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We need to talk about your Github addiction (ploum.net)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/opensource@programming.dev
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Publication about the monopoly of GitHub and the fact developers should move elsewhere if they care about their freeedom and the freedom of FLOSS projects

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[–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

I never had these issues they speak of.

I certainly don't want to send email patches because I value the centralized nature of a big platform and clear, established workflows and UI.

Disconnected decentralization adding barriers is a shit idea.

Huge platforms like Github have some risk and concerns involved, but as long as it does well, and the network effect of a platform is a net positive, I don't think adding decentralization barriers and differentiation barriers and disconnects is a good idea.

There's reasons why people don't switch besides network effect and inertia. I certainly haven't ever felt like sourcehut were approachable.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    On the topic of "let's not have a Sourceforge again",

    Sourceforge was great back in the day, and I'm not aware we had good alternatives back then. Sourceforge gave us a well known, trustworthy home for FOSS. You know where to look for FOSS, you can discover FOSS, you can host your own FOSS for free.

    Should we have diversified back then? To what? At what cost?

    When Sourceforge eventually became problematic, by chance, most active projects switched away. I did too. Thanks to FOSS and control of your own projects, that's possible.

    Today, we have a number of alternatives. Not more than a few, if you count established hosted platforms, more if you count self-hosted and self-hosting.

    I made my point about discoverability etc in my original comment. Trustworthiness of the hoster/provider is another. Decentralization to individuals has risks as well, including disappearance (my first Lemmy instance feddit.de, which was big, broke and disappeared), lack of security updates, or introduction of bugs and security issues through customizations or hosting setup. There's a middle ground with bigger platforms, of course.

    When Sourceforge became bad, I migrated away. If and when GitHub becomes bad, it'll be fairly simple to move away from that as well. Until then, I find it to have the best UI/UX (although I have some criticisms) and offerings, as well as closeness of FOSS projects and community and other projects as well (positive network effect).

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