So this is inspired somewhat by a question about somebody wanting to have a non-GitHub way of contributing to Lemmmy. I've really enojyed some other discussions on this community so felt somewhat inspired to ask this one too.
And whilst Lemmy is mirrored to a couple of alternatives (a self hosted Gitea and Codeberg) they can't really be anything more than a mirror and a backup. If one doesn't want to use GitHub they still can't realistically contribute without signing up to GitHub and creating issues and PRs.
So what would it take to actually get people away from GitHub and onto alternatives (GitLab, Codeberg, sourcehut)? The situation seems to somewhat parallel the whole Reddit and Twitter thing. Both have/had a huge monopoly on users to the point where it just wasn't really worth using anything else, at least not if you wanted to be part of a decently sized community.
Other mass migrations
Obviously the difference with Reddit and Twitter is that they both have had their version of "the Event" which cause existing projects (Mastodon, Lemmy amongst others) to suddenly explode in popularity. Has it killed off the originals? No but it has made the alternatives actually viable with enough of a community to sustain them and encourage more to join, even if slowly.
GitHub has had its fair share of controversy, most recently surrounding co-pilot and code scraping but no particular widespread outrage to cause people to leave it in droves.
GitHub is the home of open source?
I think for many GitHub has simply become synonymous with open source. The sheer number of repositories and projects hosted there means that people just use GitHub alone for all of their open source needs and don't even look at other forges. Not to mention all the services offered - most of the alternatives can offer some of the same features but not all of them. Not only do you get space for your project code itself but you get access to their CI/CD platform, a forum through Discussions, a wiki, a project management tool, static site hosting which is an awful lot for smaller projects like GitLab and community non-profit projects like Codeberg to compete with.
There of course are some people that rely on their GitHub profile and their activity chart in order to get jobs and advance their careers - many of these people I suspect wouldn't want to fragment their profile by having to split their activity up over multiple profiles.
So why would anyone not want to use GitHub. Quite simply it isn't really in the spirit of open source is it? Not only is it controlled by Microsoft who haven't historically been the friendliest towards open source but GitHub itself is closed source. You can't host your own GitHub and get all the same features it enjoys. It does seem somewhat odd that the biggest vault of open source projects is itself proprietary and completely closed off.
What would need to happen for things to change?
So realistically what could be done about it? What would need to happen in order to entice people off of GitHub? Something arriving in the hopefully not too distant future is forge federation - projects such as Forgefriends, ForgeFed and ForgeFlux aim to try and create a federation of software forges. One of the main issues about having to create different accounts for every single platform goes away as you just stick with the instance you like best (or host your own) and yet still be able to fully interact with software hosted on other platforms. This means that you should be able to interact with a project hosted on, say, Codeberg, from your sourcehut account. You should be able to see issues, PRs etc. just as if you were on the same website.
GitHub, I strongly imagine, would have no intention of joining in order to maintain and protect their walled garden. I just don't see a world where they would want to join in with federation.
Lastly I just want to add that I'm absolutely not judging anyone for using GitHub. The main project I'm involved with is also still on GitHub for some good reasons. Not only is it intertwined with their ecosystem but it provides services that we just need at this point. We still rely on some of GitHub's services so we don't spend our community donations on hosting stuff that we just don't need to. It lightens the maintenance on us whilst we are still in a very active stage of the project with an awful lot of moving parts. And the bit I hate most, we need to be visible to the community - we aren't big enough to go to one of the alternative platforms because what community engagement we have might well drop through the floor if people are suddenly forced to make accounts on other services just to log an issue or ask a question. I would love to move to a platform like Codeberg and any personal project I make would probably be hosted there but for a big-ish community project we just cannot justify it. So I am well aware of the attraction of GitHub and what keeps people there. What I want to know is what would be needed to actually break that inertia for projects, such as the one I mentioned, to justify a move away from GitHub - particularly people who may be far less ideological about the open source world.
tl;dr
- GitHub offer many nice thing
- Other places have not so many nice thing
- How other place make people change mind up to move from place with all thing and all people to place with less many people and thing?
The somewhat snide answer to this is that… this is what git already is! Git has built in tools for submitting patches via email — a federated service. It’s actually what git was built for.
https://git-send-email.io
Of course, GitHub and stuff can be a pretty nice interface on top of git and provides features on top of git itself… but for small projects like the Linux kernel it’s perfectly acceptable :).
Websites like GitHub are obviously a lot more approachable, though, especially since I feel like a lot of people kind of grew up with the gmail web interface or something similar and aren’t used to dealing with mailing lists for this kind of stuff (myself included, honestly).
But to be honest… what are we really getting out of federation for something like GitHub? Like… it’s basically just single sign on with extra steps? I guess you can build alternate clients with the protocol for PRs and issues and stuff? But git itself is already pretty distributed, so I feel like there’s not much to do there tbh.
I may be wrong on this, but what it sounds like to me is that the thing GitHub is built up on is the main attraction, the only thing to benefit is to build an equivalent platform for interfacing with it that is open source and maybe federatable
In some sense GitHub really doesn’t offer much. Like, the main thing is that it’s a nice interface for PRs and issues. If you’re just a dev working on stuff you mostly interact with git itself. Git repos themselves are distributed and very easy to move between platforms. So, like… losing GitHub would suck (you’d lose all of the issues and PRs), but it’d be fairly easy to just put the code base on another platform like gitlab or gitea or gogs or whatever. I’m not really that worried about GitHub exploding because of this.
That said it’s really pretty annoying when a project uses its own gitlab instance or something and you have to make an account to contribute or post an issue… it’s a relatively small barrier, but it’s enough of one that I won’t bother often.
I honestly don’t know what people want from a federated GitHub like service… do you just want like single sign on with OpenID? Because that’s basically the only benefit I can imagine, but maybe I have a shitty imagination.
GitHub not only provides a centralized service for automated patch creation and merging, bug and feature tracking via tagged threads, and organizational permission management (which are the main draw)...
It also provides:
GitHub may seem simple, but it really provides a ton of functionality to power-users and organization managers that cannot afford to foot the bill themselves. People like me could not continue to do what we do without GitHub at this point in time.
Yeah, these are some good points. I don't mean to say that GitHub is a trivially implemented frontend to git, or that it provides no value at all to be clear! All of these features are great and really useful, and it would be sad to suddenly use them were GitHub to explode... But in the grand scheme of things projects can still migrate relatively easily to other services or self hosted ones, and my impression is that most of these features (excluding GitHub pages, which are super popular) are fairly underutilized -- at least in my experience I mostly just interact with GitHub to do PRs and issues, and I don't think I'm alone in that. The disappearance of these bonus features would certainly impact some projects a lot, and suddenly losing issues and CI would SUCK, but it's not unrecoverable, and they're (arguably) a little bit tangential to the core product.
I also think that the free CI is a bit of an aside in the discussion of a federated GitHub like platform -- recreating GitHub as a fediverse thing would not suddenly make it so you can afford to foot the bill for CI, unfortunately (maybe you could have a pool of trusted volunteers to run it or something, but that's kind of tricky)... In terms of free CI resources, I don't think there's much of a way out of depending on big corporations like Microsoft to supply it to keep you on their platform. You're either going to depend on them, or you're going to have to pay for it yourself or accept donations somehow, right?
The free CI is really awesome, though... I've unfortunately hit the limits with my projects, but being able to just add the free GitHub CI is a huge win, especially when you can't convince your boss l organization to shell out for CI, so I definitely feel you there :(.