[bix6]

What happened to hacker culture? Did everyone (or enough) just sell out?

It’s fascinating to me that the people who know the most about tech keep deciding over and over to give something to some corporation and inevitably it becomes an issue. I guess ease of use and freemium really trumps everything; I expect more from smart people but money talks.

[themafia]

I suggested we move off of github to avoid issues about a year ago. Every developer on my team looked at me like I grew a second head.

Just because you're a developer doesn't mean you're a hacker or you care for the craft on any level.

The wild west days are over.

[physicles]

It’s not about ease of use and freemium, it’s the strong network economies at play, just like credit cards or social networks. It’s impossible for a competing product to get traction if it’s merely a little better than GitHub.

[ivanjermakov]

Nobody wants to pay for git hosting. Seems like nobody wants to self-host it either.

[jbvlkt]

I am self hosting forgejo on my synology NAS. It is easier than it looks. Synology provides me access from the internet so I do not need static IP address. It took me at most 20 minutes to write (copy paste) docker compose file to make it run and another hour to import repositories from github and gitlab. Only maintenance I do is update to new version once a while which takes about 5 minutes. You can set it up to sync repositories back to code forges.

If you do not have a lot of users you can easily set it up too.

[suobset]

Codeberg and Gitlab exist though. The problem is the inertia. Tons of repositories in GitHub from way before MS acquired them, which makes most people use GitHub, which makes most software projects choose GitHub.

Heck, GH Stars are used as a vanity metric for a lot of projects.

[zephen]

> Codeberg and Gitlab exist though.

Soooo...

Let me preface this by saying this is an old (so things are different) anecdote (which is not the singular of data), but...

a) I had never heard of codeberg.

b) My company used an on-prem gitlab instance, and it sucked donkey dicks.

For example, the equivalent of just putting a statically generated site into github pages required running a fucking production pipe.

You should make the easy things easy and the hard things possible. Making the easy things hard is an immediate red flag.

> The problem is the inertia.

Oh, don't worry about that. Github is working diligently to fix that problem. The question is, are the alternatives worthwhile?

[hluska]

You sound pleasant.

[nullsex]

Codeberg only serves a small subset of what Github does.

Pitching them as a no-brain replacement and advising people to move all their personal repos over is abusive towards Codeberg.

For community-facing FLOSS it is good. For other uses you need to look elsewhere. Forgejo, which is what Codeberg ises, is easy to self-host and other providers exist.

https://sr.ht is more open and has paid options.

[vinnymac]

I’m actively working on a free and open source alternative Frontend for Forgejo that I self host called Joui

[astrolx]

Hosting forgejo on a cheap Hetzner server is the best and easiest trick that happened in my work life these last years !

[AlienRobot]

I saw a thumbnail on Youtube that said "GitHub is killing open source" and I think the sheer wrongness of the statement surmises the entire idea very well.

There are many things that I don't like about Github, but I think the most important one is that Github doesn't allow users to have multiple free accounts.

You can create as many accounts as you want on Reddit, have as many blogs as you want on Tumblr, and even create multiple personae on Facebook on a single account, but Github doesn't allow you to do any of that.

You can't be a "hacker" platform when you give users less control over their privacy than Facebook provides.

I assume that is a bigger problem when you consider everyone decided to stop hosting their own forum and moving all their discussion to Github issues and Github's built-in forum.