Bluesky: promise of decentralization
Mastodon: real decentralization here and now
As someone who's been in blockchain, I've seen this pattern a lot: it's "decentralized", but we control 90% of token supply. Bluesky gives me similar vibes, and the fact it's a US corporation doesn't help.
PeerTube: I love the idea, but whenever I check the home page, it's nothing that interests me, and none of the creators that I know besides Luke Smith use it.
Funnily enough, I've partly replaced youtube with... spotify podcasts. A lot of the channels I like (Veritasium, Kurzgesagt, The Rest is Science (w/ Vsauce), Alex O'Connor, Hank Green, ...) are on spotify, and not just audio but videos too. For me it's a less bad option. It doesn't have AI trash, youtube shorts, and so on
GitHub alternatives: I'm less educated on evils of github (I'm yet to read stuff that @mogi sent me: https://nogithub.codeberg.page/, https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/)
But I think I know where people are coming from. The 2 big alternatives I've heard of are codeberg and sourcehut (gitlab is rather for corporate use).
Codeberg seems like a solid project that mirrors most of github functionality without the evil parts. I also know that @forgejo (that codeberg uses) works on implementing ActivityPub protocol which is awesome.
Sourcehut on the other hand is more unique, which is why I liked it more at first. But then something rubbed me the wrong way...
Please don’t upload my code to GitHub This is a call to free/libre and open source software developers to not upload the work of others to GitHub. What’s the problem with GitHub? Well, there are a lot of problems with GitHub. Here, we will mainly focus on a feature called Copilot, but if you’re interested to learn more about the other issues, please visit this page. What is Copilot? According to GitHub,
At that time (around 2022) I was using Cloudflare's Warp. And if you tried to use sourcehut back then while using Warp, it would block you, to make a statement about how Cloudflare should not have so much control over the internet and yada yada.
Now, on one hand, I agree with the statement. These days I try to use Cloudflare services as little as possible, especially due to their recent vibe-coded outages.
On the other hand, I find this unprofessional. Even if I agree with the message, this artificial restriction left me with a sour taste. I believe they removed this restriction sometime around 2024.
Besides that, I cooled down to the idea of a minimal git forge. The thing is, if you want really minimal — working over mailing lists like linux kernel etc, you don't need a forge, you can host it yourself (especially since sourcehut doesn't provide a free tier — which I don't blame them for, but worth mentioning).
Git forge should be accessible for as many ppl as possible to contribute to FOSS. PRs are easier to get into than patches over mail. But maybe that's just my opinion.
But tbh, I'm still mostly on github. I might setup a mirror for codeberg though.
The reason is, by definition I upload the stuff that I wanna share with the world. Github still has the best discoverability. And if someone wants to train LLMs on my code... well, they can do it even on codeberg, as long as it's public.
Github is for sure evil. But IMO an evil git forge is less bad than evil OS, evil social media, or evil search engine & ad network.
Alex