It was much better than the closed source SourceForge which existed before it. A lot of small projects dont have the energy to self host. Plus for small projects the barrier of entry is an issue. I recently found a typo in an error message in Garage but since they run their own Forgejo instance and OpenID never really became a thing I never created a PR.

It is first now with Codeberg there is a credible alternative. Of course large projects do not have this issue, but for small projects Github delivered a lot if value.

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PaulDavisThe1st 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> It is first now with Codeberg there is a credible alternative.

There is no credible alternative, because 3rd party hosting of the canonical repo is a bad idea to start with. By all means use 3rd party hosting for a more public-facing interaction, but its about time that developers understand that they need to host their own canonical repos.

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ahartmetz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well - my perspective is the KDE project, which has a team of capable admins who take care of hosting. The project has always been more or less self-hosted (I remember SUSE providing servers) and even provided hosting for at least one barely associated project, Valgrind. I think Valgrind bugs are still on KDE Bugzilla.

It's admittedly not really practical for most projects, but it could be for some large ones - Rust, for example.

	▲	jeltz 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I mostly work on PostgreSQL which has always selfhosted but PostgreSQL is a big project, for smaller projects it is much less practical. Even for something decently large like Meson I think the barrier would have been too big. But, yes, projects like Rust could have selfhosted if they had wanted to.

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jon-wood 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Strong agree on this. I think a lot of people who've entered software development in the past decade or so don't appreciate just how bad the available options were when Github launched.

If you blanch at the thought of a one line in a pull request just wait until you see what Sourceforge looked like, release download pages where you had to paying keen attention to what you clicked on because the legit download button was surrounded by banner ads made to look like download buttons but they instead take you to a malware installer. They then doubled down on that by wrapping Windows installers people published with their own Windows installer that would offer to install a variety of things you didn't want before the thing you did.