly this. It’s easy to fork, make a change, and submit a PR to another project. It’s the same interface for your code vs another person’s. It’s a simple, consistent interface to submit an issue.

You can argue that the lack of diversity in infrastructure is bad, and I wouldn’t disagree. I think we should have more projects to explore better ways of working. But, the tradeoff is that when you have a centralized system, like GitHub, you also have less friction. The learning curve is small when everything uses the same tools.

I think as we see more AI participation in code, github stars are going to matter less.

My main reason for using Github is stars (bookmarking)

I like Fossil, but there are good reasons to use git too.

There are many git hosting options, including some for self hosting. its a lot easier to switch to a different version control host than to a different version control system.

We had Launchpad before Github (IIRC).

Personally I don't agree at all that these centralized monoliths are a good thing.

On the contrary, I believe it's been detrimental to the open internet and only serves to control us by the powerful.

I never trusted Github and never will.

And like Twitter most people will keep using it anyway?

Just in the US. I have ONE European client... ONE of dozens who use GitHub.

EVERY other client I've ever worked with used their own gitforge or at least bitbucket...

Selection bias then as the majority of European companies are for sure not hosting their own Forgejo or GitForge.

I've asked around in my circles, because I am genuinely interested: Everyone not working in startup space IS hosting their own instances.

Hell, even I do it.

Where I work we're hosting our own gitlab instance and the previous company I worked for hosted their own Bitbucket. For most developers I know it's either a self hosted git platform instance or Github enterprise.

Even my faculty, which otherwise licks Microsoft’s boots at all opportunities, uses self-hosted GitLab.

Github pricing is aimed at US companies. Small EU companies that can only afford to pay their 5-6 developers 60K euro per year rather selfhost than pay GitHub.

I am working for small companies, for medium sized companies and for huge behemoths.

None (apart from one customer as I said) has their code on GitHub.

The big ones because of trade secrets. Which is ironic, because most of them use Microsoft Teams and talk freely there xD

I think that especially when it comes to hosting, competition is good. Everything centered on github was the bad state previously. I remember people on HN claiming they wont hire someone without github account.

This splintering should happen more often.

Good. Git is a decentralized version control solution. It's built for this. The centralization around GitHub was beneficial for the initial proliferation of Git, but has long since become a net negative. The "community" you speak of was never bound to GitHub. Better alternatives have emerged and for many it's time to move to greener pastures.

It is, but a single point of failure is itself also an unstable equilibrium, given that a lot of things have to continuously go right for its continued existence in terms of governance of all kinds (technical, moderation policies, commercial/pricing etc.)

Twitter is unstable? I can't remember the last time it had an outage.

~2007-12?!

Are you potentially in the US? I think the experience is very different globally.

Ever since the Twitter -> X rebranding, every time I open Twitter links, I have a very high chance of hitting a "Something went wrong" type page, with a retry button that just does nothing. It's been like this for ages. I barely open Twitter links anymore as a result.

I think they may mean Twitter's 'Fail Whale' era – late 2000s/early 2010s, when it regularly fell over under load.

It's becoming the Microsoft Teams of Git hosting providers.

TwitHub

I think that, exactly how 95% of the people that left Twitter eventually returned, we will see a similar outflux of people from Github and the vast majority of them will quietly be back in a few months.

That was a political decision, this is an operational one. A lot of companies have become dependent on a working github and effectively have to down tools when it is down.

Being down for a few hours 2-3 times a month is obviously garbage from a reliability standpoint, but I think they will keep it going at just the level necessary to barely hold on to these customers.

Do you have numbers to back that statement up? I don't necessarily doubt it, but I haven't seen anything to support it.

Note that raw user numbers won't really cut it; if 1 million people left Twitter, it's possible that 500 000 of those people joined and 500 000 new people joined; the user numbers would look like everyone returned, but really only 50% did in this hypothetical.

Was this reported and quantified somewhere, or does 95% reflect your experience? My experience was the opposite -- everybody I cared to follow left and never went back -- but I'd be willing to believe I'm in the 5%.

I'd say about a third of software engineers whose blogs I stumble upon and end up liking aren't active on twitter. Their accounts typically have nothing posted for 3-4 years, but they're active on bluesky or mastodon.

There was nothing wrong with twitter, it was a social fad to performatively leave.

Github is actually down and I can't push code right now, it's blocking my business which is unacceptable. It's a broken tool.

X’s revenue is down by 2/3 from the acquisition peak. That’s all you need to know about whether the decline was real or not.

Both are not comparable as the stickiness dynamics are completely different.

On Twitter, it's mostly the networking effect, you want to be where peoples are, and unless a large chunk move at once, you are stuck there.

On Github, it's the technical cost of migrating, the git part is trivial, but tickets, PR history and CI/Integration are another can of worms.

Projects which moved away, moved away for good, at most only leaving a synchronized mirror.

this varies by field, most scientists have left twitter for good

Twitter is a shadow of what it once was. The design of the site has shifted very very hard in favour of being an algorithmic content soup rather than a social network in the traditional sense. This has juiced the engagement numbers but there's a lot less meaning to them now. (I can say all this because I am a bitter holdout who still tries to use the site to have conversations with people and form personal connections. Tragically it still offers something that Bluesky and the Fediverse do not, even if that thing is slowly but surely being smothered out.)

> how 95% of the people that left Twitter eventually returned

and this assertion is based on ... ?

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