The article is pretty bad.
It argues in bad faith against GitHub, conflates addressing the reader and their own community (suddenly “we …”), fails to see how despite not being FOSS you can be pro FOSS, names the vendor lock-in but fails to present advantages and disadvantages… I think the tone is pretty bad as well.
For the most part, I dislike when projects and people self-host. It’s a barrier to me to read and participate. Different interface and UX, no account, different needs for registration, Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, unclear long-term stability.
I like Forgejo and Codeberg. It has a good and well-known user interface, is fast to use, FOSS, and has a centralized platform., and is working on federation which could ease pain points of distributed and split hosting.
I find SourceHut UI unstructured; very confusing.
When GitLab came up, there was a time when I used it for my new projects, and moved some onto there, but eventually moved back to GitHub. Hosting it myself at work; self-hosting it is huge, heavy, bloated.
The main reasons I still use GitHub are that it is free, feature-rich, fast, familiar, and one platform. I much prefer a low barrier to entry and uniform between projects as long as GitHub acts well enough, even if it is not FOSS itself.
I would hate to see people follow this article and further spread out FOSS, increasing barriers to entry. I have left exploring projects and contributing because of that barrier on multiple occasions and projects.
I’m hopeful for Codeberg and Forgejo. Codeberg can serve as a centralized platform already. Should Federation land, it can serve as a base for self-hosted instances, reducing many pain points of a heterogeneous and self-hosted-distributed field.
Side story: When SourceForge became shit, I created and executed an issue ticket migration for a significant FOSS project. Thankfully we can change platforms like that when you’re not fully locked in but have accessible or natively distributable data.
Would be nice to get the names of alternatives, always irked me that the biggest repo for open source projects is privately owned
It’s a little lower in the article
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Alternative Hosting Services:
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Self-Host (or join a group that self-hosts). A few options:
- Gitea
- GitLab Community Edition (note, the GitLab Enterprise Edition, which >is provided to the public on gitlab.com, is (like GitHub) >trade-secret, proprietary, vendor-lock-in software)
- SourceHut
Let’s not forget Forgejo, a fork of Gitea. Self-hosted. It’s CodeBerg’s backend.
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It would be great to see a Fediverse GitHub alternative. Obviously we have plenty of self-hosted software forges around, but I’m not aware of any decentralized network solution. Allow people to host repositories on an instance, but be able to search, discuss and contribute to repositories across the entire network. That way you’d get the benefits of a large programmer community without needing to centralize to a single company or organization. Maybe this already exists and I’m unaware.
There’s also Radicle
We really hope that codeberg and forgejo is accepted and used more!
I’m probably gonna switch from Codeberg, I just can’t rely on a service that’s down all the time or takes literal minutes to load a repo page.
That’s fair. Eventually hopefully forgejo will work well enough to provide an alternative for self hosting though.
Already done.
I mean, you have to use it to get software; and if you’re submitting patches to other people’s software; and I have inherited maintenance of a popular project that would just confuse a ton of people, including several distros, if I moved it. But I never create projects in github anymore. Sourcehut has been great.
