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GitLab Act 2 - A letter to our customers and our investors. (about.gitlab.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Lots of layoffs ("re-evaluating our operational footprint") and switching to "agentic" processes. Target user is AI.

Anyone still hosting Gitlab?

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[–] 68 points 4 months ago (51 children)

Oh god that is so cringe. Just getting into coding i have no idea what to use as an online repo. I dont want to use github because microsoft but i want the basic repo collaboration features to be available cloning, pull requests, issues etc.

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  • [–] [S] 122 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    If you don't want to host something yourself, check codeberg

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    I like codeberg and have no plans on migrating away from it, but their codeberg Pages product is...weak to say the least. There's very frequent downtime. I had multiple users reach out to me letting me know my site was down... embarrassing. I set up kuma uptime checks on it, and now I see when the outages happen.

    Forget "four 9's" or anything close to that....my 30 day uptime is a measley 91%...

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  • [–] 21 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)

    They communicate that openly tho:

    Regular maintenance window: We're meeting every Tuesday starting 18.00 Berlin time (currently 17.00 UTC), lasting up to 8 hours. While we announce large scheduled downtimes in advance, there might be minor interruptions due to maintenance work happening during the meeting. Please be patient in this case.

    https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg

    Not sure if that's also for the Pages feature, but in general having a weekly 8hr maintenance window is not optimal.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Github seems to be down a lot, too, although perhaps not their pages part. Perhaps you could try to have just the pages in some other place?

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    That's true! I've read recently that GitHub's uptime is pretty terrible too.

    My site is low enough stakes that I can live with it on codeberg. I just relaxed the uptime check a bit so it only alarms if I have an extended outage. Even so, the alarms aren't actionable to me...other than maybe announcing to my users that there's an outage rather than having them ask me if I'm aware of the outage.

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  • [–] 68 points 4 months ago (35 children)

    Codeberg, I can recommend

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (34 children)

    Isnt codeberg centralized? I worry it will run into the same issue as github. I was checking out Radicle but its cryptic and hard to search for other projects.

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  • [–] 46 points 4 months ago (17 children)

    Codeberg is supporting forgejo which Codeberg is built on. Forgejo is ActivityPub powered git repositories. So imagine regular git, but everyone can have their own repos on their own sites and you can still interact with each other. So yes, Codeberg is centealized FOR NOW. But they're working on opening it up to EVERYONE to run their own and be able to access all the repos you use over the Fediverse.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago* (11 children)

    Will it be possible to have decentralized pull requests? Like I open a PR on my site, my friend reviews my PR on his site, and I get his reviews on my site?

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    This was always baked into basic git from the beginning if you review your code in E-Mail chains or mailing lists.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    So not really baked in at all then?

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    why wouldn't it be? you can send emails from web uis too. you can share diffs however you desire. you can have a remote for each developer, and push/pull changes to each other. the github mindset kind of ruined the resilience and distributedness of git: one central remote, one account authority, one central place where discussing MRs... ever forgejo is not as good as decentralized git: what's a forgejo identity?

    meanwhile git has been decentralized and distributed since day one, linux is still developed in a decentralized and distributed way and forgepub is just not ready and not even close.

    sending emails with an attached diff to many ppl is too hard? make a nice offline gui doing that and we're distributed. github was a psyop to make us un-learn git, making it better is silly, like wasting decades searching for "good cigarettes"

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    Email chains and mailing lists are not really a practical way to develop anymore, and it is increasingly anachronistic (as is the idea of tying your identity to an email which is also baked into basic git). This was the only realistic democratic and federated option when git was designed, but it was never the ideal one. Forgejo is trying to build a better, more ideal, also-federated alternative that is really designed for code collaboration from the ground up. Once the design is stabilized, there's no reason it couldn't get built into git also. I would love to be able to create a PR with git itself and have it automatically submitted to the origin repository.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Email chains and mailing lists are not really a practical way to develop anymore, and it is increasingly anachronistic

    By what objective measure? Just because everyone listened to Github's siren song, doesn't make it so.

    So many Open Source projects are just one or two maintainers. So many PR's on Github involve just two people. That would all work over E-Mail, which is by design decentralized, unlike the web, which is by design not.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    The protocol extension is ForgeFed and it’s still a work in progress afaik

    The issue tracker is on Codeberg.

    Forgejo is only one of the implementations and not the reference implementation.

    It will also be more general:

    • general VCS repo support and not just git
    • patch tracker (merge requests)
    • ticket tracker (issues)
    • release tracker
    • separation of repo and trackers, which allows for them to be on different instances and have specialized implementations
    • roadmap and workflow for issues and MR
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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Just like bluesky is centralised "for now" i.e. forever

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  • [–] 16 points 4 months ago

    Except bluesky is funded by VC and they created their own protocol and federation design.

    Codeberg is an open source repo only place, they're building in AP, they have monthly updates. So nothing like Bluesky.

    But I understand the trepidation.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago* (8 children)

    Even if, switching your used repo hosting service is a matter of minutes if you're using git. You register on the other site, add your SSH key, update the remote URL of your repository which is just a git remote set-url origin <new url> and then hit git push, probably with something like --force or another option, kinda forgot the exact name. So that's something you could easily automate in like 10 lines of bash script for all your repositories.

    It's super hard to "trap" people in something like github because git is so open and decentralized. Switching is super easy. Most people who stay on github or gitlab do it because they need the CI/CD pipelines or because they're lazy and/or stupid.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    When I read this discussion on HackerNews they act like they're trapped and it would require moving the sun and the earth to switch over.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Yeah sounds like a big nothingburger to me. If you just use gitlab for private projects with basic pushing and pulling without any fancy gitlab features, switching is a matter of minutes.

    Now, if you've built your entire company setup around gitlab and use everything they offer, yeah switching is gonna be a lot harder and will require more preparation. However, it's not impossible in the slightest. Even a large corporation with hundreds of developers could make a switch within 2 weeks.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (5 children)

    And the open issues, tasks and pull requests?

    Right.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Those aren't git features, those are features provided by surrounding tooling, not git itself, so I didn't really consider them. I also never used them in private projects.

    However, issues you can migrate easiely. I've seen tools out there that copy the issue content from github and to somewhere new. The creator of that issue is then a bot user or something, but the issue is still there and can be worked on. On github, the bot will leave a message that this issue is now handled somewhere else and closes it. Done.

    Pull requests are also simple, you just merge them all. I haven't seen a lot of projects with hundreds of open pull requests that were lying there for weeks or months. Now yes, you will lose the comments and history of the pull request itself, but I don't think that's very important.

    Tasks I don't know. I've never used them and don't even know what they do. If it's just a glorified kanban board with plenty of cards that say "Do X", you can just copy paste them to your new tool because there's nothing technical about them.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    It’s funny coming from the Plex thread into this; ~100% of people who keep using Plex do so because it’s centralised and it makes sharing their library with their network of family and friends easier.

    The truth is; a lot of us feel like we need more internet accounts about as much as we need genital warts. Part of the reason GitHub got successful was the fact that you only needed to register once and you had access to fork and PR all the repos on there.

    Decentralisation is great for self hosting things for, well, yourself and your household, but it’s got hefty downsides. Account creation is a friction point for others to join and collab.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    The truth is; a lot of us feel like we need more internet accounts about as much as we need genital warts.

    You are confusing decentralized and fragmented (or self hosted). The promise of fragmented software (like Lemmy) is that there are many instances but an agreed upon protocol. You create one account on one site and then use it to pull and push data to any other site that uses the same communication protocol. Like you and I for example. You created an account on lemmy.zip, I created one on lemmy.world, and we are both discussing a post created by a user on lemmy.nocturnal.garden (an instance I have never heard of).

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    The problem is, I have an account on lemmy.world but switched off during a time it had major problems with downtime and broken images. When I wanted to switch to another provider, my account was not portable. I hadn’t posted or commented an overwhelming amount, but it’s still not associated with this account.

    So let’s say someone creates a federated Git hosting platform and feature matches GitHub with Actions/CI etc, so there’s no reason not to switch. Let’s then say git.world starts acting up, but you can create an account on git.zip instead.

    Now you have given up your commit history and any commits you make from your git.zip account is not neatly linked with your git.world account.

    I’m sure this problem can be solved, but it’s vastly more important for it to be solved before federated Git hosting can replace the “security” of GitHub. We do have to consider the fact that some people point to their GitHub profile when job searching, so git contributions and commit history is more valuable than Lemmy posts.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago*

    Its centralized, but they (forgejo, the underlying software) are building on standards wherever possible so it should be easy enough to move things around. I also don't really see them breaking bad anytime soon, at some point you have stop worrying and start to build shit.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago*

    Oh sorry, I might have misunderstood your question. Yes, Codeberg is centralised, but it is registered at a public e.V. in Germany making it more open (not a company).

    But then you could use what they use, Forgejo to self host.

    Or Gittea as suggested by somebody else.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago

    For a beginner, I'd probably stick to Github initially, just because there's so many guides and tutorials on how to use it, and their free plan is still pretty generous.

    A lot of the knowledge is transferable though. If you do want to try something else, Codeberg is pretty good for open-source.

    To just learn about Git, you don't even need a host like Github or Codeberg. You can have a Git repo just on your computer, and still get a bunch of the benefits of source control - a full history of everything, separate branches and worktrees so you can have multiple incomplete changes and switch between them, etc.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

    Host a Gitea?

    See reply comment below

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  • [–] 16 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)

    Or Forgejo, which is a fork of Gitea and is what Codeberg uses. They explain their advantages over Gitea here: https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/

    The tl;dr is that Forgejo is maintained by a non-profit whereas Gitea is maintained by a for-profit company, and Forgejo is completely open-source whereas Gitea is open-core with some features only available in their hosted service. Forgejo also has better testing and a bigger focus on security.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Oh dang I didn't realize! Thank you!! I was just starting to look at those things myself and wanted to also avoid GH. Plus Gitea was available on Yunohost too. I've heard of Codeberg, I'll see if I can host that instead. It's too bad other companies don't move away from GH...

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