this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Let's be honest, the majority here probably has a github account. Some of us are happy as a clam and wouldn't switch no matter what happened, but there are some who would and haven't yet. Why?

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[–] [email protected] 80 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Elon Musk buying it.

Seriously though, it would take something rather drastic. Our company briefly tried using bitbucket, but it was just worse overall. Don't touch a running system.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Elon Musk buying it.

Holy hell, you went for the jugular.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The guy owning the Xhub.com domain is rubbing his hands right now.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

He'll rename branches tubes and merge conflicts X, and with that he'll come up with the new name: xtube

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

He shouldn't be. Elon doesn't give massive payouts. If he really wanted that domain, he'd trademark it and sue the owner for it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

What's the problem with bitbucket? It's a solid... oh shit sorry atlassian is down. One moment.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I haven't had reliability issues with BitBucket. My main complaint is it's just really difficult to use.

I just find my time in GitHub is smoother and easier. For example comparing branches/tags to each other... in GitHub if you open a release from a week ago, there will be a link "this is 12 commits behind your main branch" and you can just click it to view the code in those commits.

BitBucket doesn't even have releases. They just have tags which can trigger pipelines. Functionality wise, it's the same thing. But from an ease of use perspective GitHub is so much faster and easier to navigate as long as your project follows standard branching/tagging/etc practices (which it should, especially if you're working on a team).

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Charging me 0.20 cents every time someone git clones my projects.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago

What? You can't afford 0.60 cents?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Don't forget the $2000+ per maintainer mandatory Pro subscription fee when you reach over 1 mil clones.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

It's hard to overstate the psychology behind the github profile. As a developer, your github profile shows that you're actively developing, whether it's for open source projects or for work projects. My previously company used a private gitlab install, which meant only my open source work showed up on github. My current company uses github, which means my profile shows green all the time.

We're a small company, but the github costs are a drop in the bucket. As others have said, it'd take something truly federated, or a crazy price jump from Github, for me to consider moving. It's free for my open source projects, it's a small amount for my company, and I have a public profile I can point to whenever I'm discussing my development.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

ForgeFed and whatever Gitlab is doing with the PR federation taking off.

In the meantime I make my gh account as lean as possible.

  • removed real name, photo and all links
  • profile changed to private mode
  • all gists and stars removed
  • removed most useless repos, migrated one important repo to self hosted forgejo instance, remaining 2 are laying around

I use my personal account for work, but I'd close my account and create an employer-only one if I needed to.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Federation is honestly the biggest thing that could happen to github alternatives, IMO. They can work on CICD next, but federation would be so sick.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

GitLab already has stellar CI/CD, far superior to GitHub Actions IMO

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

If GitHub changes terms of use to pay for basic stuff, or starts breaking compatibility or adding egregious bugs, I would start looking for alternatives.

A while ago I had all my personal projects on GitLab. I was a GitLab fanboy and advocated it everywhere to the point I convinced the project manager of a previous job to migrate the team's projects to it and pay for GitLab ultimate. Without going into details, that goodwill ended the moment I stumbled upon a regression introduced by GitLab which affected my personal projects, and their customer support essentially said the issue was won't fix but it was fixed in premium customers. I simply unblocked myself by moving all projects to GitHub, disabled GitLab CICD and shut down my GitLab runners, and onboarded onto a mix of GitHub Actions and CircleCI. I could still stick with GitLab, but why bother?

I would do the same to GitHub if I experienced anything remotely similar.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I don't know what Gitlab is doing. They burned so much goodwill with their recent pro-business and fuck opensource dev attitude, that I consider them dead in the water. It's a real pity because I consider their offering to be way ahead of github (project management, issue management, CICD, devops experience, etc.), but they hide it all behind Premium even on self-installs. I really want to use them because they're better and opensource, but their pricing is beyond fucked IMO.

If Codeberg were Gitlab lite and working towards implementing gitlab features, I'd use them, but they're just github lite and github is shite, IMO

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Pretty much any deterioration of service would do it, I'm not tied to github at all, it works but so does gitlab and self hosted solutions.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

I have a GitHub for commenting and contributing on GitHub

I have a Gitlab for commenting and contributing on Gitlab

I have a personal gitea instance for all my personal projects.

Honestly, the project default instance is whatever makes sense for that project.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Other hosters gaining more popularity, among other reasons, GitHub is owned by one of the worst companies around, I found Codeberg and switched there, now almost all of my projects live on Codeberg, mirrored to GitHub cause I don't expect an employer would follow a link to Codeberg if I solely include it on my CV

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Lol. I read “Other oysters gaining more popularity”, and found it very appropriate !

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

The problem is that you lose out on dev attention when moving away from github.

I moved my projects into github when placeholder projects literally containing a README with a link to the real repo only got way more interaction on github than in the real repository: More stars, more views, more issue reports and even more PRs (where the devs have obviously Cloned the repo from the actual repository but could not be arsed to push there as well).

If you want your project to be visible, it needs to be on github at this point in time:-(

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Once federation gets added to one of the FOSS, self hosted alternatives, I'll probably switch. I'll mirror stuff to github probably, for resume/recruiter purposes, but the CI/CD, website deployment, and main development will happen on whatever alternative I chose.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

My loyalty is fluid and my projects are portable

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Never had much use for an account on a public repo and started disliking GitHub once it got bought, so I'm in the third category: never had any repo on GitHub, anything marginally significant that I have (i.e. only one private repo atm) I host in Codeberg. You can follow them on the fediverse @[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The big and growing issue is that too much functionality is in GitHub and not in Git itself. So while you can move or mirror your repository very easily, moving your issue tracker or pending pull requests is a lot harder and comes with huge loss of information (e.g. there is no way to contact the submitter of a bug report, as all you get is a GitHub username, not email and GitHub doesn't even offer PMs).

That said, I'd happily ditch GitHub for anything more distributed, e.g. hosting Git repositories on IPFS, integration with git-bug, etc. You can mostly DIY that today, but a hoster that provides some free storage would be very much welcome to help with availability.

Another more basic thing I am missing today is a redirect service for repository names , having https://github.com/User/Project.git spread all over the build files makes it hard to move hosters or provide backup repositories. GNU Guix has mirror:// to solve that, but that's about the only place I can think of with mirroring build in.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I already host my projects on my own gitea server so...

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

The social aspect of GitHub is pretty important, to me, professionally.

So I'm primarily waiting for a project like GitLab to support federation.

I want to be able to work where-ever makes sense, but still have strong discovery support for all of my public work.

At the moment, that makes me a GitHub user. I'm watching for GitLab to announce activity pub support, though.

I'm also watching for GitHub to start down the venture capital enshitification route, of course.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I'm waiting for federation on gitea or radicle to figure out which direction they want to take.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, there's just not much reason to switch yet. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

(Well, maybe Copilot training, but I'm sure those dipshits at OpenAI scrape Gitlab too.)

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

The right mood and a bit of free time to start the process. I'm already planning to go Codeberg or some other Gitea instance.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't understand the question or the responses.

It's a host for code repos. I would "switch" from GitHub if the repos I need to interact with were hosted somewhere else.

How do y'all use GitHub? Is everyone running their own open source project? None of my personal projects have ever been open source before. Very few of them were even useful for anyone but myself

I've been a developer for 20 years, I've never felt dependent on public code repos for my own career before, and I would be uncomfortable if it happened. No employer has even asked for my public GitHub profile or to see my commit activity. Not even when the company hosted their code on GitHub

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Very few of them were even useful for anyone but myself

Most developers learn and grow by doing - which means learning by making mistakes, googling their error messages, and looking at examples of other people doing what they're trying to do - which is why you should always open source your code unless there's a specific reason not to. If you've ever made something that works, then your cube would be useful.

I've never felt dependent on public code repos for my own career before,

I hope you don't actually believe this. The entire Internet, and computing itself, is built on the foundation of open source. This is like saying "why do I gotta pay taxes" when you and everyone you've never met has relied on roads etc. And that's just the basic example - the real importance of, say, public education, is that, while you personally may not have used it, many many many other people have - and their education has pushed the quality of your collegues higher - which pushes you to be better, either as competition or cooperation. This is the actually accurate meaning of "the rising tide raises all ships."

Even if you've never used Linux, or any open source software at all, the rest of us have, and we're pushing your job and your career to new heights.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I already switched to Gitlab when Microsoft bought GH out. Been using it for years and have never had an issue

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Same. Our whole team switched to gitlab. The whole point of git is that it's distributed. We could host it ourselves over ssh if gitlab became a problem.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I'm not in charge of many open source projects but the last one I actually put up on gitlab instead. We use gitlab at internally at work and it's completely fine. I mostly use my github account to interact with repos that other people host on github.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I host my projects mostly on Codeberg but still keep a Github account because of the multitude of useful projects that are unfortunately hosted on GitHub. I wouldn't waste a second to delete my GH account if those projects migrated to Codeberg or any other Libre alternatives.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

All it took for me to switch to GitLab was a larger free lfs quota which I wanted for a project. The superior webpage UI made me migrate every old project to it too.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

The only reason I would switch is if the projects I contribute too would switch. I personally don't care.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I’ve been using GitLab for years. I have a GitHub account but at this point I only use it to contribute to other projects.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

With free time and some rest I’d move to sourcehut.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've never really heard of alternatives, to be honest. If others are equally easy to use and work with Git, I'd do it. Taking suggestions for alternatives?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

GitLab. You can use their SaaS offering (gitlab.com) or run the open source version on your own server(s).

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Them shutting down.

I have a couple netdevops Ansible projects there but I would not want to dilute the openAI scalping with my shitty playbooks. Not sure if the scalp private repos though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

People didn't move when it became a social network, when Microsoft bought it, or when their IA scanned the whole code to make money from open-source projects. Only Musk buying it would change that a bit, but it still wouldn't not destroy it.

As for me, I don't have an account. My personal projects stay private, and for work I have pro accounts at GitLab or Azure DevOps.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I use GitHub and GitLab about 50/50, but I'd use nothing but GitLab if forking and pull requests across platforms was near seamless.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

What did GitHub do?[serious]

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They're just a monopoly and could easily pull a Unity, Twitter, Reddit, or whatever other big service exists.

It's the implication

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