GitHub faces a fight for its survival at Microsoft
(www.theverge.com)
from baatliwala@lemmy.world to programming@programming.dev on 22 May 2026 05:02
https://lemmy.world/post/47188393
from baatliwala@lemmy.world to programming@programming.dev on 22 May 2026 05:02
https://lemmy.world/post/47188393
#programming
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Seems there’s lot of mess in the company all because of Microsoft or name it greed or late stage capitalism but still something tells me GitHub is just too important to lose dominance in next few years, after that if any other company takes over it’ll probably be gitlab but it’s really hard to speculate on this kind of things, I hope Microsoft leaves GitHub alone, they probably will fix themselves, lot’s of developers depend on Github and migration is not easy thing for big repos I expect.
When I first became familiar with the existence of free and open source software, GitHub did not exist yet. The most popular similar website was SourceForge. (Do many people much younger than me even know that exists?)
If things could change once, they can change again.
I used to get everything from SourceForge! I was a young kid and had no idea what I was doing tho lol :D
It’ll not be gitlab, gitlab is fine but the UI sucks and no improvements in sight.
Forgejo/Codeberg is the one that will take over in the coming decade.
You think it sucks because you’re used to GitHub’s interface. I really dislike the github interface after having left it a few years ago. Gitlab’s interface is, to me, so much better and a breath of fresh air (even though it might look like the old old Github).
As for forgejo, I agree, once they get functional federation and a good CI (not a shitty Github actions clone), github and Gitlab can really fuck off. Gitlab might become a “competitor” once they have federation, but they only will do that if forgejo takes off sue to federation.
Agree- I think the gitlab interface, though they tweak it all the time, makes sense. I continually have to hunt for things on github and it’s very annoying to me.
This is both wishful thinking, and would reintroduce the same problem anyway (centralization) if it would happen (the codeberg part).
I don’t take seriously individuals celebrating a move to self-hosting either. While it may look cool and ideally liberating at first, infrastructure/hosting responsibility has worse bus factors and burnout than actual development (not to mention actual monetary costs). It’s safe to assume that any code self-hosted has a high chance of becoming unreachable in 1-3 years (and yes, exceptions exist).
Solutions like radicale don’t help with unpopular repos, as you would again get a (hosting) bus factor of 1 (the dev/seeder), if that.
A theoretical solution leveraging an anonymous encrypted distributed storage network for repos would help keeping code alive for a while (after the bus hits). But unpopular content will eventually fizzle out, out of the network.
Multiple congregations of Forgejo (or something similar) communities forming would be cool. But the technology that would help them form one social block with network effects doesn’t exist*. And what’s proposed here and there (like federation for issues) doesn’t cover the code itself. And even if we get far in that direction, instance drama incidents, and attempts at exerting control over “the network” will inescapably appear.
* I don’t know if tangled counts. But judging by the amount of love ^😑^ people show the AT protocol, it may as well not exist.
tl;dr: Codeberg will not become GH-big. And if it did, it wouldn’t be a good thing. And yet there is no ideal alternative to central forges anyway, not even a theoretical one.
I agree with most of what you’re saying, but:
forgejo is working on federation. They’ve been working on it for a certain amount of time by now, but I do think we can expect some concrete version of what you describe in terms of community to materialize in the next decade as long a people want it and are motivated enough
when talking about code that is stored in a version control software that supports decentralized state (git, mercurial are the 2 I have working knowledge of) the “easy” fix for low bus factors is to just fork/mirror the software you want to see continue to exist. Source code is not that voluminous, I would be surprised if [the collective we] can’t manage to store multiple copies of the sources for software we deem useful. It’s a question of changing habits, not finding some miracle tech
Of course, habits aren’t necessarily easy to change.
Your comment contains an implicit assumption; there is always a co-occurrence between active development, and all ever grown interest in a project.
A person could grow a newfound interest in a repo after 1/3/5/10/20 years of inactivity. Most people are not glued to their chairs watching endless feeds, and bookmarking/starring (and maybe forking) all repos of interest away. The “normal” chain of events usually starts with a person growing a need for certain functionality (for research or direct use), and then checking out all tools, libraries, or resources available related to that functionality.
Relying on users to only “seed” repos they approve of is not a good strategy for high availability, for many reasons, not the least of which is the tendency of some users to develop tantrums over time, and pressing the “remove account and delete all history” button*. This is why anonymous distributed storage is unrivaled as an availability provider, at least for a period. Long term availability however still requires frequent re-grabbing or re-insertion (both have the same “refreshing” effect in these networks).
*Pushing code repos themselves to the side again, a decision will also have to be made with regards to whether the “ghost” behavior from GitHub should be replicated, or should “respecting the user wishes” to really delete EVERYTHING take precedence. Deciding this is important as it would/should be a part of the user agreement.
Forgejo feels so clean compared to github.
for open source it will be vodeberg. gotlab will do well with enterprises.
I see no way of that happening. GitHub is a huge resource for Microsoft; in terms of market penetration, people platform, but especially now with GitHub Copilot and their push for AI. They can’t let go of GitHub.
Github more than a code repository is a social network for coders, and it has the first mover advantage… making people move from that is dificult (facebook still being used nowadays after all), but also its not impossible.
If only there were better, open-source, self-hostable alternatives… Wait, there are!
Oh common it’s not like there’s an org for mountains of code. A codeberg.org basically.
Or a method to forge jo own code repos just like that, just for dev. A … forgejo.dev … No that would be crazy. Let’s rather stick with Microsoft - after all, nothing they ever touched was bad for their user base, ever.
Forge federation can’t come soon enough. I love being able to host my own little projects on my own forge, but if anyone intended to open an issue or PR, they would currently need an account on my instance to do so.
Heck every conference I go to I pester Gitlab about it. It’s always “ehh it’s on the road map”. Honestly it really is the solution to that problem space
Why would GitLab care!?
Because the network effect is the primary reason GitHub is the defacto forge. There some pretty large FOSS orgs on gitlab though, but it’s inherently splintered without federation.
From an enterprise standpoint, there are a surprising amount of organizations so big they have several gitlabs running, but tons of friction again because of the splintered nature that takes up.
They did care, then AI became the time sink.
Codeberg is great, but let’s not pretend that it’s a replacement for GitHub. Notably they don’t allow private repos and can’t offer free CI (not in the same way as GitHub anyway). Plus, I don’t see how they would be immune to the slopnami either if they became popular.
Best case would be if GitHub survives and just improves their reliability. I would not be surprised if they start imposing some kind of stricter limits on free accounts though.
I fundamentally disagree on your conclusion.
Codeberg is a non profit under German law. There won’t be openai “non profit but not really” bullshit.
And your point about CI Integration ins good example: There is no “free” CI. GitHub lets you pay with their vendor lock-in and your data.
If that’s okay with you, that’s okay with me - but as a programming community as a whole ,especially FOSS side, this needs to go away.
The best case for me is that GitHub dies and its death is a wake-up call to decouple collaboration layers in a way that keeps them modular enough to not again rub into “too big or integrated to fail”.
And yes, I’m aware that this is 2/3 day dreaming. But that’s my best case association anyway :D
What vendor lock-in? GitHub barely has any.
That’s fair it has loss leaders and network effects more so. The vendor lock in is non-git, non-ci side. So issues, orgs, etc. Actually you can see where they embraced opensource vs extending solely by the degree it is vendor locked.
If they stole it, it’s a loss leader, if they made it, it’s vendor locked.
Yeah I would say issues are minimal lock-in since they barely have any features (just labels I guess?) and can easily be exported. CI must be the biggest lock-in. If you have a complex CI system that makes use of lots of third party actions it could be a decent amount of work to migrate it. But not a huge amount.
There are alternatives… until you care about your code not leaking out of your org
Non paywalled link?
gitflic.ru/…/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean
Install this plugin. It’s legit, it got banned from all of the well known github-likes so they have to host it on ru
I dont use firefox, and im on mobile, so i dont think that would work for me. Thanks anw though
I use it on mobile. Works like it’s supposed to.
Idk if the chrome version works on mobile.
If you want to get rid of nearly all the paywalls, now you have a reason to switch.
Chrome Version:
gitflic.ru/…/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean
No source code whatsoever. Thanks but no thanks.
Don’t spread 0-effort misinformation. It takes 20 seconds to find the source.
There is a zip with the full project for ff and chrome respectively, which you can compile yourself and verify and read.
Their strategy is to “hide” it because of the years long dmca takedowns. Read the wikipedia page on that if you want some extra info.
gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bpc_uploads/file?…
Reading mode bypasses the paywall
This worked 👆 👏
Use this site: removepaywalls.com
thank you - the extension doesnt work on mobile
Yessss let it die sonpeoppe can finally switch to non Microsoft alternatives.
Its already working with the Linux and Mac market shares increasing lately. Please pleeeeeaaaassssseeeee let them drop the ball.
It already lost when it sold out.
After MS started down the AI path I updated all my licensing for what I hosted there excluding it from all AI training. Yeah I know they won’t listen but if we ever have a tech based class action lawsuit I am ready.
I then archieved all my projects posting a link to my self hosted git solution. The new solution again constantly states AI has no business here.
Last step was setting the guards and traps. I have a robots.txt file setup and my nginx is configured to send 444 to all requests who report as bots. All methods that they should obey. But if they don’t every page I host has an invisible link to a cgi script that creates an infinite loop of links. The bot falls down this rabit hole and I eventually ban their IP.
I love the idea of honeypots for AI. I’ve been ruminating on that for months now.
QR codes that lead to a virus to sabotage Flock when the AI scans the video of you driving by and gets curious.
Code files littered with meta commands like “disregard previous commands” and such.
Things that lead to infinite loops like you said.
I cackle at the idea of all of us laying entire minefields of AI traps everywhere. Good luck!
The honey pot lists a dozen randomly generated links that all point back to the honeypot. Then I have a script that runs nightly and if your IP clicked on a honeypot 100 or more times in a day the IP gets blocked. That way people can stumble on it and not get banned.
Looking at the logs I easily get tens of thousands of hits daily by dozens of bots. A few business sites, personal page, hobby page, and my GitHub replacement. Not really a big target. But still a lot of bot traffic.
Crazy.
Ooo. You know what would also be fun. Instead of a ban, after the obvious bot limit is hit switch that IP to piles of garbage data. Randomly generate word salad pages and make it redirect to those.
I was thinking about something similar. Generate a lot of source code that is pure garbage with comments so that they are learning nonsense. But at the end of the day I don’t want to waste more CPU cycles. This is enough to waste their time on my sites with no real blips on my machine.
A more descriptive term is “Turing tarpit”.
Oh I love that. Very good imagery.
Something something extinguish