cloudskaterProgrammers, can you inform me why people still use github? Its owned by Microsoft, promotes AI garbage, and that alone kind of makes it shitty as a place to host open source stuff in my book. As a simple plebian, am I missing something? I don't code, so does it offer something that other platforms don't?
Glyph1. access to a network of existing developers orders of magnitude larger than anything else. it's like telling advertisers to "just stop using instagram and facebook"
2. tens of thousands of dollars worth—per project, per month—of free compute for continuous integration and quality assurance
it is difficult to overstate the amount of value that github provides. I agree that its problems are distressing, and getting worse, but it has a *long* way to fall before it's not worth it
@cloudskater like if you gave me a budget of a million dollars to move all my stuff off of github — just to pay for resources, not to pay for my own time — I'm not sure that I could do it without massively sacrificing on quality and ease of ongoing maintenance for the project's own infrastructure. after all that work, time, and ongoing expense, the main reward would be that most contributors would start ignoring it and we would not receive any further volunteer work.
@cloudskater there's also a bunch of other stuff like the fact that service providers which do things like track code coverage or performance regressions all have GitHub apps and often have very low levels of support, or no support at all, for other forges. but I won't belabor that point since I don't want to be just doing an ad read for GitHub here. I think it's great that smaller projects with less of a CI footprint *are* moving, I feel like it's a sacrifice they are making to help all of us
pmonks (330ppm)@cloudskater Can’t speak for anyone else, but in my own case it’s solely due to switching costs. I do intend to switch, but it needs to be at a time when I have nothing more pressing and can afford to waste a few days moving all my projects to something else.
@pmonks @cloudskater "a few days" is definitely a programmerly level of optimism about even just the switching costs for most projects :)
@glyph @cloudskater Ha you’re probably right. I’m trying to drum up some enthusiasm for this thankless task, and lying to myself about probable duration is part of that! 😜
It would be so nice if we lived in a world where corporations didn’t constantly enshittify everything they touched. *sigh*
@pmonks So what is the cost of switching? For all I know it's as simple as changing where you upload your projects to. I have no idea how much effort it would take to move a project to another platform, nor why it would cost anything other then time.
@cloudskater Moving the source code is the easy bit (assuming I stick with git as the SCM). It’s porting all of the other parts of GitHub project hosting (CI, wikis, issues, docs hosting, etc.) that aren’t.
And yes, most of the switching costs are indeed incurred as time. I have finite amounts of that, and there are always opportunity costs to be considered when choosing how I might spend it.
Owen@cloudskater it took me months to go from "I should get my projects off of github" to actually moving them, and my level of use of their non-git features - from pull requests to actions - was always very modest. There's a ton of overhead in finding another place to host stuff, transferring repos, updating web pages and configurations to refer to the new location, et multiple cetera. It's a ton of work, in return for basically the status quo (minus the high-pressure AI upsell).
@cloudskater For folks that use Actions, it's hell. Actions is an entirely proprietary execution environment, even though it's made of parts that are nominally inspectable and comprehensible to many nerds. If you use actions to drive automated tests, deployment, or many of the other things microsoft positions them for you're _very nearly_ welded to the Github platform.
Zło To 🏴☠️ ᵗʰʳᵉᵉᶠᶦᵈᵈʸ@cloudskater If you, like surprisingly many folks, find their upsells to be mostly ignorable (or, for that matter, beneficial in literally any way), then that also sucks away any initiative to migrate, because from that perspective the alternatives are at best the same, and at worst, worse.
CivilCorvid@cloudskater I keep deleting my local files and I'm too stupid for proper selfhosting.
Gitlab seems reasonable given how small my projects are though?
Gitlab seems reasonable given how small my projects are though?
Norm@cloudskater I recently migrated my few projects from Codeberg to GitHub. Codeberg (and others) just aren't used nearly as much as GitHub, so you get a better (potential) audience from the latter. Since I was still using GH to contribute to projects that are hosted there, consolidating everything there was another factor.
wakko@cloudskater Short answer: inertia. Before Github was Sourceforge. Lots of projects still haven't left SF despite all the malware. Same reason lots of GenX & Millennials will never leave FB. The cost of switching isn't zero.
The Doctor@cloudskater Because if it's not GitHub, recruiters and interviewers ignore it and treat you like you are lying to them.
@drwho Again, no experiance as a programmer which includes how people react to anything aside from GitHub, but that's so stupid? You present them with projects you've worked on with proof of it existing and they just shrug and go "nah, doesn't exist". Wtf?
@cloudskater Yup. It should be the picture in the dictionary next to the word "stupid."
They're not actually thinking, they only look for an icon and don't understand anything about what it means.
Alice Harpertwelve years of git remote origin and no serious alternative that isn't worse in a different direction. it's not loyalty, it's inertia with a logo.