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Ask HN: Is my project at a disadvantage for being hosted on a GitHub competitor?

9 points by pawadu ↗ HN
I have a number of open source projects hosted on sites that I see as alternatives to Github (gitlab, bitbucket and others).

I sometimes feel that my projects are at a major disadvantage for not being on github where all the mindshare seems to be. Do you feel this is true? If so, can we break the github more-or-less-monopoly?

(for the record, I think github is awesome and they provide a great product free of charge. I just don't want them to be the only player in the market)

11 comments

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pawadu
I know that at least some gitlab people hang out on HN. I am really curious what they think of this issue.

In particular, I want to hear if they plan to make the hosted projects easier to discover and the developer pages more attractive. The amount of information developers can put on their gitlab and bitbucket homes is very limited. Does it really require that much effort to add a short bio and some external pointers (e.g. twitter, linkedin) to these pages?

robinhood
There is already the possibility to add LinkedIn, Twitter, Website, Skype, your organization information and a short bio on your profile page. What do you feel is missing?

Disclaimer: GitLab people here.

jobvandervoort
Besides the points addressed by my colleague, we _absolutely_ want to make hosted project easier to discover and developer pages more attractive.

Right now, GitLab.com is slow [0] and the interface is a little bland [1]. The features to support open source projects are there (I'd say, but please let me know what we miss), it's a matter of iteration before we should really be the preferred option.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59

[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/24304

pawadu
I appreciate your work, and I see that the site has improved a lot since last time I visited it! I also noted that some of my complaints have already been addressed (well, at least by gitlab. bitbucket not so much)

I have two suggestions regarding discoverability: when I visit a developers homepage I normally want to see his bio and his projects, not his latest commits (which is the current landing page). I assume the former is also more cache friendly and less expensive to generate for gitlab.

Furthermore, on github when I find a great developer I always look who they follow and sometimes also who follows them. This together with the star system is a great discovery tool (although it also fills your start page with endless commit messages from other people). Something similar to this but more automated and less noisy would be highly appertained.

tedmiston
I don't technical limitations are really the reason (I'm a GitLab fan and have observed GitLab's product accelerating much faster than GitHub's). It's just that the community has been established on GitHub for so many years.
johnnydoebk
I don't think it has something to do with the community. But rather that GL and BB are losing to GH in terms of UI / UX. Well, at least I wanted to switch to GL long ago, but couldn't due to unsatisfaction by their user interface.
tedmiston
They have been changing the UI quite a bit and GL has changed significantly feature wise too in the past 12 months. It might be worth another look.
johnnydoebk
Please do something with the fixed header on [1], it wastes 15-20% of screen space on every device that doesn't have at least 1920x1168 resolution. That's not cool.

And it would be great to decrease the content block's width to something like 75-80%. Just like GH, HN, millions of other websites, and even BB.

[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com

kapuru
This is something I just recently thought about as well. I somehow take projects hosted on Github alternatives less serious - even though I probably shouldn't. If you want to host your project on a Github alternative I recommend using Gitlab, which I think is best alternative to Github. Bitbuckets UI is just so cluttered that I often bounce after a few seconds.
tedmiston
Yes, this is certainly true. I've seen GitHub stars used as either (1) "likes", or (2) a tech to try todo list. A good git host agnostic app that covers both use cases could probably abstract enough that you could host on Bitbucket, GitLab, etc and still have people notice.

That said, if you use any of the services that provide a free hacker tier to open source projects, many only do that for GitHub projects today.

One workaround is to actually use another host, but mirror it back to GitHub.

dontJudge
> disadvantage for not being on github ... mindshare seems to be

Just have a mirror on github and they'll be none the wiser. Judging by how many people think linux is developed on github.