Why I moved to sourcehut

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