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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

Github is not a programming tool. Github is a social network. It's value is that it has network effect dominance. That's why microsoft bought it. That's why people use it. I don't see many uses for this if it doesn't allow for stuff like federating to re-achieve the social network aspect outside of network effect centralization.

I suppose if you're a small group of people that don't need github's main feature (other people) and just want a local github-alike for playing it's cool. But why not just git then?

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On the contrary I think "source control with a nice web UI and no social network" is a category of product that a definite part of the market wants. Look at projects that choose to be "open source, but not open contribution" like SQLite--they don't want a free-for-all drive-by pull request community. They want a way to publish code for all to see and consume, yet be maintained entirely by a single or core set of contributors.

Github's popularity is proof enough in itself that the vast majority want the social network of Github.

That's certainly one use case, but most definitely not the only one. There are tons of corporate customers who use Github and don't give 2 shits about the larger social network aspect of it (I mean, for one, just think of all the users that use on-prem Github).

> Github is a social network

Is it? I would have said it was a collaborative tool. I don't use it to 'socialise' and 'chat' with other users. I use it to thrash out PRs.

But I do agree with the gist of what you're saying.

Very much a social network. Look at your profile/activity feed and how it gamifies contributions with the activity chart (the more you do across github, the more it lights up). Github project stars are just the same as FB likes. Or how they prominently put fork buttons on every repo that immediately clone and copy a fork of the project to your repo. Or that github has an entirely new inbox of messages and issue replies to deal with (and all the issues of potential harassment, etc. that come with that honestly).

> GitHub is a social network

Yes indeed social network like Facebook, which can stop access to repository or code based on DMCA. It pose many serious risks, given a lot of open source code is under control of a single corporate entity.

Hopefully social model evolves and become fully distributed which is the fundamental basis of git/hg/fossil and other distributed version control.

Today all the necessary technology is available, needs an effort to integrate them and bring back the self-hosted alternative which automatically forms a distributed social network to collaborate on code.

GitHub is a social network - with far better UI/Ux than all the other social networks other open source software tries to use. It is also the location from which many packages do their releases and a very helpful tool when managing large scale projects (usually). GitHub also provides a self-hosted version, but imo they are slow with feature delivery in some cases and an open source project that really dug in would be great.

I know about gitlab et al, but nothing really quite creeps up to the same level of GitHub

We use something similar to this for a team of 5. We can coordinate about 30 repos, manage issues, have deployment from source mechanisms and so on. It's definitely got a use.

Personally I would be much too cool to actually socialize on GitHub.

I must admit there is a use case for something like that, though I also must admit that I personally feel the same

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