@devrtz brought up a good point in the Forum Outreach thread…
Yoooo lead dev here, absolutely heard on non-GH sites for code storage. We are using GH currently bc it’s what I have the most experience with, and existing integrations (GitHub Pages) made it easy to get small static sites hosted for free (such as KGLW.today)…
I’m interested in learning about other code forges, but I’d need some hand-holding along the way!
The only other ones in the conversation, imo, would be gitlab or maybe sourcehut (looks interesting, still in alpha). I’ve used a bunch of em and github is the easiest to use for me. Sure, it’s owned by Microsoft which is not good (not to mention it’s pretty much a monopoly)… but it does pretty much everything that the alternatives offer and a lot they don’t. If you can ignore some of the commercialization of their offerings, at it’s core, it’s completely fine. And that’s all you really need, imo.
I get the draw of the alternatives, but they are often less stable and could end up going commercial on you at any time. From a project like this, I think github is totally a good choice. But would love to hear alternative perspectives as well!
Gitlab is what I use the most in my day to day work (Debian, GNOME, …). It can do “Gitlab Pages” (see official and other examples) and configuring custom domains also seems to be straight forward.
I’m only using the features from the free (as in freedom) version and I usually end up disabling a bunch of stuff for my repositories, because I don’t need half the things. Basically I want: Code storage, CI (with container registry), Issue tracking, MRs and sometimes a projekt wiki.
Don’t know too much about it, but it appears to do what I expect a codeforge to be doing 
(in a user friendly web UI)
@cwar’s link does have some interesting information, about how the fork came about.
I would only add: With FOSS the danger of the stewards of a project no longer acting in the community’s best interested is mitigated by being able to fork and move on. Sure, it can be some inconvenience but for me this would be a small price to pay.
I think sourcehut appeals primarily to mailing list loving nerds 
(e.g. patches/reviews are done via email, not some fancy web UI).
And while I find it very interesting this poses a significant barrier to entry (even among the FOSS crowd).
@cwar said (re: github):
but it does pretty much everything that the alternatives offer and a lot they don’t
I’m genuinely curious: What does GH bring to the table?
I know there’s tons of integrations/bots (webhooks, Matrix/IRC bots that watch repositories, bots that bump dependencies, …) but these things also seem to exist for GitLab (and perhaps other forges).
@SupremeAxendancy said:
Yoooo lead dev here,
You’re a(n altered) beast!
Thanks for all your work on this amazing site.
I’m interested in learning about other code forges, but I’d need some hand-holding along the way!
I can offer a hand or two to hold (:
PS: The GH issue was mainly me being a nitpicky FOSS enthusiast (actually I’m running/developing Debian 
on my smartphone!)
What a great post! I love learning about this sorta stuff.
I think for me what I want on my (public) repo really consists of a few basic things.
Firstly, usability. Most of this really is git for me. I use the gh cli tool to clone a repo. But other than that git under the hood does everything else that I want in my local.
Then extensibility. Webhooks allow us to have custom event driven functionality anywhere we want. The GitHub API lets us go the other way (as long as it’s not a private deployment).
Branch protection. Pre-merge checks on protected branches.
Search. GitHub has decent search/navigation. It’s not the best but it’s usable. Especially in the last few years they’ve really improved the search functionality. And usually this is just if I’m searching through many repos, maybe throughout an organization.
Anything else I’d probably just do off GitHub. I don’t want to be too dependent on any particular forge. GitHub actions? Nah let’s use Webhooks to trigger actions elsewhere… Maybe aws lambda or circleci. GitHub pages? Let’s do a static s3 site instead. This way if things do go south I just find an equivalent forge without worrying about all the bells and whistles.
I would love to check out alternatives. I really enjoy that kinda stuff. I’m sure some of them would ultimately serve us better. But I’m a fan of good enough in most cases and GitHub has a track record with me of being good enough for a long time.
Sorry to derail this thread. Maybe we can continue this conversation elsewhere?
Picking back up — let’s teach this old dog some new tricks!
I created a group on GitLab for us: https://gitlab.com/kglw-dot-net
I’m interested to see the CI/CD options and how hosting via GitLab Pages works.