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?
it’s free and convenient? if there was another reliable, free git host with a polished web interface and decent cli for features like issues, sure, I’d consider moving to it. I’m not in the market though, I have other work to do
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.
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 @Codeberg@social.anoxinon.de
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.
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).
I saw in other comments that you aren’t happy with the direction GitLab is going in and feel that they’re focusing on business customers at the expense of open source users. Can you expand on that?
The project I am working on joined the GitLab for Open Source program and it was absolutely painless. All we needed to do was submit an application and now we’re using Ultimate without paying a cent.
I’m not sure it’s what you’re referring to, but one of the pain points for me is that open source projects (that don’t join the program) no longer have access to lots of free SaaS CI hours. That sucks, but I can’t blame them - they had a plague of crypto miners taking advantage of those free CI hours. It’s not reasonable to expect them to eat that cost, especially when the open source program is so easy to join.
I saw in other comments that you aren’t happy with the direction GitLab is going in and feel that they’re focusing on business customers at the expense of open source users. Can you expand on that?
Biggest pain point is contributing to projects across instances (no federation). IINM they had very few business customers asking for it and more community members asking for it --> no priority.
Then at some point they decided their main instance was costing them too much money and started limiting their offerings for open source projects. I can’t remember all the changes, but IIRC it was limiting the number of users in groups, free minutes for CICD (understandable, no problem with that), moving some basic free features into premium like protected branches, code owners, issue dependencies, epics, roadmaps, etc. . Most of those things can be acquired for free on github + some other tool like JIRA.
They put all that behind premium which once started at 20$/user and is now 29$/user! Additionally, self-hosting doesn’t solve anything as it’s still behind premium. I contribute frequently to projects on github, so my activity on gitlab was not very high, so I wouldn’t qualify for their open source program (at least I didn’t back then). Regardless, I wasn’t going to waste precious time filling out some form and possibly having to justify my activities on gitlab just to get what was free before. My prior positive tone about Gitlab soured and now I recommend people don’t use Gitlab.
Gitlab might’ve had the stuff to become a github killer, but now they’re just an expensive, inconvenient, open-source, sourceforge. Federation will get them a step closer, but if they don’t get rid of that ridiculous tiering it won’t get them more users. If I self-host, I’m offloading from their main service and get to pay them for it. No thank you.
I’m definitely not interested in convincing you to change your mind but I do want to reply to some specific items.
the number of users in groups
The only limitation I can find is that top-level groups on the free plan are limited to 5 users. Granted, there are certainly reasons to keep a group private, but public groups are not limited.
moving some basic free features into premium like protected branches, code owners, issue dependencies, epics, roadmaps
Protected branches are available for all plans. I’m pretty certain the rest of the features you mentioned were never free. You can disagree with that choice, but it is incorrect to say they were moved into premium.
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.
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
I hope that charging for basic stuff never comes. I doubt it since like the first thing MSFT did after buying it was to make some pro stuff free (like private repos)
I want to have separated accounts for different sets of project…
Signed up a second account… it got suspended instantly (after I log in with my main). According to ToS, I can’t have more than one account.
Nuh uh, You aren’t the only provider. Headed to Gitlab, no more bs.
Was this with the same email address? I have multiple accounts for personal and work. I sometimes log out of one account and into another in the same browser, and have never had a problem. Honestly never thought it’d be a big deal.
That’s hilarious because for automated access to the API, without tying to a single specific user account (for attrition purposes), my company was advised by Microsoft Support to create a service account for that API access. The process was the exact same as any other user account because… it WAS like any other user account.
Someone creates an alternative that is federated by default, like Lemmy. But additionally it is fault tolerant, i.e. if one instance goes down, my account will still live on on another, and so will the repositories and all their associated data.
I haven’t found a platform that handles issues integrated with git (as a technology) except, maybe, git-bug.
The wiki concept is simple; an external repo that’s a static site generator. All GitHub’s wiki happens to be is a fancy UI around Gollum wiki.
The protected branches and other git hooks are definitely part of the git-hooks feature that ship with the software.
Honestly, the full integration and friendliness to self-hosting had me seriously looking at Fossil, until I saw some opinions I couldn’t get on board with (e.g., automatically pushing to/pulling from remote on every commit)
Try actually working on 5 different Gitlab instances and you will soon notice that there is in fact a really big difference between federation and decentralization.
You need a new account for every single server. And if you don’t want email notifications you’d have to manually check all of them to see if there are issues relevant for you.
Though for what it’s worth Gitlab is actually looking into potentially supporting ActivityPub in the future!
Try actually working on 5 different Gitlab instances and you will soon notice that there is in fact a really big difference between federation and decentralization.
This is my biggest problem with Gitlab and github alternatives. Multiple accounts on every single instance you want to contribute to. It’s a pain
Though for what it’s worth Gitlab is actually looking into potentially supporting ActivityPub in the future!
Gitlab could’ve worked on federation years ago, but they sat on their hands for at least 7 years until an external contributor decided he would implement it. Good on the dude, but fuck gitlab for being so passive about it for all these years.
This is my biggest problem with Gitlab and github alternatives. Multiple accounts on every single instance you want to contribute to. It’s a pain
Wah really? I contribute to, like countless projects on github. Sometimes just a comment in a discussion or a single line pull request and then never again… gitlab sounds horrible.
Yep, they completely ignored that aspect for maybe a decade. One poor, unaffiliated dude is finally taking it upon himself to implement it while Gitlab engineers cheer him on. IMO it’s their biggest oversight and misprioritisation.
My account has not seen a single commit in years now, and yet I can let it go… I still “need” it for support on an old project of mine that I share with other people, and to submit changes for projects I care about which are only on GitHub.
I also keep my account for name squatting purposes, and so people can find the link to my actual repo.
I don’t think I’ll go all the way to delete my account, but my projects are definitely not reliant on it anymore.
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.
I know this will come as a shock to a lot of people, but a lot of software doesn’t do CI/CD. Especially CD. Basically only webapps can do CD, although Dropbox is close with weekly releases. A lot of enterprise and industry software still does quarterly or even semiannual releases. Hospitals, banks, and government agencies in particular have stringent vetting procedures that mean they can spend months verifying and approving a new major version before upgrading, so there’s no point throwing one at them every couple weeks.
CD == Continuous Delivery, which can also mean publishing a new “release candidate” artifact. Maybe there is a more stringent QA system downstream, such as QA teams after a car gets a firmware update to that release candidate.
A lot of enterprise and industry software […] have stringent vetting procedures that mean they can spend months verifying and approving a new major version before upgrading
This happens on the consumer side too, with risk averse customers, even if they adopt a continuous delivery paradigm upstream. It’s also a common argument against a rapid release model, but is often dismantled when appropriate, automated safeguards are put in place. Not always possible to automate everything, due to regulations, but automating the bulk of the tests are in everyone’s best interests.
How are those tests triggered? On developer machines? Not very reliable that a human will remember to execute them, even if it was possible to run them all from a workstation. That’s why there’s a bastion host or, hopefully, set of hosts to run those tests and builds. That’s the CI/CD system. That’s the value.
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it’s free and convenient? if there was another reliable, free git host with a polished web interface and decent cli for features like issues, sure, I’d consider moving to it. I’m not in the market though, I have other work to do
also the github actions workflows are brilliant.
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.
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.
Do you contribute to opensource?
Yes but not through GitHub.
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.
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 @Codeberg@social.anoxinon.de
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.
Holy hell, you went for the jugular.
The guy owning the Xhub.com domain is rubbing his hands right now.
He’ll rename branches tubes and merge conflicts X, and with that he’ll come up with the new name: xtube
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.
What’s the problem with bitbucket? It’s a solid… oh shit sorry atlassian is down. One moment.
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).
They don’t even have syntax highlighting on pull requests. Like the fuck
People also said that when Microsoft bought them. In the end it didn’t really make a dent in their user numbers
My one-man software development company is using bitbucket along with a local mirror (with Gitea).
ForgeFed and whatever Gitlab is doing with the PR federation taking off.
In the meantime I make my gh account as lean as possible.
I use my personal account for work, but I’d close my account and create an employer-only one if I needed to.
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.
GitLab already has stellar CI/CD, far superior to GitHub Actions IMO
Ah, I meant other alternatives besides gitlab. I agree that gitlab CICD (even their UI) is leagues ahead of github.
I saw in other comments that you aren’t happy with the direction GitLab is going in and feel that they’re focusing on business customers at the expense of open source users. Can you expand on that?
The project I am working on joined the GitLab for Open Source program and it was absolutely painless. All we needed to do was submit an application and now we’re using Ultimate without paying a cent.
I’m not sure it’s what you’re referring to, but one of the pain points for me is that open source projects (that don’t join the program) no longer have access to lots of free SaaS CI hours. That sucks, but I can’t blame them - they had a plague of crypto miners taking advantage of those free CI hours. It’s not reasonable to expect them to eat that cost, especially when the open source program is so easy to join.
Biggest pain point is contributing to projects across instances (no federation). IINM they had very few business customers asking for it and more community members asking for it --> no priority.
Then at some point they decided their main instance was costing them too much money and started limiting their offerings for open source projects. I can’t remember all the changes, but IIRC it was limiting the number of users in groups, free minutes for CICD (understandable, no problem with that), moving some basic free features into premium like protected branches, code owners, issue dependencies, epics, roadmaps, etc. . Most of those things can be acquired for free on github + some other tool like JIRA.
They put all that behind premium which once started at 20$/user and is now 29$/user! Additionally, self-hosting doesn’t solve anything as it’s still behind premium. I contribute frequently to projects on github, so my activity on gitlab was not very high, so I wouldn’t qualify for their open source program (at least I didn’t back then). Regardless, I wasn’t going to waste precious time filling out some form and possibly having to justify my activities on gitlab just to get what was free before. My prior positive tone about Gitlab soured and now I recommend people don’t use Gitlab.
Gitlab might’ve had the stuff to become a github killer, but now they’re just an expensive, inconvenient, open-source, sourceforge. Federation will get them a step closer, but if they don’t get rid of that ridiculous tiering it won’t get them more users. If I self-host, I’m offloading from their main service and get to pay them for it. No thank you.
I’m definitely not interested in convincing you to change your mind but I do want to reply to some specific items.
The only limitation I can find is that top-level groups on the free plan are limited to 5 users. Granted, there are certainly reasons to keep a group private, but public groups are not limited.
Protected branches are available for all plans. I’m pretty certain the rest of the features you mentioned were never free. You can disagree with that choice, but it is incorrect to say they were moved into premium.
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.
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
I hope that charging for basic stuff never comes. I doubt it since like the first thing MSFT did after buying it was to make some pro stuff free (like private repos)
I want to have separated accounts for different sets of project…
Signed up a second account… it got suspended instantly (after I log in with my main). According to ToS, I can’t have more than one account.
Nuh uh, You aren’t the only provider. Headed to Gitlab, no more bs.
Was this with the same email address? I have multiple accounts for personal and work. I sometimes log out of one account and into another in the same browser, and have never had a problem. Honestly never thought it’d be a big deal.
No. Maybe it flagged dynamic IP as spam or whatever. At this point I don’t really care. Got what I want.
That’s hilarious because for automated access to the API, without tying to a single specific user account (for attrition purposes), my company was advised by Microsoft Support to create a service account for that API access. The process was the exact same as any other user account because… it WAS like any other user account.
I use it for work so to entirely leave it they’d have to move away. That seems unlikely.
Someone creates an alternative that is federated by default, like Lemmy. But additionally it is fault tolerant, i.e. if one instance goes down, my account will still live on on another, and so will the repositories and all their associated data.
This is the world I want to live in.
Self-host your git repo.
git is already decentralized.
I’d have to assume they mean the features of Github like pull requests, issue tracking, wikis, etc that aren’t part of the git
All of those features are very poorly implemented by GitHub. There are many other platforms which do a better job and can integrate with git.
And can integrate with git? Examples?
I haven’t found a platform that handles issues integrated with git (as a technology) except, maybe,
git-bug.The wiki concept is simple; an external repo that’s a static site generator. All GitHub’s wiki happens to be is a fancy UI around Gollum wiki.
The protected branches and other git hooks are definitely part of the git-hooks feature that ship with the software.
Honestly, the full integration and friendliness to self-hosting had me seriously looking at Fossil, until I saw some opinions I couldn’t get on board with (e.g., automatically pushing to/pulling from remote on every commit)
Gitea, loads of Atlassian products like Jira and Confluence, Reviewable, Gerrit, Jenkins - and that’s just off the top of my head while I type.
Try actually working on 5 different Gitlab instances and you will soon notice that there is in fact a really big difference between federation and decentralization.
You need a new account for every single server. And if you don’t want email notifications you’d have to manually check all of them to see if there are issues relevant for you.
Though for what it’s worth Gitlab is actually looking into potentially supporting ActivityPub in the future!
This is my biggest problem with Gitlab and github alternatives. Multiple accounts on every single instance you want to contribute to. It’s a pain
Gitlab could’ve worked on federation years ago, but they sat on their hands for at least 7 years until an external contributor decided he would implement it. Good on the dude, but fuck gitlab for being so passive about it for all these years.
Wah really? I contribute to, like countless projects on github. Sometimes just a comment in a discussion or a single line pull request and then never again… gitlab sounds horrible.
Yep, they completely ignored that aspect for maybe a decade. One poor, unaffiliated dude is finally taking it upon himself to implement it while Gitlab engineers cheer him on. IMO it’s their biggest oversight and misprioritisation.
I use GitHub as an off-site backup for personal projects for over a decade now. I don’t think I’ll be moving away for any reason.
Killer feature of gitlab that I have yet to see replicated is automatic repo creation on git push. This makes GitLab my go-to for this role.
My account has not seen a single commit in years now, and yet I can let it go… I still “need” it for support on an old project of mine that I share with other people, and to submit changes for projects I care about which are only on GitHub.
I also keep my account for name squatting purposes, and so people can find the link to my actual repo.
I don’t think I’ll go all the way to delete my account, but my projects are definitely not reliant on it anymore.
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.
It would take a lot to get me to start using it. Git is great, and GitHub is a mess.
What are you on now? Codeberg?
Self-hosted Gitea.
What do you use for CICD? And AFAIK federation hasn’t been implemented yet, right?
I know this will come as a shock to a lot of people, but a lot of software doesn’t do CI/CD. Especially CD. Basically only webapps can do CD, although Dropbox is close with weekly releases. A lot of enterprise and industry software still does quarterly or even semiannual releases. Hospitals, banks, and government agencies in particular have stringent vetting procedures that mean they can spend months verifying and approving a new major version before upgrading, so there’s no point throwing one at them every couple weeks.
CD == Continuous Delivery, which can also mean publishing a new “release candidate” artifact. Maybe there is a more stringent QA system downstream, such as QA teams after a car gets a firmware update to that release candidate.
This happens on the consumer side too, with risk averse customers, even if they adopt a continuous delivery paradigm upstream. It’s also a common argument against a rapid release model, but is often dismantled when appropriate, automated safeguards are put in place. Not always possible to automate everything, due to regulations, but automating the bulk of the tests are in everyone’s best interests.
How are those tests triggered? On developer machines? Not very reliable that a human will remember to execute them, even if it was possible to run them all from a workstation. That’s why there’s a bastion host or, hopefully, set of hosts to run those tests and builds. That’s the CI/CD system. That’s the value.