I really worry about a bunch of people going over to codeberg. Site's already super slow, but apparently it's quite nice when self-hosted

Anyone who is able to just plop a forgejo instance on their own machines... please do that if possible!

If it wasn’t for SourceForge I’m not sure my life would’ve ended up where it is! They use to promote projects they liked and ended up putting Waterfox on their front page a few times. Really sad when they started blasting people with ads and swapping out installers with adware for popular projects. By that time I moved to Microsoft’s CodePlex, if anyone else remembers that? Felt like I was the only one using it at the time! I remember the connection speeds to it were atrocious, but appreciated they’d share ad revenue from the downloads of a projects page which was nice. I remember it was actually super expensive to offer downloads [for binaries] back then, using these code hosting websites was the only way to do it for “free”

What is GitHub’s decline? I’ve used it extensively since 2011 ish (to lazy to look up when) it’s only gotten better. What’s the issue?

GitHub sooner or later will be only source of training data for the AI engine

Great through-history write-up! Thank you.

> That is one of the great ironies of modern Open Source. The distributed version control system won, and then the world standardized on one enormous centralized service for hosting it.

Cycles everywhere indeed. Perhaps we should ->

> GitHub wrote a remarkable chapter of Open Source, and if that chapter is ending, the next one should learn from it and also from what came before.

Indeed! Try to learn from the inevitable iterations to make the next instance at least that slightly better.

... Where the stuff meets the metastuff it seems all works under very similar forces. My thinking is step-by-step - it works on the individual level, and it scales up.

Day to day is step by step and a step today funds the step tomorrow.

This “slowly dying” effect is what happens to every company that gets acquired by big monster slug companies like Microsoft.

What Microsoft acquisitions still have any of their original spark left in them? Or Oracle? Or IBM? Or Google? Etc…

Hell, some Microsoft originals from inside the company like Xbox have even lost their edge.

Money is great and I’m sure I’d take the big check, too, but I’m surprised more tech founders don’t think of their legacy in this way when they decide to sell out.

It’s considered a grand accomplishment to essentially lead the wonderful thing you created to its slow demise and hand it over to apathetic quarterly earnings zombies.

I was posting on Planet Source Code before SourceForge existed.

Radicle is a good answer, coupled with a reborn Usenet, maybe Nostr. We have like never before the ability to communicate and cooperate yet most fails to understand and implement that.

Nearly any of us could run an XMPP/Matrix server and federate with friends or Nostr/{0xchat,whitenoise}, all with audio, video, text, file exchange etc, yet less than 1% do that.

Simply people, techies as well, have forgot the meaning of personal ownership and therefore are owned by someone else.

IMHO the problem is always the same. Social networks (and I consider Github as one in this discussion) tend toward centralization and hence monopolization. But monopolization tends towards enshittification. It happens again and again. There's a new cool player, it grows, it's not the cool player anymore. Rinse and repeat.

Unfortunately I don't have a clever solution (to the social aspect of the problem).

If everyone moves off GH, it'll just go back to normal again?