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Comment by ghewgill | Hacker News Reader

Yes, let's look beyond centralized services for source control (also known as "developer social media"). For example, Forgejo is working on federation (https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...) which makes the choice of where to host your code less relevant, because anybody on the federated network will be able to interact with any other repository no matter where it is hosted.

The success and growth of Mastodon proves that this model works, particularly for people who identify as being developers.

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Is Mastodon successful?

(copy paste hedged definition of success)

Depends on how carefully selected and considered your criterion for success is.

It accomplished what it set out to do, which was not "make obscene piles of money" but since they didn't make obscene piles of money it probably is a failure anyway, right?

A peak of 2.6 million active users 4 years ago and the decline since then to 750k users is a true success story, right?

That's what I meant by carefully selected and ill-thought-out criterion.

They didn't set out with the goal of making gobs of money or subsuming the entire online population, and because those things didn't happen, success is tautologically ruled out, right? After all, as we all know, the only kind of success that is even theoretically possible is being the best and only player left alive in your field. Literally anything less is failure, unqualified and unequivocal.

Mastodon did what they set out to do and there's a vibrant community around it. That's a success, even if it doesn't meet narrow-minded silicon valley definitions of success.

Git is meant to be a dvcs (distributed version control system) and I remember doing this in the early days of Git to point to any remote when the central repository or provider was down.

Is it possible to create mirrors of every repo with no Microsoft dependency or until someone else acquires GitHub from Microsoft and makes it more reliable (maybe Elon Musk like he did with Twitter)? This can solve for commit/push/pull when GitHub is down, but not for Pull requests and reviews.

I just hate Microsoft and used to love GitHub. I can understand why Github is down with the current insane rates of Commits, PRs, Agents calling GH CLI etc and I hope they find a way back to 3 9s availability.

Are you saying Elon Musk made Twitter more reliable? Because he absolutely didn't. He actually abruptly removed Twitter servers from a data center after being told not to by the people who actually understood how twitter worked and that had the IP addresses hard coded all over Twitter code and this caused a lot of outages.

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