Sentiment for/against GitHub aside...
"Why X are doing Y" articles like these pretend that the premise of "X are doing Y" is true, conveniently skipping to the "Why" before proving that the premise is even accurate in any meaningful way.
This is why I never buy headlines that start out with "Why".
> developers are ditching
Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos against the hundreds of thousands on there
> Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos against the hundreds of thousands on there
The trend is what's interesting here. Github has never been threatened by anyone, because their service was too good to bother for everyone but the most ideologically motivated.
Now their service has become so bad there's a github joke at work every time something is down or slower than it should.
Reputation is a very valuable thing, and Github has destroyed a stellar one in a few month, this is newsworthy.
Yeah, like how developers were en-masse ditching GitHub to go to GitLab when Microsoft acquired GitHub.
Maybe those people weren't wrong to do that...
It's so weird the herd behavior of developers.
I would expect that's true in any field that moves as fast as software development.
Developer A makes a move, perceives some benefit, tells developer B, who does the same thing and then tells developer C.
Some of the people consider the move, weigh costs, and make an intelligent decision. Many just think "smart people are doing this, I'll do it too". I really doubt this behavior is unique to developers.
Is it really?
Statistically I would assume that if you select a bunch of people on a certain criterium, you're going to see similarities related to that criterium among that group.
Except the article doesn't prove any trend
Here you have (albeit small) proof of some sort of trend: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=codeberg%2Cforgejo%2Cgit...
Still, doesn't come close to popularity of GitHub itself today (https://trends.google.com/explore?q=codeberg%2Cforgejo%2Cgit...), but I think the trend of moving away from GitHub is clear both in data and sentiment, both qualitative and quantitative.
If only the article used any of that. And if it did, I still don't think the headline was warranted.
Also Google search trends are no evidence of adoption or migration. High chance of correlation, sure.
The trend i see in Google is explosion in git(hub) related searches and small blip in non-github alternatives
The existence and growth of the codeberg project does, however.
And what level of 'growth' constitutes a trend that warrants "developers are ditching GitHub" without providing any numbers at all?
The existence of Telegram doesn't negate the fact that WhatsApp is the world's most popular instant messaging platform, and the others aren't even close.
And Telegram is a lot more developed and has a much larger percentage of the global instant messenger marketshare, compared to Github vs CodeBerg.
Stackoverflow usage didn't fall overnight either. But it has gone the way of MySpace and Oracle.
Stackoverflow was still arguably the best offering at what it provided, but what it provided became obsolete. The need for a repository service is only growing.
It is not clear to me that Github's service has degraded due to incompetence, it also seems possible that they are just struggling to meet demand as the source code backbone of an internet in a critical moment of evolution. I'm not sure any single provider would fare any better.
> the way of myspcace and Oracle
Oracle had record revenue in its most recent fiscal year, with record user engagement. So whatever connection you're trying to establish between its fate and that of SO or myspace is off-target, both in terms of popularity and revenue.
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Wow. GitHub gaining the same reputation as DNS ("it's always DNS"), printers, OSI layer 8, and PEBKAC is actually a bit of an achievement.
Hat tip to Microsoft.
Agree with the headline part, but the second part not so much.
As someone mentioned it's about the trend.
I have heard from people at multiple major open source projects that what is keeping them at Github at this point are free GH Action credits that they get and they couldn't really afford CI/CD if they left. Meaning numbers would be bigger if GH wasn't "paying" projects to stay.
The trend may be there but the article does nothing to back that up
I can't help but think at this point that Ghostty's "departure" from GitHub is unserious. It's been two and a half months now and not even a single peep of discussion about where they may be migrating to or what they may be doing.
GitHub is still the only option on their download page: https://ghostty.org/download
If I didn't know any better, I would think this is a thinly veiled marketing piece by "Codeberg", a company that I never heard of until this headline.
https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
You can just insert the word "some" as required.
Agreed, but the headline wouldn't travel nearly as well, if at all.
> Why some Americans are switching to soy
Would be more accurate than
> Why Americans are switching to soy
But wouldn't garner nearly the same amount of clicks.
There is conscious exaggeration in omitting 'some' - a fluff-blog click-farm trope I don't enjoy seeing in the developer space.
You could drop the verb clause? This would make the headline accurate while keeping it punchy.
> why Americans switch to soy
And
> why developers switch to codeberg
But the cynic in me thinks that the form of the headline that drastically overstates the the phenomenon in question by implication is something that has been workshopped and is commonly used because it turns something kind of boring into a spectacle.
Some means at least one.
It’s just a PR article to promote alternative
Given the context, I had to read this twice to understand that PR is not referring to Pull Request here.
> Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos
I'm pretty sure, shortly after the motorized vehicle was made commercialy available, there were only a "handful of remotely meaningful" people and companies who stopped using horses.
Do tell: How many horses are around on todays streets?
What exactly is the car equivalent in this analogy? Codeberg is not a car if you're saying GitHub is the horse. Just doesn't really make sense to compare the two like that...
This is not an effective argument, given that these smaller services are uniformly retrograde in functionality.
Agreed, if there was something actually better to switch to then I'd be interested. But seems unlikely for that to happen now - it's easier than ever to build a new github, at least the app itself but i doubt someone's gonna bother with the business effort needed to actually build it up as a reliable, trustworthy option that you know will be around for a while, which is a process that takes years when you know you're going to get disrupted. It would probably have to be open source to get early adopters to use it but somehow be nicer to use than GitHub, and there's basically no money to be made
If only Github was reliable and trustworthy, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
When cars started replacing horses, they didn’t have more features. They just didn’t get sick or temperamental, and they didn’t shit all over the streets.
Going more than 20 miles an hour and not dying of heat exhaustion (or because your oats are too dry) are pretty big features.
But my point was that it’s a bad analogy. People are opting out of GitHub despite the alternatives having fewer features. You can read that as an ideological choice or as a YAGNI one. If it’s ideological, then there’s no competitive or feature angle at all; people are doing it because it seems right to them.
(To be clear, I have no problem with this. I think GitHub only gets better after public pressure, as we’ve seen with the last N cycles of product atrophy.)
howtogeek is low-effort content mill, it's just upvoted here because of the headline, there is 0 actual effort in the article
I don’t know if it’s because of the weasel words in the article or the extensive use of passive voice in the article, but this article feels in part like it’s AI generated.
I am exhausted with having to figure out whether someone wrote something or let AI generate it for them.
Reading articles like this has become less pleasurable since the advent of generative AI. There’s no feeling or heart in the article, and it’s one of those cases where I can read the headline, read the article, and wonder why I spent my time reading it.
Thank you! I immediately had the same reaction and was disappointed no one else pointed it out, though I'm guessing it's because most people just read the headline before commenting
Agreed. But if I comment on this, I'm promoting the article. What do I do?
> a handful of remotely meaningful repos
If there's a trend to leave a platform it won't start with the most entrenched users (largest repos).
They acknowledge your concern in the article and their analysis does apply to those few who are leaving. But to be fair the title can be interpreted either way and the most reasonable read for anyone is "some of them are leaving". I'd find it clickbaity if they said "why developers are leaving en-masse" and then point out to the regular turnover. There's clearly a trend, what's not clear is if it gains momentum.
> If there's a trend
That's the point being made. Is there a trend? How do we know?
There's always some repos moving between hosting providers for all kinds of reasons. The burden of proof is on the author here to show there's been an increase and they don't do that.
The early adopters are leaving. These are the people that will blaze a trail that others follow.
Which early adopters exactly? The most prominent example they gave is ghostty which has existed for just a couple of years, notwithstanding the fact that the owner published a spiel about how he's personally been using it for longer.
An early adopter is someone who is first in line to try something new, usually because they're willing to build part of the new thing with their own hands. Just look at what projects are on any of the third-party forges, those are the early adopters of post-github tech.
I would also be one of them, but I'm not actually off Github yet. That's because I haven't quiite finished building the thing I'm going to move to.
I know what an early adopter is. Should we call this HNsplaining?
I'm saying that Ghostty, which is ~5 years old, cannot be called an early adopter of GitHub, which is 18 years old.
You could say that any time two distant psychos roll their Teslas off a rocky cliff and then exclaim "Why Tesla drivers are dumping their cars".
And not provide any other meaningful data
Rolling your car off a cliff isn't the same thing. This would be more like you want to drive your Tesla into the jungle so you build a road as you go.
The key problem is not losing the cars but losing the road builders who are now no longer building roads that lead to you, but rather roads that lead away
A better alternative might be along the lines of “why developers ditch GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives”. That way it doesn’t commit to a trend or exaggerate the situation in your mind, instead making it clear it’s a report on “those X who do Y do it for these reasons”.
I’ve seen titles like “Why top scientists are leaving the United States” where the article itself talked about A SINGLE RESEARCHER relocating to France.
If you're talking about the article featured on HN just day(s) ago, that was about a funding effort to get more researchers to move to France from the US, while they interviewed one specific individual. I think maybe you skipped the contents of that article (as it was in French) and instead just read the HN comments which misunderstood the article :)
> If you're talking about the article featured on HN just day(s) ago
I’m not.
Engaging :)
Are you perhaps talking about "Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands" then that was also on the HN frontpage just days ago?
There been so many articles, surveys and papers about how scientists and researchers are leaving the US for the last 1-2 years, that it's hard to keep track. Still, I'm curious to understand what you actually read.
No, I’m talking about an article I saw maybe 10-12 months ago on a major news site, perhaps The Guardian.
Individual reports of scientists leaving are meaningless without overall statistics. If there is a net outflow of scientists from the US, I’m not aware of it, and I certainly haven’t seen any actual statistical evidence for it.
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