Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

The problem with consolidating everything on GitHub is that, to me, you're selling your user's and contributor's clicks. Moreover, GitHub blocks indie search crawlers, and as such is just a content silo. Now F/OSS software licenses, at least of the reciprocal kind, make very much a political statement by their license choice, willingly or not, that is questioned by using GitHub (or any other gateway cashing in on user engagement data) as project host. The really ugly and depressing thing is that F/OSS projects seek networking effects on GitHub, turning a super-powerful and easy dSCM into a centralized hub in a heartbeat; to me, they kindof devalue their own (massive) work by trading it for only the attention value it gets on GitHub, and contributing to the oligopolistic web. Hosting GPL software on GitHub is like sticking fingers in your ears, dogmatically adhering to a licensing taxonomy of yesteryear, while refusing to face today's problems. I'm not sure what incentive to go to GitHub is there for a project with a defacto closed group of developers that's been in the works for years or decades already; it's not like the project seeks indie contributors anyway. Might be better to support https://codeberg.org/ .

> Moreover, GitHub blocks indie search crawlers,

Do they have a deal with Google/Bing? Any details about this crawler block?

What is Codeberg's selling point over Gitea? I see they contribute to the community every so often, but is it just a hosted instance of Gitea? Or is there some other value-add on top of Gitea? Just curious why you wouldn't recommend donating to the Gitea community directly.

Can't say whether it's "just" a hosted version of Gitea (or gitlab), but the point is, in fact, that it's hosted, doesn't track you, and can give your project a permanent URL that isn't unfamiliar to a crowd "educated" and networked to find everything on github.

Now a better solution still would be to self-host on a proper project home page.

oh wow, this is just a straight up github clone. I actually kinda like that, it's an interface pretty much everyone is used to, and it's good too. Maybe they should change the color scheme or something a little though, so you don't forget you're not just on github, cause if I scrolled down and reopened the tab, I would definitely think I was on github

Codeberg is just a hosted Gitea instance (click help in the menu bar and it takes you to the Gitea docs).

Gitea is wonderful and definitely something you can host yourself for friends and family. I've even enabled KaTeX rendering in comments/issues/Markdown files on mine, which is something GitHub probably won't do anytime soon.

I'd definitely check it out.

oh huh, I had heard of gitea but I didn't know it was so similar to github. I may actually set up an instance for myself then, I'm using github issues for some personal stuff that isn't collaborative

It lacks search and has many bugs, I'm constantly reminded by those things that I'm not on GitHub.

It is also much faster than GitHub based on a bit of browsing i just did. Project pages, etc opened almost instantly whereas on GitHub everything takes a while to open.

they seem pretty much identical on my connection. Basically everything loads in under a second. I thinks it's probably just your connection/where you live/the path between them and you.

Hadn't heard of CodeBerg. How does it compare against SourceHut?

Codeberg looks like it’s just a hosted instance of Gitea, so it’s the same comparison between sourcehut/Gitea (which is largely the same comparison between sourcehut/GitLab/GitHub, etc)

I agree with all of the above. - The incentive for a mature project with some rogue corporate developers that are no longer idealistic is this:

1) Moving a project to GitHub ingratiates them with their puppet masters and generates a lot of billable hours.

2) Once on GitHub, these "developers" keep complicating the commit procedures so that even doc fixes look like a lot of work. More billable hours.

3) GitHub makes it easy to generate green squares for review actions. Merging a PR that another idealistic person put a lot of work in just requires a click. Half of the credit goes to the core developer. It looks as if the core "developer" is doing a lot of work.

4) If you apply the above methods, you will have green GitHub statistics and increase your market value.

pg has written about similar tactics in an essay where he explains why developers love Java. It is sad that open source is now "embraced" to such an extent that the same tactics apply there.

The idealistic developers are not political enough to prevent the bureaucrats from taking over. Also, they do not have time because they are actually writing code.

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