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
Removed by mod
We have excellent free and open source alternatives to GitHub that are not run by Microsoft Core AI as a trap/jail for developpers.
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.
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).
Duality of man
Wait, there’s a GitHub “feed”?
None of the bad things mentioned here have happened to me using GitHub on the daily. Totes agree it’s probably not great to depend on a business for free hosting, but it’s also pretty straightforward to move in the future if needed.
Do you never open https://github.com/ where there is a “Feed” in the center of the site?
No. Why would I?
Do you ever go to wikipedia.com? Most people hit most webpages via searching something specific. Sure, you might go to some news, ecommerce, or social media sites landing page, but I’ve never once thought of going to github’s landing page in the last decade… maybe if I suspect an outage, but not to view content.
Ah here is the difference: I maintain a few gh repos and our company works exclusively on github. So in the morning, I open github.com to see notifications (via g-n shortcut).
Nope! I tend mostly to use /org/repo and other subpages. The few times I find myself on / I’m just confused at how I wound up there and close the tab.
Thanks - I have now! It looks like updates of repos I’ve stared? But I’ll never go there again, and suggest OP not do that either if it’s upsetting to them. I just go to my profile, or the project I’m interested in.
One big problem with GitHub that is only briefly touched on in the article is that developer teams used to be able to use the feed to get useful updates on what their team was working on. Now, it’s polluted with unrelated AI generated suggestions. So for those of us who use Github as an enterprise application, we previously had a user friendly app that helped us get work done, but we now have a user hostile app that participates in the attention economy, luring us with distractions, which are the opposite of what we should be doing at work. The GitHub feed is now anti-focus, anti-work, algorithmic buzz, and enterprises like my employer still pay for that.
Yes, very much this. There are still my coworkers’s PRs in the feed, but not all of them and there is many other things there too.
What I’d want is to have notifications on the frontpage.
Hobbyist - I only use it for casual home projects. I open the bookmark of my repo to see a major update definitely uploaded and then close it again.
I guess some people just don’t use bookmarks
I’ve just realized that no, I don’t use bookmarks anymore. I used to use them, but nowadays, I just start typing the name of what I want to open and firefox omni-bar will find it in my history.
Thanks for sharing theses very important thoughts. I think I agree with the author on this even though I am not a dev but I do some minor contribution from time to time.
Fuck you sound like my ex.
Jesus Christ this is just an old man screeching about emojis. What a worthless argument to put to paper.
While he concentrates a bit too much on emojis, he brings up valid points.
No he doesn’t. It’s a low barrier to switch, there are dozens of competing products, and if they ever do something supremely stupid it’s easy to move away. But as it stands, it is an exceptional product and there is zero need to increase workloads for maintainers.
It’s creating work because the dude got annoyed with emojis and worked backwards to invent some need to create work.
and if they ever do something supremely stupid it’s easy to move away.
We don’t need to move, this super flammable building hasn’t gone up in flames yet…
It’s Microsoft we’re talking about. Are you sure they don’t fuck it up?
Better to move away now, on our own terms. That’s my opinion.
👌👍 MS is going to prevent you from moving your code. Take the fee win instead of making more work for some low probability future that honestly, I have no idea what you were evening referencing.
low probability future…
Lol, MS is going to enshitify GitHub so hard and everybody with common sense is seeing it coming.
I mean the author has a right to his opinion, as much as you have a right to yours. Time will tell who’s right.
Yeah, I love open source and privacy, but developers are staying on github because it’s not enshittified (yet). I do wish we’d all move to another platform, if anyone wants to keep the github UI, gitea (and forgejo/codeberg) straight up cloned it at a certain point, see https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo for example
