It's not a secret that I dislike all the things that Microsoft owns, and yet, I'm haunted by them every single day. No day passed by without I'm forced to use Microsoft Teams, Azure with their terrible excuse of scrum boards, or GitHub, with their lack of features only being compensated for the free things they offer.
The only exception is VSCode, but they are really trying their best to make it as bloated as possible, so I have high hopes for Zed.
The last straw
Today, I noticed something very special: GitHub is working on lists to organize your stars.
This is the feature that the community is claiming for! We NEED it, and I didn't even know that a few seconds ago. I'm so happy that they know their customers so well.
Who thinks like that? Who has a list of missing features on GitHub where the first item is "list of starred repositories"? This to me is the last straw. They don't know what they are doing with the platform.
GitHub is good enough, but is far from perfect. Let's see a small list of things that it's lacking:
Repository folders, so you can group your repositories
Default reviewers for group of repositories
GUI to change and configure the default reviews
Repository topics on the home page of an organization, like in the repositories page
Organization/account wide configuration for repositories
Organization access tokens, so you don't have to use user personal account key in pipelines
RSS feed for releases
A better home page
GUI for filters (on issues, discussions, etc)
And many, many more
"We are a social platform"
Who uses GitHub to hang out?
Hey, I saw on my GitHub homepage, because I follow your profile btw, that you create a new repository, very nice champ!
If I want to follow you, I'll follow you on Twitter or Daily.Dev, not on GitHub.
GitHub is the platform for open-source (kinda hilarious how the open-source platform isn't open-source, isn't it?), we go there to create public things and interact through issues and discussions, and yet, Microsoft tries its best to force it to be Facebook.
It should be focused on collaboration, on making things easier. Easier to find repositories (folders), easier to organize permissions (access key for organizations), and a lot of things that GitHub has been ignoring for years.
The alternatives
Do we really have alternatives?
I tried to use Bitbucket, but it has SOOOO MANY things that it's hard to configure anything. The interface is extremely polluted, you can't find anything there. The learning curve is immense.
I heard that GitLab has the same problem Bitbucket has, so what more do we have? Amazon CodeCommit? No, thanks.
GitHub was amazing before it was purchased by Microsoft, and on the first few years, the purchase was a great thing: free private repositories and free pipelines, but now they are doing the same thing that they do with every Microsoft product: destroying it.
The good thing is: The same way that the fall of Skype brought the rise of Discord, I see a new git platform for open-source coming in the next few years. One that solves the problems that GitHub have, even if it has a price.
If you know any GitHub alternatives, please leave it in the comments to share with the community, may we can at least give GitHub some fair competition to make them fell the pressure to improve.
Thanks for reading.
Top comments (4)
I actually think Gitlab is pretty good. You should try it. Most improvements in the last years were positive.
Am I the only one that loves lists ? I star basically every github repo that catches my attention and so I like being able to organize this information for later use.
I can figure out which projects I'd like to explore later, or which projects I like to use for certain purposes, etc.
If you are looking for alternatives, check out -> radicle. Decentralized platform, P2P seeding a-la torrent, collaboration via issues and patches, really cool.
Exactly
We moved to self-hosting Gitea. The GitHub migration tool worked flawlessly for a couple of smallish projects for us.
about.gitea.com/products/gitea/