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by rvz 1548 days ago
Well, I think I have said that since 2020 [0] and it is self-evident that you are better off self-hosting your own Git repo. If you can host a website you can do it. If GNOME, ReactOS, Wireguard, Linux Kernel Project, Mozilla, etc can do it, so can you. Or even use it as a backup / failsafe just in case.

But going 'all in' on GitHub just doesn't make any sense anymore.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=true&que...

2 comments

But who can host a website? I would be wary of hosting something that isn’t a 100% static site, out of fear of the amount of attention maintenance would take.

Also, quite a few of the non-profits behind the projects you mentioned have multi-million dollar budgets that they can use to administer their git instance, if needed. I don’t think “if they can do it, you can” is a strong argument for those.

I don't recall ReactOS, or the creators of wireguard having 'multi million dollar budgets'. How is it that even projects like RedoxOS [0] are able to self-host on a GitLab instance using a subdomain, without giant budgets in the millions?

You don't need a 'multi-million dollar budget' to self-host a git repo and may of these open-source projects have been doing so even before GitHub existed for years. Even if they did have such a budget, there isn't an excuse left to self-host and avoid going 'all in' on GitHub.

At the very least I would expect something like what ReactOS is doing by having a self-hosted backup just in case GitHub goes down or vice-versa. [1]

Looks like that is proving to be useful.

[0] https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os

[1] https://github.com/reactos/reactos#code-mirrors

> You don't need a 'multi-million dollar budget' to self-host a git repo

I never made that claim. The argument was “if X can do it, so can you”.

I pointed out that _some_of_these_ (Mozilla, likely the most extreme of them, had over $400 million in revenues in 2020), are quite different from the typical ‘you’, invalidating that argument.

As always, invalidating an argument doesn’t mean its conclusion is wrong.

> The argument was “if X can do it, so can you”.

So when are you going to question this user [0] and others here planning to do the same thing for not having a 'multi-million dollar budget' for self-hosting their own services then?

Since clearly according to you they 'can't do it', despite me saying 'if X can do it so can someone else'. Where 'X' can be even a toy project like RedoxOS, or a messenger project like GNU Ring hosted by themselves and accessed via a subdomain.

Seems like they and other lesser known and funded open-source projects are doing just fine like that for years.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30780874

My last bill from Hetzner was ~35€. I host gitea, drone CI, hashicorp vault and my own docker registry/pypi repository. I can add as many users as I want, and I had exactly zero incidents in the past ~6 years since I set this up.

I don't even worry about a strong backup strategy (besides just making occasional snapshots of the data volumes) because this was all set up with IaC tools (Terraform, Ansible) and I have copies of all the code in local repositories.

It's almost like people forget that git is a Distributed Version Control System, after all...
GitHub/Lab are for more than just code repo
Can project management features not be made part of a dumb repo on the db side? (Spoiler: yes, and many projects have explored this — setup unfortunately has never been as easy as "we'll invite u to the gh, check ur email".

Perhaps with decentralization push of web3/QR etc, we'll get over the hump.

I think that parent means also things like CI, release repository, PR review, etc.

These are not easily portable, but honestly is because of this lock-in that I prefer to use separate/independent tools. For my open source project [0], I am putting things on github and it is the link that give to most people, but in reality is just a mirror to the gitlab repository[1], which I use for CI and static page hosting, and the "project management" is done on Taiga [2]

  [0]: https://github.com/mushroomlabs/hub20
  [1]: https://gitlab.com/mushroomlabs/hub20/hub20
  [2]: https://tree.taiga.io/project/lullis-mushroomlabshub20