[Daeraxa]

Re: GitHub alternatives, I've been looking at this for a while as I'm keen to not have everything centralised and Microsoft are hardly the most trustworthy...

There are some GithHub-alikes, the most obvious is GitLab which you can also host yourself but all (or at least some of) the extras you get for free with GitHub are behind payment walls.

My current favourite is Codeberg, it uses Forgejo underneath (which is a fork of Gitea itself a fork of Gogs - all of which you can self host). Codeberg is run by a non-profit and are very much aligned with my ideals. They are also slowly adding nice features like their Woodpecker CI.

One that is growing in popularity and is a little less "GitHub-y" is SourceHut (which also has Mercurial support).

The main issue is that GitHub has really cornered the market. They give so much out for free that is difficult for others to compete with and it has become the de-facto place to host your project. This can mean that hosting anywhere other than GitHub will limit discoverability and contributions from people if they don't want to make an account or work out how to deal with whatever forge you are using.

However one thing that is coming that may help alleviate some of that is forge federation which will allow you to interact with various forges from your "home" forge - which hopefully prevents the need to make an account to make PRs or raise issues.

Edit: I see your other comment now, what could a better GitHub be that supports a better-than-git VCS. Well there did used to be places to host Darcs projects like the Darcs Hub but I don't know if some of the newers ones like Pijul or Jujutsu have any forge support yet.

Edit2: Oh it seems Pijul has "The Nest" for hosting.

[martinvonz]

Because Jujutsu is Git-compatible, there are lots of supported forges (GitHub, GitLab, etc.).

There's no native forge yet.

[Daeraxa]

Yeah I know it will work with the git backend, still not sure what the native backend can/will bring, documentation on it seems to be pretty sparse.

[martinvonz]

Good point, we might want to document that. Btw, I've called it "native backend" and "native forge" myself, but maybe those are not the best terms because there are many possible native backends/forges.

For example, our "Piper" backend at Google is a native backend in the sense that it stores all data in its own database. I think the most exciting thing about that backend is that it's cloud-based so users will be able to access each others' commits (e.g. `jj show <commit id from chat>`) without requiring a push.