alt Hacker NewsThe reality of good competition is that competitors are built on good, cheap open source. No matter how decentral, a lot of users will want guards at the offramps and onramps. The only path for... everyone to create stronger competitive checks on services they rely on is to make sure that the open foundations are extremely strong.
The alliance any up-and-comers can make with the ecosystem is to develop more of what they host in the open source. In return for starting much closer to the finish line, we only ask that they also make the lines closer for those that come after them.
That's a bit of an indirect idea for today's Joe Internet. Joe Internet is going to hold out waiting for such services to be offered entirely for free, by a magical Github competitor who exists purely to serve in the public interest. Ah yes, Joe Internet means government-funded, but of course government solutions are not solutions for narrow-interest problems like "host my code" that affect only a tiny minority. And so Joe Internet will be waiting for quite some time.
The problem is funding. To be a real github competitor you need some serious infrastructure investment, which means you need to generate revenue and you start doing all sorts of stuff that is hostile to your free-tier userbase.
Personally I wouldn't mind paying for access but I doubt there is a critical mass of users that can be weaned off of free access. Competing with free networks is hard. Codeberg, as far as I can tell, basically has a donation model where you can volunteer to pay and be a "member", but 0.5% of users choose that option, that is, they made a one time payment of 10 euros. That's enough to fund how many months of bandwidth and a couple of recycled servers. For cloud infrastructure standards are pretty high, you want replication, backup, anti-DDOS, monitoring, etc. All of that costs money. It would also help if they made it easier to donate with a paypal link instead of a SEPA QR code that requires an international bank transfer.