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bhoustontoday at 1:50 PM4 repliesview on HN

It is not working at all, I can not load any repo pages.

Github.com's promise is that it can be the central broker of open source code because it is reliable.

That promise hasn't been kept recently.

That said, Github is hard to displace and it is similar to the era of the Twitter Fail Whales. It was a sign of growth that couldn't be properly managed but there was not viable alternative.


Replies

jillesvangurptoday at 2:35 PM

> Github is hard to displace and it is similar to the era of the Twitter Fail Whales

Hard but not impossible. Being unreliable might nudge a few people. Also, Twitter had their fail whale in their early phase (mostly), not twenty years or so into their existence.

The issue with replacing Github is that it takes more than version control and issue tracking to replace the network that is Github. It's effectively the largest social network for software developers on this planet.

Tangled (tangled.org) is built on the at protocol (bluesky) and seems like an interesting take on this. Most other solutions seem to just move the problem to another much smaller silo (gitlab, codeberg, etc) or throw out the baby with the bathwater by focusing on self hosting without attempt at networking with other instances.

A federated approach seems like it is directionally right. Tangled is far from feature complete but I like the direction and it probably is a bit more resilient against global outages like this. I'm not a user yet but I'm keeping an eye on it.

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beached_whaletoday at 3:09 PM

github's value is that it has a lot of eyes and visibility for smaller projects(thought many get lost too). More and more this value is going down and that stability is getting more important. More so when the story of github these days is copilot(good or bad) and their downtime. AI is giving a lot of project owners second thoughts and being so open with an AI company too.

hedgehogtoday at 2:06 PM

It's a bit of a different situation though, in many cases the unit of adoption is a team or organization that is free to switch platforms without consideration of what anyone else is doing. At this point I'm going to move my personal projects, it's not bad enough to be a priority at work yet but it's trending that way.

dv_dttoday at 2:58 PM

github replaced sourceforge, so something or things can at least offset github