Lots of layoffs (“re-evaluating our operational footprint”) and switching to “agentic” processes. Target user is AI.
Anyone still hosting Gitlab?
Hmm I transferred a lot of my stuff from GitHub to GitLab a while ago mainly because of the free private repos. Was thinking about moving fully off GitHub but glad I waited 🙃 Still going to do it but gotta figure out which providers actually have their heads somewhere other than up their ass
Forgejo is great.
They endlessly tooted their horn about their diversity and fully remote operations. So this is pretty rich.
“This isn’t cost cutting” Oh, fuck off. This is trimming the fat before they try to look for a buyer again.
We are uniquely positioned to not only participate, but to lead in our category where the TAM is exploding at a step function rate.
Translation: please buy us, we want to cash out before the bubble fully pops.
lol I just created my gitlab account today to get away from github and after reading this the account has been scheduled for deletion and now I have a new account with Codeberg. When are these dipshits going to learn that we don’t want AI in our workflows? I am capable of breaking things on my own, but at least when I break things I will learn from it.
Run gitea on a small box.
Sucks, I manage GitLab in our company and it’s been difficult to maintain already without the vibe coded shit updates that break everything. I’ll need to see what are our options our but my assumption is that there aren’t any.
Forgeo?
The enterprise features we rely on do not exist in Forgejo last time I checked (8 months ago). Maybe it improved. Hell, my company would probably even be onboard moving to Forgejo if we can get a support contract with them and some of the enterprise features we rely upon (SCIM being the main one).
Just like everyone has already done I’d also recommend Codeberg/Forgejo👌
Gitlab CEO - 16 years in Microsoft, Gitlab CTO - 13 years in Microsoft
Can we say Microsoft Gitlab ?I hope not: we’re migrating from Gitlab to GitHub. I was never a fan because of the lack of enterprise features in GitHub (folders, with more granularity of settings and permissions, scalable usability), and certainly GitLab CI was extremely limited but wtf
Gitlab isn’t owned or controlled by Microsoft
No one claimed it was.
Is every mother fucker just going bat shit insane this year? Goddamn it.
I always love to see companies do this with a semi open source product with investors
The code gets closed, a small clump of users split off, make their own version with beet and hookers, and soon the vast majority of the users following because the real open source one is so awesome
That was jellyfin’s story, but this is a variation on that and I’ve seen this story many times now
Bye bye gitlab,rest in pieces
with beet and hookers
I work on Jellyfin, but don’t like beets. Do I need to fork again?
They once were a promising alternative to MS GitHub but now they’re going down the same route.
“Software will be built by machines, directed by people.”
Oh my lord. Is this a delayed April Fools post?
This is dangerous for me to say on lemmy, but fuck it.
Doesn’t it make sense that machines would write for machines? Isn’t that kind of what we already do by creating compilation layers programmers use? We obviously wouldn’t write the manual 1’s and 0’s, and most people don’t write using assembly. Is this not a translation layer for us to be able to write code?
Right now we have LLMs writing with languages designed for humans, and it’s already doing some pretty wild stuff. If we get to the point where AI is literally a coding model (and not a generic LLM) that is able to use an AI optimized way of writing code, who knows what it would be capable of.
Code is one of the few things AI is specially suited for. AI is just a big fancy prediction machine, so what better application than something that is by definition formulaic and patternistic like code? I am not saying we are there now, but rather the idea that machines should write software does make sense when it becomes actually feasible.
If we could have programmed like this from the beginning, we would have. There has been many evolutions of making it easier to code. What’s easier than plain language?
I may be considering AI usage from a different angle. I’m less interested in the technical side than I am from the moral side.
AI companies trained their agents using open source software, did not contribute back to the code, did not credit the authors, and now want to sell it back to the same people they ripped off.
As an open source project maintainer, I’m disgusted by this.
I’m also a musician. AI companies trained agents on other people’s music without giving anything back to them. This also is disgusting.
AI trained on people’s work now lets you circumvent paying the original creators.
Add to this resource usage and environmental impact.
This is why I see AI usage as immoral. It hurts real people.
@Bazoogle @1hitsong First of all - when it comes to creating programs, you want the output to be deterministic. Stochastic program output is a serious problem, as you _will_ get unreproducible bugs. Second, plain language is _not_ easy except for the simplest of tasks. Actual programs need to handle all kinds of corner cases and hardware weirdness and human weirdness. Your “plain language” goes from “do a thing” very quickly to “do a thing. but not that thing. or that other thing. and and and…”
Your “plain language” goes from “do a thing” very quickly to “do a thing. but not that thing. or that other thing. and and and…”
Your options would be write all those things in plain language, or program them all eith (hopefully) no mistakes, bugs, or vulnerabilities. Either way you have to catch all the situations. Even in plain language, not everybody will be able to effectively use AI to generate code. You need to have a solid understanding of software architecture to be able to get useful output.
when it comes to creating programs, you want the output to be deterministic
AI is capable of writing deterministic programs.
I would also like to preemptively emphasize that AI is not there yet. I am simply talking about the concept of machines creating software. If you try to step back from your anti-AI gut reaction and truly think about it, it would make sense to do if we get there technologically
I don’t know why anyone should take your post seriously when you say that AI isn’t there yet. You’re saying, purely hypothetically, that AI could do these things, if it existed, which it doesn’t. That can’t be argued against because no matter what anyone points to, you can just say that isn’t it.
But, like, your basic premise that machines would be the best programmers of machines is inherently flawed because humans created those machines, and thus it should actually stand that humans would thus be the best programmers of those machines. But that’s a reductive argument that kinda is more tell than show.
Programming is really just some layer of abstraction on modifying how a computer works, so vibecoding should really be just another layer to that abstraction. But as it stands now (and how we have specifically created our current LLMs), these outputs are not deterministic, and thus sort of fail as a means to program with. That’s one of dozens of reasons of why it fails as a programming substitute.
Idiotic. Use codeberg.
MacOS CI jobs?
- Software will be built by machines, directed by people.
- The agentic era multiplies demand for software. As the cost of producing software collapses, demand for it will expand.
objectively insane.
Governance built into the core.
I still believe that’s not possible, but that’s only my opinion.
As the cost of producing software collapses, demand for it will expand.
This part actually makes sense. Plenty of software doesn’t get written because it’s just easier or cheaper to do without it. It’s why BPM tools exist. Simplify the coding process and you can solve problems more cheaply.
I also think this will kill BPM tools. Why use BPM tooling when creating a real app is just as easy and more customizable?
I see that requires some more explaining my thinking:
There is only demand and supply.
Previously, we had “high demand” and “limited supply” which is what lead to software dev roles being a very well paid job in silicon valley and some other places.
Now, the promise of AI, making software by itself or increasing productivity, if true, mean that supply increases. That makes software cheaper. Theoretically.
But that’s the supply side.
What you’re talking about is also a “I have so much supply, I can now afford to do projects and software I could not do before, because my time, budget, etc. was limited.” But you already had the idea and the “demand” however low priority, already existed.
What isn’t happening, is that some company sits down and suddenly decides that they need more software than they thought they needed. Even the bit that is “replacing real humans” is replacing humans. It’s meeting a demand that was already there in a new way.
Using a metaphor / example, we currently, as humanity, manage to feed ourselves. Or let’s pretend that we do and nobody is starving. Someone claiming that “the demand for food is going to go up” is talking nonsense. They can say that demand for “cheese” or “meat” or “potatoes” will go up. But not food, because that market is already saturated. Because we’re not starving.
Yes, the fact that the demand is there and that the supply gets cheaper will mean that more software will be produced.
But not because of increased demand. AI doesn’t create it’s own demand.
…at least that’s my thought process and why I wrote what I wrote in the original comment.
I see what you’re saying. That makes sense. It’s an overloaded term.
In economic terms, a price drop would result in an “increase in demand”. Because current demand is the amount request “at current price”.
And that’s why it’s always talked about in relation to demand curves. Or how much demand there is at many theoretical.prices.
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.
If you don’t want to host something yourself, check codeberg
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%…
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.
That’s true, but even at worst case (full 8 hour outage per week) that’s still 96% uptime.
Most of my outages have been out of that window.
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?
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.
Thats rough. Check out https://grebedoc.dev/ I believe codeberg itself also wants to migrate to that as well, I cant tell you how reliable it is though (I am using hetzner managed for 1.90€/m) is but I dig its simplicity.
Codeberg for hosted, Forgejo for selfhosted.
They are great.
Codeberg, I can recommend
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.
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.
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
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?
That’s the plan, but it’s still far away
That’s nice
This was always baked into basic git from the beginning if you review your code in E-Mail chains or mailing lists.
So not really baked in at all then?
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”
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.
That’s nowhere near as convenient as current web based PR.
That sounds like the dream.
Just like bluesky is centralised “for now” i.e. forever
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.
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 hitgit push, probably with something like--forceor 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.
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.
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.
And the open issues, tasks and pull requests?
Right.
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.
Those are all part of the forge, not git.
- A git migration is easy.
- Forge migration usually requires some form of migration tool to get all the forge specific stuff (like issues, PR’s and todos).
The 2 are very different things.
And what kind of service is gitlab, which we are discussing here, or github which was brought up in the comment, or codeberg?
They are forges.
I think the comment of migrating git, was more for smaller and maybe private projects. Not large collaborations. So only the git part, not the forge part.
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.
At least with federation a single account gets you access to all the systems. So a truly federated git system would be great.
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).
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.
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.
It is but they’re working on federation for forgejo (which powers Codeberg).
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.
Codeberg or sourcehut.
Gitlab was always cringe.
Even cringe as it always was, still a better product than GitHub. Microsoft drove it into the ground, but it was quite bad before as well, comparatively.
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.
Codeberg
Host a Gitea?See reply comment below
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.
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…
