Comment by atonse
17 hours ago
During one of the x threads where Mitchell was (legitimately) complaining about Github, there were a couple replies suggesting that GitHub should hire him to be their CEO.
And I remember seeing that and thinking "huh... not at all a bad idea."
There is a specific kind of leader that can turn such ships around, and they are strong in their convictions, and aren't just "managers", but visionaries coupled with strong execution and power to attract talent.
I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub.
The problem is that Github does a lot.
However, I consider that there is still not a great UI for the core service, in special for a complex project.
In the other hand, I bet jujutsu has the best basic take, and is still missing a good forge.
But how much of that do people actually need? Most users don’t use most features. The core MVP is not that big.
Does it do anything that GitLab does not?
With what I heard about GitHub Actions, the GitLab CI pipelines should be much better.
Not that I haven’t shot myself in the foot with GitLab pipelines on numerous occasions.
Xit has a better “take” on Git. Pijul & Darcs still have better fundamentals.
Unfortunately, naming things is hard, and JujitsuHub just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way that GitHub does. jjhub? forgesu?
Dojo is such an obvious thing, but its such an obvious thing that there are dozens of software trying to call themselves that.
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You just don't have to think about it too hard:
jjplace/jjhub/codetown, whatever. Doesn't matter.
Names don't matter that much for brands. Names just have to be simple enough to remember (ideally two syllables or less). What the heck does Nike mean, for example? Boeing is just someone's name. Microsoft is just two words smashed together. A brand's name literally doesn't matter.
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you don't have to name your forge after the VCS it's based off of.
JujutsuJunction (Ju³), obviously.
JitHub.
("Please don't sue us.")
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jub
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Maybe it's time for fossil to get another look... It's effectively distributed code, wiki, and issues all using the same tool.
Every time Fossil comes up, people's big objection is that you can't squash commits. Personally, I'm fine with that - I tend to agree with Hipp that the repo history should not sacrifice truth for the sake of pettiness in the timeline. But a lot of people seem to disagree, which limits the audience for Fossil. I use Fossil for my own projects but I wouldn't expect it to become big like git is.
> GitHub should hire him to be their CEO
And then impose the same requirements that killed GitHub in the first place.
- "Ok guys first thing is move off Azure and ditch Copilot to get back to the level of stability we had before all that mess"
- "Uuh, no"
Be a pretty quick story
The problem is that what users want GitHub to be and what their owners (Microsoft) want them to be are disjoint.
If AI replaces software development the way that big tech company management wants it to, maybe they'll converge again. In the mean time, people want a git remote and they're getting an unstable host diluted with some flaky vibecoding bullshit.
Gitlab is pretty cool to be honest, and it’s generally underrated.
I agree, but it does have faults. Performance is woeful, and managing an on-prem instance is (literally) a full time job.
> managing an on-prem instance is (literally) a full time job.
Hosting a Docker container is a full-time job? I have worked at several employers self-hosting their own instances without issues or a lot of effort. Many FOSS projects do, that definitely do not have a full-time guy for that. What are you talking about?
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yeah that is true. i did manage a gitlab instance for ~100 developers (between 2019 and 2022) and yeah performance was shit. not gonna lie, i blame ruby for that.
if you accept the performance hit, it's great quality software though.
however, a fairly large company with 100-120 users (developers, devops engineers, QAs etc) and ~600 gitlab runners ran happily on a 8 core / 64gb virtual machine (hosted on a local vmware cluster).
so it is (was?) also fairly cheap.
He would pull them away from co-pilot and the unlimited spigot of money that agentic coding brings, which is contrary to the best interests of Microsfot.
I'm still holding out hope for distributed and federated git forges. The only compelling reason for everyone to centralize on GitHub is collaboration on issues/PRs without everyone allowing signups on their self-hosted forges. That could be achieved without hosting every line of code everyone's ever written in the same crumbling infrastructure.
It'll probably never happen. But it'd be really nice if it did.
Jeremie (of XMPP) has a neat project, v-it, which uses atproto (Bluesky) to let people socialize their changes to projects. https://v-it.org/
It's a bit short of actual PRs, but in some ways, especially with agents, the lo-fi approach has some advantages.
Interesting project, thanx.
Also nice language evolutions: "socialize their changes to projects", "lo-fi approach" :)
> I'm still holding out hope for distributed and federated git forges.
Do you know that you can just send a patch via email (assuming you're not using the gmail web client)? You can even save the diff on some hosting website and send the link via any text medium.
I say this as someone who actually ran mailservers for about 25 years, who can telnet to port 25 and type SMTP to send an email, and who is hugely found of plaintext: I'd rather quit coding than move to that workflow. I loathe every bit of the pipeline of getting a clean patch from machine A to machine B, where I control at most one of them, and having it come out the other side with the same SHA256 digest. I don't look down on people who prefer it: to each their own! But I'll never in a million years understand it. Say what you will about the GitHub-style PR process, and there's plenty to say about it!, but there's a reason that devs outside LKML and the *BSD mailing lists pretty much immediately leapt onto GitHub the moment it became widely known. It was a revelation.
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> I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub.
Really? I can only think of two: Codeberg and Sourceforge. Which are both great, but that's not what I'd call "many".
Gitlab? Three distinct codebases is quite a lot to be honest. Especially when Forgejo has the lineage of Gitea and Gogs in its wake.
At least as far as I can tell, Gitlab seems to be used a lot more than the other two. I don't think I've ever gone to a page for a SourceForge project that was created after maybe 2012 or so, and although it's possible I've looked at a project on Codeberg or Forgejo, I can't think of a single one off the top of my head. Meanwhile, I've run into projects on Gitlab (either gitlab.com itself or a self-hosted version) at multiple employers and various Linux codebases and packages (Plasma and Gnome desktop environments and other various windowing-related software, Arch Linux package sources, etc.).
I guess it's possible that my experience is wildly different than others, but if we're talking about volume of usage today rather than individual preferences, it's kind of shocking for me that someone wouldn't think to reference Gitlab at all in the list of potential successors, let alone not mention it literally first.
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Gitlab's interface makes me want to cry every time I have to use it. I would not recommend it to someone who misses classic GitHub. Codeberg/Forgejo/Gitea would be a much better match.
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Doh, I completely forgot about GitLab. OK so that's 3 services. I'm only counting hosted services that aim at serving all comers and providing an entire platform similar to GitHub. Individual disconnected instances, while useful, aren't a replacement for the social aspect of GitHub.
Gitlab, Bitbucket, Gitea
Oh, I'd forgotten about GitLab and Bitbucket. How is Bitbucket doing these days?
Sourceforge???
I am pretty sure they were talking about sourcehut...
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