GitLab is fantastic, but GitHub has the most eyeballs and best discoverability features. As long as that remains true, GitHub will remain a better place to launch an open source product than alternatives.
This is due not only to higher traffic numbers, but also more features revolving around discoverability. GitLab could build those features too, but it’s difficult to overcome the network effect driving GitHub’s momentum. It’s especially hard because even the people who did migrate to GitLab mostly did so for the free private projects and CI. It’s unlikely many will move public repositories to GitLab now that GitHub nears feature parity in CI.
The Linux kernel does this (with a mailing list, no less!). I agree with the main thrust of your post and I suppose strong usability is arguable but I thought it would be good to throw out a (very) notable example regardless.
But you’ve got a good point that they make it work. It’s certainly possible. (And obviously Linux is an exceptional example, let’s not forget it shares a creator with git.)
If you know the basic functionality of Github, do you really have to learn to use similar functionality of Gitlab, Gitea, etc? Is it not enough to be familiar with the concepts?
Just like when people were switching from the blue e to firefox/chrome: these were different browsers, with different UI, but the concept of browsing the internet was the same. So in the end, the different UI didn't matter.
Unfortunately, you can’t outright disable GitHub’s pull requests. I’ve seen plenty of orphaned PRs on repos that do tracking/review elsewhere and people just don’t read (or actively ignore) the provided contributor guidelines.
(Ironically, there is nothing comparable on GitHub’s platform. You cannot make a fork that keeps itself up to date, for example.)
Here is how to do it: https://gist.github.com/milesrichardson/b00e2623e5f4427ec192...
Which is, well, rather the point of the sanctions.
You're being downvoted for a true statement.
There is a lot of GitLab zealousness at HN. Please don't downvote simply because you disagree over product favoritism and outlook. Offer a refutation.
One reason we ask users not to go on about downvotes is that users frequently come along and add corrective upvotes, but comments like this don't garbage-collect themselves. They start as off-topic and end by being off-topic and false.