[qbasic_forever]

You don't have to compete with hosted systems that have dedicated teams of developers and operations shipping features though. Linus Torvalds manages the development of the entire Linux kernel (millions of lines of code, thousands of contributors) with just an email client, text editor, and git CLI.

I will say too don't expect these hosted services to free you of operations burden. On the contrary you're even less connected and more at risk of operations burdens when these hosted services are facing issues. When Github actions CI/CD is acting up, or the hubot issue manager isn't working, or the release artifact store doesn't have the bits you expect, etc. your entire project grinds to a halt and it's not easy (by design) to eject out and work around them. Projects that depend heavily on all these hosted services are going to find over time that they need to buffer and insulate themselves from these centralized, single points of failure. It's just a different kind of operations burden.

[stu2b50]

I mean that may be technically true but practically without something Github-like it's very difficult to make it work.

If you started a FOSS project today with a mailing list wherein contributors mail you git patches, you would get exactly 0 contributors.

And maybe that's ok, maybe this is your baby, and if someone wants to push code to it they can learn how to email a patch to you.

But for many developers, they do want to have some of the load taken off of them by other developers. They want to reap that benefit of OSS.

[moron4hire]

Well, to be fair, regardless of what you do, the likelihood that you will get exactly zero contributors is very high.

Oh, you'll get complaints, that much is very achievable. But actual contributions? Even simple, bullshit code boot camp homework exercises? Good luck.

[jrochkind1]

Why would someone want to contribute to a bullshit boot camp homework exersize? That seems literally the least likely thing to get any collaborators on.

But, sure, if you don't care about making the development tools something that anyone other than you find convenient, than you can of course just pick whatever you find convenient, nobody is going to stop you.

That's still not a mailing list with patches for most people, but if it is for you, that's great, nobody's going to tell you you can't do that.

The OP said he was switching because he thought their current systems were taking too much of his time to maintain, and were still too hard to use for other collaborators.

You seem to be trying to tell him he's wrong and those systems didn't really take too much of his time, and he actually didn't have any other potential collaborators anyway.... it's a weird argument.

[Jach]

> Why would someone want to contribute to a bullshit boot camp homework exersize? That seems literally the least likely thing to get any collaborators on.

You've misunderstood, the coding boot camp assigns homework, and sometimes that homework is: "Contribute to an open source project!" This usually takes the form of something like a pull request to "Fix typos in README" or something otherwise insignificant. GP is just saying that however you release your FOSS project, you're unlikely to get even that tiny level of outside contribution, so using "no one will contribute" as an argument against a mailing list isn't very persuasive. The argument that mailing lists suck, perhaps more so, but GP didn't opine on that.

[moron4hire]

I was saying that the few contributions I've ever gotten on any of my projects are basically people completing bullshit codecamp exercises. The contribution is low impact and the contributor never returns. The actual act of submitting the contribution was a larger percentage of the effort than the actual change itself.

[jrochkind1]

That works out well for you that you and Linus and others find that system to have just as good user experience as the sort of hosted systems far more projects are using, but the majority of current actual and potential developers do not.

I think you are unlikely to persuade them to change their minds with an argument in an HN comment, but you can keep trying!