← Back to context

Comment by kstrauser

15 hours ago

> But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated.

I've moved my projects over to my own personal Forgejo (when I don't care about collaborating on them) and Codeberg (when I do). I find that ecosystem vastly simpler in the common ways that matter. For instance, viewing large diffs and syntax highlighted files is unbelievably faster, about as fast as GitHub's use to be before it was "improved".

For every way I use those forges as a solo or small-group contributor, the alternatives are as good as or better than GitHub today. Some product manager could become a company legend by figuring out how and why that is, then getting someone to do something about it.

3 comments

kstrauser

Reply
rob74  4 hours ago

Yes, sure! OP didn't say that there aren't alternatives or that the alternatives aren't any good, they just said that GitHub is so huge it will probably continue to remain relevant, no matter how bad it gets. And they have a point - X is one example, but even SourceForge (remember SourceForge?) is still around, despite being an undeniably shitty platform that tried to install adware on their user's computers.

  • kstrauser  2 hours ago

    But OP did say the alternatives were “so much more complicated”. If you showed a new dev both GitHub and Forgejo, I’m not sure they’d notice the differences other than the latter being much faster for many common operations. It and Codeberg aren’t more complicated in any tangible way.

    If GitHub’s internal thinking were “well at least we’re easier than Codeberg”, then they may find that the moat isn’t nearly so deep as they might hope.