Initially, LinkedIn was just another site where you could find jobs. It was simple to use, simple to connect with others; it even had some friendly groups with meaningful discussions.

And then it gained monopoly as the “sole” professional network where you could actually land a job. If you are not on LinkedIn now, you are quite invisible in the job market. Recruiters are concentrated there, even if they have to pay extremely high prices for premium accounts. The site is horrible now: a social network in disguise, toxic and boring influencers, and a lot of noise and bloated interface to explore.

When Google decided to close their code.google.com, GitHub filled a void. It was a simple site powered by git (not by svn or CVS), and most of the major open-source projects migrated there. The interface was simple, and everything was perfect. And then something changed.

GitHub UI started to bloat, all kinds of “features” nobody asked for were implemented, and then the site became a SaaS. Now Microsoft hosts the bulk of open-source projects the world has to offer. GitHub has become a monopoly. If you don’t keep your code there, chances are people won’t notice your side projects. This bothers me.

Rant over. I hate internet monopolies.

  • Unicorn 🌳@mander.xyz
    3·
    1 year ago

    There are many good replacements, you just need to stop using Github :)

    Some examples: Forgejo/Gitea (self-host or hosted eg. codeberg.de), Gitlab (self-host or hosted), Sourcehut (self-host or hosted eg. sr.ht)

      • Unicorn 🌳@mander.xyz
        2·
        1 year ago

        This is only true for the merge request workflow and not at all a problem for the patch workflow, which can work entirely via email (and is in my eyes simpler). Have a look at https://git-send-email.io/ if you want to learn about it. This is the true decentralized spirit of git. :)

          • Unicorn 🌳@mander.xyz
            1·
            1 year ago

            By this logic, you want a complete monopoly of a single platform? Because that’s the only possible way to have “no barrier”. Unless GitHub starts federating with some kind of standardized protocol. This is a huge technological and monetary barrier for GitHub, which is why it will never happen on its own, so if users are not willing to try platform-independent workflows then the problem is frankly not the competing platforms.