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?
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.
Elon Musk buying it.
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
They recently added it as a experimental feature and it has been working fairly well, at least for Java. As far as I recall, each user needs to activate it themselves via settings. Far from optimal but better than nothing.
My one-man software development company is using bitbucket along with a local mirror (with Gitea).
People also said that when Microsoft bought them. In the end it didn’t really make a dent in their user numbers
Charging me 0.20 cents every time someone git clones my projects.
What? You can’t afford 0.60 cents?
Don’t forget the $2000+ per maintainer mandatory Pro subscription fee when you reach over 1 mil clones.
It’s hard to overstate the psychology behind the github profile. As a developer, your github profile shows that you’re actively developing, whether it’s for open source projects or for work projects. My previously company used a private gitlab install, which meant only my open source work showed up on github. My current company uses github, which means my profile shows green all the time.
We’re a small company, but the github costs are a drop in the bucket. As others have said, it’d take something truly federated, or a crazy price jump from Github, for me to consider moving. It’s free for my open source projects, it’s a small amount for my company, and I have a public profile I can point to whenever I’m discussing my development.
ForgeFed and whatever Gitlab is doing with the PR federation taking off.
In the meantime I make my gh account as lean as possible.
- removed real name, photo and all links
- profile changed to private mode
- all gists and stars removed
- removed most useless repos, migrated one important repo to self hosted forgejo instance, remaining 2 are laying around
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.
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.
I dunno, it’s been a while since I looked at the stuff in depth. They are definitely not fresh in my memory. What really stuck with me were my negative feelings towards Gitlab. Maybe someday they’ll pop up in my life again and surprise me 🤷
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)
Pretty much any deterioration of service would do it, I’m not tied to github at all, it works but so does gitlab and self hosted solutions.
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.
Other hosters gaining more popularity, among other reasons, GitHub is owned by one of the worst companies around, I found Codeberg and switched there, now almost all of my projects live on Codeberg, mirrored to GitHub cause I don’t expect an employer would follow a link to Codeberg if I solely include it on my CV
Lol. I read “Other oysters gaining more popularity”, and found it very appropriate !
Same. Shame though they may still probably have the audacity to use mirrors for non-consensual copilot training.
The problem is that you lose out on dev attention when moving away from github.
I moved my projects into github when placeholder projects literally containing a README with a link to the real repo only got way more interaction on github than in the real repository: More stars, more views, more issue reports and even more PRs (where the devs have obviously Cloned the repo from the actual repository but could not be arsed to push there as well).
If you want your project to be visible, it needs to be on github at this point in time:-(
Once federation gets added to one of the FOSS, self hosted alternatives, I’ll probably switch. I’ll mirror stuff to github probably, for resume/recruiter purposes, but the CI/CD, website deployment, and main development will happen on whatever alternative I chose.
I already host my projects on my own gitea server so…
Same. I don’t use all the bells and whistles that others provide and gitea just works!
Do you collaborate with others? If so, how? And what do you use for CI(CD)?
I’m not OP but I use Woodpecker CI, also self hosted. Gitea is also working on Gitea Actions which are supposed to be compatible with Github Actions, but I think it’s still on beta.
Ive been using it for a few months now, and its probably more than 95% compatible, and closing the gap quickly
They are working on ActivityPub integration so you can work together with people on other instances.
I don’t collaborate with others on my private projects. But if I would, then I would just invite people to register themselves on my instance like they would on github, gitlab, bitbucket etc.
I have yet to deploy my pages via CI/CD but thats a project I want to do eventually :)
My loyalty is fluid and my projects are portable
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 @[email protected]
The big and growing issue is that too much functionality is in GitHub and not in Git itself. So while you can move or mirror your repository very easily, moving your issue tracker or pending pull requests is a lot harder and comes with huge loss of information (e.g. there is no way to contact the submitter of a bug report, as all you get is a GitHub username, not email and GitHub doesn’t even offer PMs).
That said, I’d happily ditch GitHub for anything more distributed, e.g. hosting Git repositories on IPFS, integration with
git-bug, etc. You can mostly DIY that today, but a hoster that provides some free storage would be very much welcome to help with availability.Another more basic thing I am missing today is a redirect service for repository names , having
https://github.com/User/Project.gitspread all over the build files makes it hard to move hosters or provide backup repositories. GNU Guix hasmirror://to solve that, but that’s about the only place I can think of with mirroring build in.The social aspect of GitHub is pretty important, to me, professionally.
So I’m primarily waiting for a project like GitLab to support federation.
I want to be able to work where-ever makes sense, but still have strong discovery support for all of my public work.
At the moment, that makes me a GitHub user. I’m watching for GitLab to announce activity pub support, though.
I’m also watching for GitHub to start down the venture capital enshitification route, of course.
