alt Hacker NewsThis is starting to feel like Twitter. For a variety of reasons, we had a centralized place where everyone of a particular set of persuasions could connect, and this had outsize benefits for the community as a whole. That place is becoming untenable, and with the loss of goodwill and stability, the community’s started to dissipate. But there isn’t one obvious transition candidate, so the diaspora is finding itself spread across a bunch of disparate places and services. The stated need they satisfy (source control with a web interface and some technical features, like pull requests with reviews) will be fulfilled. But those emergent features like a core community and default expectation of where you can find someone will fade. And that is a very real loss for all of us.
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Personally I don't agree at all that these centralized monoliths are a good thing.
On the contrary, I believe it's been detrimental to the open internet and only serves to control us by the powerful.
I never trusted Github and never will.
"Protocols, not platforms" should have remained the philosophy of the Internet. Alas, we are here.
Use Tangled ! https://tangled.org/
It's a social network with github-like social features and git hosting, but you can still self host your git and have all the features like issues, PRs and so on just like GitHub.
And it's built on ATProto so you can also have your issues PRs and so on hosted on your infra, but everything interconnects nicely with your single account, just like using GitHub.
They even added a vouching system for users, to know who to trust based on who you already trusted.
> spread across a bunch of disparate places and services.
This is the way. Stop centralizing everything.
It's becoming the Microsoft Teams of Git hosting providers.
Luckily we already have a distributed version control system that can take over github: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
I suppose people can use git too if they ever figure out how to send emails from a dedicated client.
At least this will wake up more people to the existing alternative efforts such as Forgejo and its progress with federation protocol.
https://forgejo.org/2023-01-10-answering-forgejo-federation-...
It is, but a single point of failure is itself also an unstable equilibrium, given that a lot of things have to continuously go right for its continued existence in terms of governance of all kinds (technical, moderation policies, commercial/pricing etc.)
I think that, exactly how 95% of the people that left Twitter eventually returned, we will see a similar outflux of people from Github and the vast majority of them will quietly be back in a few months.
Twitter is unstable? I can't remember the last time it had an outage.
I think that especially when it comes to hosting, competition is good. Everything centered on github was the bad state previously. I remember people on HN claiming they wont hire someone without github account.
This splintering should happen more often.
Good. Git is a decentralized version control solution. It's built for this. The centralization around GitHub was beneficial for the initial proliferation of Git, but has long since become a net negative. The "community" you speak of was never bound to GitHub. Better alternatives have emerged and for many it's time to move to greener pastures.
Fuck the community, nobody needs that, especially in a version source control system. Thinking otherwise is just dweebs' eternal longing for belonging, or someone has some bullshit to sell to the unsuspecting dirty masses.
Good. That's a gain, not a loss. We're better off without social media psyop manipulations and subscription services bolted onto our code repositories. We're better off without a giant evilcorp getting wholesale access to a large majority of the world's source code.