> I was prompted to write this after reading the good post about Ghostty leaving GitHub but it's something I've written and talked about for a few years.

Many of us were annoyed already when Microslop, 'xcuse me, Microsoft assimilated GitHub. But we have to be realistic - alternatives often sucked. Sourceforge? I find creating issues there annoying to no ends. I can use gitlab, which is a bit better than sourceforge, but I also hate creating issues there. I recently saw codeberg appears to have updated its UI (I think?), but I also find it quite annoying.

What GitHub got right were, initially, the UI; and also a focus on folks using github, e. g. making things easy/easier for them. They did not get everything right though - the wiki support I find awful. I rarely use the wikis because they are so bad.

I think the really big problem is that there are commercial interests aka private interests. Microsoft is just one example here; it is a problem literally everywhere in similar sites. In the past I pointed at the example of discussions in issues, with regards to the xz backdoor utils - and the next day after I also participated in discussions, Microsoft took it all down; though it also does not matter if it was Microsoft or the repository owner. The problem is that individuals can too easily censor potentially useful information. The issue discussions WERE useful, and they were censored. If I remember correctly, all information from back then was never fully reinstated. Perhaps people mirrored it, but I did not see a link. The point is that I think this shows that top-down control can be really detrimental. And let's be honest: how many of you trust Microsoft? We kind of need something that is de-central, works reliably and well, and also has a good UI by default and a simple (or at the least a good) workflow. And we also need to avoid the situation where private actors can hold everyone else a hostage. I have absolutely no idea how to solve the above; perhaps it requires different approaches at the same time.

The www kind of changed and I feel that private interests - aka huge mega-mega corporations in particular - made things a lot worse in the last 10-15 years here. That needs to change.