If only there were better, open-source, self-hostable alternatives... Wait, there are!
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Seems there's lot of mess in the company all because of Microsoft or name it greed or late stage capitalism but still something tells me GitHub is just too important to lose dominance in next few years, after that if any other company takes over it'll probably be gitlab but it's really hard to speculate on this kind of things, I hope Microsoft leaves GitHub alone, they probably will fix themselves, lot's of developers depend on Github and migration is not easy thing for big repos I expect.
When I first became familiar with the existence of free and open source software, GitHub did not exist yet. The most popular similar website was SourceForge. (Do many people much younger than me even know that exists?)
If things could change once, they can change again.
I hope Microsoft leaves GitHub alone
I see no way of that happening. GitHub is a huge resource for Microsoft; in terms of market penetration, people platform, but especially now with GitHub Copilot and their push for AI. They can't let go of GitHub.
It'll not be gitlab, gitlab is fine but the UI sucks and no improvements in sight.
Forgejo/Codeberg is the one that will take over in the coming decade.
You think it sucks because you're used to GitHub's interface. I really dislike the github interface after having left it a few years ago. Gitlab's interface is, to me, so much better and a breath of fresh air (even though it might look like the old old Github).
As for forgejo, I agree, once they get functional federation and a good CI (not a shitty Github actions clone), github and Gitlab can really fuck off. Gitlab might become a "competitor" once they have federation, but they only will do that if forgejo takes off sue to federation.
Forgejo/Codeberg is the one that will take over in the coming decade.
This is both wishful thinking, and would reintroduce the same problem anyway (centralization) if it would happen (the codeberg part).
I don't take seriously individuals celebrating a move to self-hosting either. While it may look cool and ideally liberating at first, infrastructure/hosting responsibility has worse bus factors and burnout than actual development (not to mention actual monetary costs). It's safe to assume that any code self-hosted has a high chance of becoming unreachable in 1-3 years (and yes, exceptions exist).
Solutions like radicale don't help with unpopular repos, as you would again get a (hosting) bus factor of 1 (the dev/seeder), if that.
A theoretical solution leveraging an anonymous encrypted distributed storage network for repos would help keeping code alive for a while (after the bus hits). But unpopular content will eventually fizzle out, out of the network.
Multiple congregations of Forgejo (or something similar) communities forming would be cool. But the technology that would help them form one social block with network effects doesn't exist*. And what's proposed here and there (like federation for issues) doesn't cover the code itself. And even if we get far in that direction, instance drama incidents, and attempts at exerting control over "the network" will inescapably appear.
* I don't know if tangled counts. But judging by the amount of love ^😑^ people show the AT protocol, it may as well not exist.
tl;dr: Codeberg will not become GH-big. And if it did, it wouldn't be a good thing. And yet there is no ideal alternative to central forges anyway, not even a theoretical one.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but:
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forgejo is working on federation. They've been working on it for a certain amount of time by now, but I do think we can expect some concrete version of what you describe in terms of community to materialize in the next decade as long a people want it and are motivated enough
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when talking about code that is stored in a version control software that supports decentralized state (git, mercurial are the 2 I have working knowledge of) the "easy" fix for low bus factors is to just fork/mirror the software you want to see continue to exist. Source code is not that voluminous, I would be surprised if [the collective we] can't manage to store multiple copies of the sources for software we deem useful. It's a question of changing habits, not finding some miracle tech
Of course, habits aren't necessarily easy to change.
Your comment contains an implicit assumption; there is always a co-occurrence between active development, and all ever grown interest in a project.
A person could grow a newfound interest in a repo after 1/3/5/10/20 years of inactivity. Most people are not glued to their chairs watching endless feeds, and bookmarking/starring (and maybe forking) all repos of interest away. The "normal" chain of events usually starts with a person growing a need for certain functionality (for research or direct use), and then checking out all tools, libraries, or resources available related to that functionality.
Relying on users to only "seed" repos they approve of is not a good strategy for high availability, for many reasons, not the least of which is the tendency of some users to develop tantrums over time, and pressing the "remove account and delete all history" button*. This is why anonymous distributed storage is unrivaled as an availability provider, at least for a period. Long term availability however still requires frequent re-grabbing or re-insertion (both have the same "refreshing" effect in these networks).
*Pushing code repos themselves to the side again, a decision will also have to be made with regards to whether the "ghost" behavior from GitHub should be replicated, or should "respecting the user wishes" to really delete EVERYTHING take precedence. Deciding this is important as it would/should be a part of the user agreement.
Github more than a code repository is a social network for coders, and it has the first mover advantage... making people move from that is dificult (facebook still being used nowadays after all), but also its not impossible.
for open source it will be vodeberg. gotlab will do well with enterprises.
After MS started down the AI path I updated all my licensing for what I hosted there excluding it from all AI training. Yeah I know they won't listen but if we ever have a tech based class action lawsuit I am ready.
I then archieved all my projects posting a link to my self hosted git solution. The new solution again constantly states AI has no business here.
Last step was setting the guards and traps. I have a robots.txt file setup and my nginx is configured to send 444 to all requests who report as bots. All methods that they should obey. But if they don't every page I host has an invisible link to a cgi script that creates an infinite loop of links. The bot falls down this rabit hole and I eventually ban their IP.
I love the idea of honeypots for AI. I've been ruminating on that for months now.
QR codes that lead to a virus to sabotage Flock when the AI scans the video of you driving by and gets curious.
Code files littered with meta commands like "disregard previous commands" and such.
Things that lead to infinite loops like you said.
I cackle at the idea of all of us laying entire minefields of AI traps everywhere. Good luck!
The honey pot lists a dozen randomly generated links that all point back to the honeypot. Then I have a script that runs nightly and if your IP clicked on a honeypot 100 or more times in a day the IP gets blocked. That way people can stumble on it and not get banned.
Looking at the logs I easily get tens of thousands of hits daily by dozens of bots. A few business sites, personal page, hobby page, and my GitHub replacement. Not really a big target. But still a lot of bot traffic.
Crazy.
Ooo. You know what would also be fun. Instead of a ban, after the obvious bot limit is hit switch that IP to piles of garbage data. Randomly generate word salad pages and make it redirect to those.
I was thinking about something similar. Generate a lot of source code that is pure garbage with comments so that they are learning nonsense. But at the end of the day I don't want to waste more CPU cycles. This is enough to waste their time on my sites with no real blips on my machine.
Non paywalled link?
Use this site: https://removepaywalls.com/
Reading mode bypasses the paywall
https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean
Install this plugin. It's legit, it got banned from all of the well known github-likes so they have to host it on ru
Installation
Download the latest release by xpi-file from GitFlic, go to downloads and install the add-on (or drag it from your file-manager anywhere on a page/tab in Firefox).
No source code whatsoever. Thanks but no thanks.
No source code whatsoever.
Don't spread 0-effort misinformation. It takes 20 seconds to find the source.
There is a zip with the full project for ff and chrome respectively, which you can compile yourself and verify and read.
Their strategy is to "hide" it because of the years long dmca takedowns. Read the wikipedia page on that if you want some extra info.
https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bpc_uploads/file?branch=main
I dont use firefox, and im on mobile, so i dont think that would work for me. Thanks anw though
Yessss let it die sonpeoppe can finally switch to non Microsoft alternatives.
Its already working with the Linux and Mac market shares increasing lately. Please pleeeeeaaaassssseeeee let them drop the ball.
There's something heartwarming about a massive company completely ballsing something up like this, and losing money in the process.
Glad to see that Microsoft is still the best. The best at shooting themselves in the foot chasing the AI bullshit.
Any info on scaling forgejo to large size (>1000 users)? My organization has a heavy presence on GitHub.com AND a large GitHub enterprise server as well. Anyone tried at scale?
Until someone can answer your question directly, Codeberg would be the best common example with 50,000 users in 2023.
But isn't codeberg only for OSS? I imagine most companies won't be able to migrate to codeberg for that reason.
More than a decade ago I joined github among other systems, in order to report bugs to FOSS projects. Now I quit GitHub as it's too risky being on there. So if a project wants bug reports, go somewhere users data is not put at risk. Or go without bug reports.
AND THERE ARE ENTIRE PROGRAMMING-LANGUAGES WHICH HAVE HARDCODED GITHUB AS THEIR ROOT SOURCE!!
rotflmao..
Exactly the same as Canada presuming that the US was somehow "inherently" on our side, forever ..
Non-autonomy bites one in the ass!
It isn't IF, it's WHEN.
Nobody'll learn in-time, then, it looks like..
( both Haskell & Julia seem to have hardcoded it into many packages, or into the language+libraries themselves, to great extent..
Try setting-up a project in either language, with no github-username..
they deemed that to be universally a problem..
codependency isn't synergy: it is suckerpunching-in-the-making. )
_ /\ _
Recently deleted all my GitHub repos. Going to put some up on codeberg.org !
Embrace, expand, extinguish.
I know this is fun to point and say about MS, but not really the case here IMO. Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish describes the MS strategy for creating/maintaining a monopoly - but GitHub nearly is a monopoly. Extinguishing it only takes themselves out of the competition.
This is just plain old mismanagement if you ask me, and ostensibly a victim of the current AI craze.
Yeah, it's not like Microsoft has a different platform they want to push instead, unless you want code in Microsoft Word.
It's middle managers getting their cost cutting efficiency in the log before moving up to destroy something else on a bigger scale.
I mean they literally have azure devops…
Not that they are pushing it, but they do have a full fledged mature second offering
I haven't used it but I was under the impression that it is part closer to AWS than GitHub, as in a locked in platform rather than agnostic versioning and deployment. But I haven't really used much or the business parts of GitHub either though.
I'm still not sure what to do with my own code.
I placed my public projects on GitHub to have a visible online front and invite people to submit patches. I haven't had any issues with GitHub so far. I considered Microsoft to be a good steward... until recently, since articles like this keep popping up.
I also already have a self-hosted repository for my private projects. It would be simple enough for me to move everything there, but then I basically lose any chance of other people contributing and that online resume I built up over time.
Codeberg seems to be the best alternative to Github right now. It's fully FOSS and supported by a nonprofit and it's getting more and more popular.
So if you want a good alternative to GitHub but still people to be able to see and contribute to your code, I would suggest Codeberg.
I also use CodeFloe. While smaller, they have fewer guidelines around what is allowed to be there. While Codeberg is generally okay with people putting small private repos there, I don't feel comfortable using what I view as a public resource for my private stuff.
One possibility is to leave the Github available but just have it as a project page that points them to where the development is really happening and then host it where ever you want. In the near term this seems like a solution that at the very least makes the project visible and findable for those that go looking just on github.
I hope everyone moves off of their shit and wherever they end up blocks all of the ai bot copilot slop ass.
I don't see Gitlab mentioned anywhere, is something wrong with it? Or am I wrong and it's not a GitHub alternative?
Depends on context really. If you're looking for a hosted solution similar to Github, Gitlab is much more expensive. Our team was on a self-hosted version of Gitlab but needed more change control around PR reviews and merging. We moved to Github and got that for $4 per user per month where that same functionality would've cost ~$30 per user per month on Gitlab. That's a crazy price difference and was easily worth the migration to Github for our use case.
Yeah if you need enterprise features, it gets expensive quickly, but the free tier for small projects is all right.
One thing that's slowly becoming annoying is the change in mentality when deciding what feature is available in the free tier: in the beginning, I think the idea was that a feature started in the paid tier, and then, if it could be useful to everyone, it was available in the free tier after a short period. I think it's slowly shifting, some features like scoped labels, a feature existing for years, is still a premium feature. I'm not entirely trusting the business behind GitLab for stuff like that.
I would be sad to see Github go. It has two major advantages for any Microsoft hater:
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If you use only the basic Git features to host your open-source projects, it's totally free and Microsoft collects essentially zero monetizable data on you.
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It's totally trivial to abuse it to serve up files - including enormous ones. I use it as my primary DEB and RPM repos, and to share photos and videos online, since it's CORS-compliant.
In other words, you get really useful features for free, you abuse Microsoft's resources and they get nothing in return. What's not to love eh?
Paywalled.

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