Why I moved to sourcehut
                  ========================
                         2022-08-03


This week I have moved all my public  code  repositories  to
sourcehut [1].  Sourcehut is a  great  software  forge  that
matches  my  ideal   boyfriend   forge   almost   spot   on.

People online seem to  like  lists,  so  here's  a  list  of
reasons why sourcehut is awesome:

- It's   100%   free    and    open    source    software.
- Sourcehut has a kind business model.  Besides pledging  to
  stay 100% FLOSS they offer to accommodate  your  needs  if
  you require financial aid.
- Sourcehut's website is super sweet.  It's exactly the kind
  of website I like, fast, no-nonsense,  easy  to  navigate,
  works great in text browsers and has only a minimal amount
  of JavaScript.
- Sourcehut offers the git  and  mercurial  version  control
  systems and also has a todo/tickets system, mailing lists,
  continuous integration service, and a wiki system.  And on
  the side they've also built  an  IRC  bouncer  [2]  and  a
  static website server [3].
- The sourcehut folks support a lot of open source  projects
  beside their own.
- Their patch workflow is based on "git send-mail"  which  I
  love and for people who prefer a  different  cup  of  tea:
  I've read [4] that  they're  also  working  to  make  this
  available  in  the web UI.
- Sourcehut does not lock you in. You can still send patches
  to projects if you're not a  user.   Thanks  to  the  mail
  workflow.
-  Sourcehut  is  blazing  fast.   They   have   benchmarked
  it [5] and I can tell  from  experience  that  this  feels
  correct.
- Sourcehut has no social media features.  In my book that's
  a huge plus.  I really don't like social media and I don't
  appreciate how sad they can make me feel about myself.   A
  lot of social media seems to be shaped  around  exploiting
  psychological traits to  keep  you  on  board  and  that's
  something I really dislike.  So no social media  features,
  yay!
- The company behind sourcehut  is  very  transparent  about
  their   business   side    of    things.     They    often
  blog [6]  about their  financial
  status and even stated that they will never take VC money.

I've been a paying  sourcehut  user  since  March  2019  and
summing all this up makes it seem odd why I didn't move  all
my public code from GitHub earlier.  I  think  the  Software
Freedom Conservancy [7] stated it perfectly:  "For  software
developers, giving up GitHub will be even harder than giving
up Facebook".  Having also left Facebook a couple  of  years
ago I couldn't agree more. I thought it was necessary for my
"online  presence"  as  a  serious  programmer  to  have   a
well-filled GitHub account.  However as the years passed the
friction between GitHub's social media  infused  proprietary
stance and my personal ideals became too much. Thanks to the
SFC's campaign I reconsidered my  position  and  decided  to
leave.

I haven't closed down my GitHub  account  completely,  since
there's still some projects there that people use.   I  have
instead archived them and edited the README files  to  point
to the new sourcehut location. Hopefully this will let a few
others get to know sourcehut as well and maybe even consider
switching.

P.S I have also briefly looked at Codeberg [8] and while  it
seems like a nice FLOSS-friendly place run by great people I
don't like that it has followers, stars and activity  views.


Hyperlinks:
[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~jelle/
[2]: https://man.sr.ht/chat.sr.ht/
[3]: https://srht.site/
[4]: https://postmarketos.org/blog/2022/07/25/considering-sourcehut/
[5]: https://forgeperf.org/
[6]: https://sourcehut.org/blog/
[7]: https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/
[8]: https://codeberg.org


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                       Tags: english