MY INNER CONFLICT WITH GITHUB AND WHAT I PLAN TO DO ABOUT IT A very direct monologue of some feelings around GitHub It's been about 6 or more months now since I've extracted out of GitHub. Escape from GitHub really feels like some never-ending effort. Why is this? Obvious reasons and more, that you and I can think of: * The majority of programmers use it * Now even a margin of non-programmers use it * Hence there's a social pressure to use it Why do we, humanity, use it? * People use web browsers as their primary interface to computers today * Thus typing "github.com" is easy access to GitHub ("no install") * Thus access to GitHub can happen from anywhere ("remote access") * The UI/UX must have a level of pleasantness and competency ("looks nice") It would be false and unfair to then say there's no reason to use GitHub. Truthfully GitHub is satisfying a real problem around collaboration. I can't even tell people to *not* use GitHub because of this. 10/10 times I will actually recommend using GitHub. It's just the reality. Our computer literacy is getting worse each day since Windows 95. (Unfortunately this means all those open-source "git forges" too. They are all web-based. Escaping from GitHub and landing in GitLab, Codeberg, SourceHut, is no better to me ideologically. At least the alternatives you can self-host which is large step.) So what the hell's my problem with it? Why do I insistently tell myself there's a problem with using GitHub? Let's work through my thoughts... * GitHub is accessed through a web browser * A web browser is essentially a portable operating system * Chromium, a web browser, is ~37.7 million lines of expressions * Linux, the kernel, is ~27 million lines of expressions * There is no way in hell I could write my own web browser * Websites are documents * GitHub is one part complex document, one part git repository daemon. * Why do I need a whole portable OS to access a document * Because of everyone else if I want to share my creations * Why do I need a whole portable OS to access what's essentially an archive * Because of everyone else if I want to share my creations * Why do I need what's essentially a storage unit for my projects? * I don't, I can share projects with people "out of my shed" It seems there is NO way to remove the need of a portable OS. The only way to satisify my ideological OCD (hey, that's a nice way to describe this feeling) is to provide two ways of access: FIRST WAY The first way is already implemented on https://len.falken.directory/code.xml as a shell script. I would need to refine this part a bit. * All projects are visible via an RSS/ATOM feed (sorted by last updated) * You can `git clone` any of those to browse them SECOND WAY The second way would be to copy the GitHub UX *mostly*. This would exclude essentially everything minus the main code view. I'm not even sure I would allow people to see code; instead just rendering the README.md or .txt and showing the top level of files and directories, giving the illusion of the GitHub feel. I would most likely do the "profile view" and "repositories view" too. I would copy the UI and not create my own or an offshoot. What I think I have to do then, is write some program that can generate these two views dynamically. Additionally I've found creating or pushing a git repository to my remote host an effort. It'd be nice to do something like `git host ` and have git configure itself properly to setup remote origin and the proper git repository configuration on the remote end. This setup then would satisfy only needing an RSS/ATOM reader (a small demand) and git to grab projects, or letting people continue to use their familiar way using a web browser to browse code projects. CONCLUSION: GITSHED I am going to call it GitShed, because it's more like a shed than a hub. Also people will have fun calling it "GitShit", which I find funny, because I have a sense of humor. Plus the whole "bike shedding" which this could be seen as. I'll be looking for a logo where the silouhette copies GitHub's. Calling all FOSS artists :D Send them to len@falken.directory and I'll put them up in a repository when I'm done this. ETA is probably mid-December.