Microsoft acquired GitHub and applied their unique brand of enshittification. Amongst their achievements was the spawning of the Copilot circle of hell. Now they’re effectively DDoSing themselves with slop. I won’t dwell on what else went wrong. I don’t know and I don’t care. GitHub is impressively bad now. It’s embarrassing. Shameful.
↫ David Bushell
Luckily, there’s really very little in the form of lock-in with GitHub, unless you really value your stars or whatever. There are countless alternatives, and if you’re a programmer, it’s probably absolutely trivial for you to run your own instance of any of the various available forges. If you’re still on GitHub, you should really be thinking about, and planning for, leaving, as it seems it’s circling the drain.
The github lock-in is all the actions and data living along side the repo.
Exactly. For example, GitLab CI does not offer the same level of automation features as GitHub Actions, especially for public repos without a large internal infrastructure. GitLab needs runners to be self-hosted, which, for some projects, is prohibitive. The same goes for other solutions like CircleCI, where you quickly need a paying solution. GitHub hosts its management runners, which help, for example, create installers/wheels for a wide variety of target platforms. Moving a code-only repo is definitely easy to do; moving one that depends heavily on deployment capabilities is a bit harder :(.
Exactly. It’s the issues, the PRs, the group permissions, the CI workflows that test the code and then build and publish the releases. It’s the logins for crates.io and countless other services. It’s the old discussion threads from working group meetings. The project planner with all the milestones and the tags.
Replacing GitHub with a random git code forge is like replacing Microsoft Office with Wordpad. Yeah you can still type stuff in, but your workflow has gone to hell and you can’t see any of your old documents. Technically all the data is there and readable, like a docx file, but who really can make perfect sense of it without messing up the meaning in some important way?
I’m trying and all the alternatives are just worse in so many ways. And yet staying is untenable.
Agreed,
For someone with basic needs like git push / git clone and an online viewer, any other alternative will also do fine.
But if you have a larger project, there are few alternatives to github, and most likely people don’t even know about them, let alone pay for an open source project.
And so o GitLab it seems. They’ve just announced a major restructuring thats AI centric.
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/
> there’s really very little in the form of lock-in with GitHub
I wish that this were so, but migrating CI off of gh actions to somewhere else can be an absolutely mammoth undertaking when working on larger projects.
I am still rooting for self hosted forgejo as the future, but it’s going to be a very difficult shift to do well and maintain CI
darkgreen,
That usually requires and entire “devops” team, or … of course a very skilled and dedicated engineer.
Github made those things pretty straightforward. And it would be difficult to move off of it.
(Though ironically, this very thing is causing their headache. Those 1 PR per month open source repos now get tens of PRs per day from volunteers. Good luck processing that much server side python and shell scripts)