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By toastercat 2025-08-0516:436 reply I've got this feeling that the endless feature creep of Github has begun to cause rot of core essential features. Up until only recently, the PR review tab performed so poorly it was practically useless for large PRs.
GitHub isn't focusing on creating a good Git platform anymore, they are an AI company now
Bets on where everything/everyone goes next? Will it be like the transition from SourceForge to GitHub, where the center of gravity moves from one big place to another big place? Or more like Twitter, where factions split off to several smaller places?
Personally I doubt we will see a huge centralized place like GitHub again. Trust in American companies, and big companies in general has been eroded. I think it would be for the better if it split off, and hopefully more devs decide to self host with tools like Forgejo.
By DaSHacka 2025-08-0612:55 > Personally I doubt we will see a huge centralized place like GitHub again.
I can almost guarentee we will. Consumers love simplicity through centralization.
> Trust in American companies, and big companies in general has been eroded.
Where are you seeing that? I've seen general dislike of large corpos forever, and the anti-US sentiment is more common abroad from places like Europe that have never 'liked' US culture and companies.
By goku12 2025-08-069:31 I'm all for Forgejo or even a simple forge without any namespaces (I abandoned GitHub when MS acquired them). But the major issue with these alternative platforms is the the discoverability of projects on them. Github doesn't have any noteworthy feature in this regard, but it has the first mover advantage. The users unfortunately ceded that advantage to them.
Many forges are working on a federated development infrastructure. That's great. But I believe that for these platforms to really become popular, we must solve the problem of federated project search and discovery as well. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be paying much attention in this area.
By 8n4vidtmkvmk 2025-08-0622:40 I need an easy way to host a nice UI for mercurial. That's rock solid stable, zero maintenance.
I've been pushing my repos to a random $5 server I have for years now. It's been rock solid. But I have no UI. I can push and pull and it supports exactly 1 user (me) and it's never gone down because I just never touch the server. I did go the extra mile to set up automatic backups but that's it.
An issue tracker and code explorer would be nice.
By dzader 2025-08-0521:07 [dead]
By azangru 2025-08-0522:16 > I've got this feeling that the endless feature creep of Github has begun to cause rot of core essential features.
Tangential, but... I was so excited by their frontend, which was slowly adopting web components, until after acquisition by Microsoft they started rewriting it in React.
(Design is still very solid though!)
GitHub in essence is still pretty much the same, there's products that have feature creep but I wouldn't say GitHub does that.
I can't say that I'm having issues with the performance either. I work with large PRs too (Especially if there's vendored dependencies) but I never ran into a show stopping performance issue that would make it "useless".
By toastercat 2025-08-0522:08 > GitHub in essence is still pretty much the same, there's products that have feature creep but I wouldn't say GitHub does that.
I think we're using two different products. Off the top of my head, I can think of Github Projects (the Trello-like feature), Github Marketplace, Github Discussions, the complete revamp of the file-viewer/editor, and all the new AI/LLM-based stuff baked into yet another feature known as Codespaces.
> I can't say that I'm having issues with the performance either. I work with large PRs too
Good for you. I suffered for maybe 4 years from this, and so have many others: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/39341
> there's products that have feature creep but I wouldn't say GitHub does that.
I remember GitHub from years ago. I still find myself looking for things that were there years ago but have since moved.
Also, GitHub search is (still) comically useless. I just clone and use grep instead.
By davidspiess 2025-08-0520:28 I noticed this recently too when using Firefox.
By cedws 2025-08-079:25 I often miss entire files in the review process because the review page collapses them by default and makes them hard to spot. If they’re going to be collapsed by default at least make it very visible. This is critical for security too, you don’t want people sneaking in code.
By ajsnigrutin 2025-08-0521:181 reply Still doesn't read email, but it's close to that.
By paradox460 2025-08-061:20 You can interact with a lot of GitHub via email
By sleepybrett 2025-08-0523:08 Yeah i've switched to doing pr reviews in goland because their ui is dogshit slow if there are more than like 10 files to diff.
HN sure has changed. A few years ago there would be at least a dozen comments about installing Gitlab, including one major subthread started by someone from Gitlab.
We recommend Codeberg/Forgejo now since it is better in every way, and Gitlab went corpo.
Gitlab was always for profit.
And forgejo doesn't have feature parity at all with gitlab. Neither does github, for that matter.
Just take a look at how to push container images from a cicd pipeline in gitlab vs. Forgejo.
By NewJazz 2025-08-0517:49 In gitlab, yes (well, two lines, login then push). In forgejo, there is no cicd token that gives you scoped access to the built in container registry. You must create a long lived token and add it as a secret to the repo you want to push from.
See here: https://mteixeira.wordpress.com/2025/02/03/my-self-hosted-fo...
By pfcd 2025-08-0523:18 > We recommend Codeberg/Forgejo now since it is better in every way...
Lol.
> ...and Gitlab went corpo.
How else will they sustain/maintain such a product and compete with the likes of GitHub? With donations? Good luck.
By Elucalidavah 2025-08-0517:031 reply Are those any better than self-hosted gitlab, or do you only mean central-hosted usage?
By NewJazz 2025-08-0520:44 Codeberg is central hosted so I think they mean in general.
By KronisLV 2025-08-067:49 I've used self-hosted GitLab a bunch at work, it's pretty good there still. In my opinion GitLab CI is also a solid offering, especially for the folks coming from something like Jenkins, doubly so when combined with Docker executors and mostly working with containers.
I used to run a GitLab instance for my own needs, however keeping up with the updates (especially across major versions) proved to be a bit too much and it was quite resource hungry.
My personal stack right now is Gitea + Drone CI + Nexus, though I might move over to Woodpecker CI in the future and also maybe look for alternatives to Nexus (it's also quite heavyweight and annoying to admin).
By rngecounty 2025-08-061:48 Having tried gitlab, it's a very poor product almost unmaintainable as a self hosted option. Reminds me of Eclipse IDE - crammed with every other unnecessary feature/plugin and the basic features are either very slow or buggy.
At this point Gitlab is just there because being even a small X% of a huge million/billion dollar market is good enough as a company even if the product is almost unusable.
By factorialboy 2025-08-0516:41 Not just HN, Gitlab has perhaps changed as well.
By dewey 2025-08-0519:47 Which is probably good, as otherwise they would be dead. Building products for self-hosting HN users isn't really a big money maker.
By shakna 2025-08-0516:23 Well, the CEO did say to embrace AI or get out of code, 2 days ago... And MS previously said AI is not-optional for their devs...
By hiccuphippo 2025-08-0515:531 reply Maybe they are trying vibeops now.
By jennyholzer 2025-08-0516:12 At Microsoft vibeops is an age old tradition.
By esafak 2025-08-060:37 After writing it :)
By DeepYogurt 2025-08-0523:10 They do actually
