The reason I don't use or consider using SourceHut is… well, look at it.

https://git.sr.ht/~bacardi55/houston

To me a site like GitHub/SourceHut/Codeberg has two functions, one is to actually host the VCS, but the other is to be a useful, inviting public presence for your project. People with little-to-no knowledge of source code should be able to get useful information out of your project landing page.

But every Sourcehut page is bewildering to *me* at first glance, and I've contributed code to DVCSes!

"Normal" VCS hosts (BitBucket, Codeberg, the increasingly "ask"-filled GitHub) are not as good about this as they could be. The README being scrolled offscreen by a file listing is unfriendly¹. I've seen *so* many cases of non-coders landing on a Github page and not understanding they need to be clicking on the "Releases" box on the right.

But SourceHut feels like, at a design level, it's *intentionally* hostile to non-coders.

¹ Bitbucket lets you set the wiki as the landing page. I miss that.

@mcc

> Bitbucket lets you set the wiki as the landing page. I miss that.

i kinda feel like forgejo/codeberg might be receptive to such a feature request...

The SourceHut design gives a strong sense that it's the byproduct of a set of intentional choices. But I don't agree with those choices. Simplicity and unpretentiousness in design are good, but simplicity isn't an end in itself. Even in minimal designs you want to guide the eye & cleanly separate functional areas. SourceHut is a big expanse of blank white with certain elements shaded gray but others arbitrarily not. The eye gets lost. If you stop and read the labels, the names are idiosyncratic.

@mcc what if minimalism, turned to 11

@mcc yes, it's precisely the way that drew devault would like to build software. i don't like it either.

And well, I'm potentially willing to learn to use a prickly or idiosyncratic piece of software; certainly git itself has idiosyncratic names for things. But again I have to think about not just myself, but my *own* users, e.g., the users of my software. If my users land at my project page and either get a hostile feeling or get confused how to engage with the host page, that defeats the purpose of using an HTML code host in the first place instead of slapping a git repo on my flat file host.

@mcc This is all the more problematic, since many projects fill their public-facing websites with marketing gobbledygook that's even less useful than the README.

@mei Maybe a good idea, I don't think I've looked into how wikis/"pages" work on Codeberg yet. What I like about Codeberg is they allow you to link directly to the README via an anchor, so I've just been doing that.

@mcc
My annoyance with them is more based in the fact that, while their minimalist layout looks like it will be good for older/simpler web browsers, they now use Anubis to block anything that can't run JavaScript, so I can't look up cool projects from Links, Lynx or Dillo anymore!

@ddlyh I mean Codeberg also uses Anubis but the combination of no-js pages and js bot-test interstitial *is* a little funny…

@mcc Isn't the primary function of web-enabled DVCS-hosting to facilitate working with collaborators and therefore main features beyond DVCS are issues, PRs/MRs, code review and the wiki to document the software for coders?

@luis_in_brief …to 11 zeroes after the period. as min as poss

@ddlyh @mcc my annoyance with sourcehut is that it’s run by a loli/shotacon

@exception That's a compelling point, but that only increases the necessity of a clear, user-friendly interface as some people who wish to file bugs may be nontechnical end users.

I'm actually unsure what the status of issues/PRs on Sourcehut is. They don't seem to have a pull request feature. They have some sort of patch submission feature but it might be email-based (unacceptable). Digging around I found one repo with a "tickets" page. It had the same prickly design as everything else.

@mcc the UI equivalent of stepping on Lego

@mcc And the SourceHut design doesn't even begin to integrate the navigation between different services.

For example, say you follow a link here:
https://ghost.org/help/tips-and-donations/

You are looking at the source code repo for a project. How do you get to the issues for project? There is no link, no navigation!

@mcc I use fossil, which has flexible inbuilt web hosting, because I'm so far up the "why do it like everyone else does it when you can do something totally different" road I also self-host it on NetBSD. On a server I built myself. Including welding up the case from steel stock and painting it myself. Don't be me.

@kitten_tech Fossil has always looked very appealing to me but I'm unsure if I'm still allowed to contribute to the project due to being an atheist and that's a weird position to be in

@mcc @kitten_tech do they even accept contributions? i think sqlite doesn’t at least

@mcc @kitten_tech I know that sqlite has the weird religious code of ethics and also does not accept external contributions. Does the code of ethics apply to fossil too and does fossil even accept external contributions?

@noisytoot @kitten_tech Well, I don't know. The problem is I don't know.

@mcc

Do you need to contribute to fossil though ? Have you contributed to git ? (Legit question)
@kitten_tech

@rakoo @kitten_tech I have contributed patches (on a small scale) to Mercurial, hg-git (the bridge plugin that allows Mercurial to access git repos), and Dulwich (an independent Python reimplementation of git used by hg-git). I cannot specifically remember if any of my Mercurial contributions were accepted. I definitely remember at least one Dulwich bugfix made it in.

@rakoo @kitten_tech I am interested in getting involved with Jiujitsu if I find it fits my needs well.

@mcc@mastodon.social Now that's more than a bit confusing...

@zkat
Wait, what?
@mcc

@mcc to me the design said "this hoster will never betray you" and i moved everything over there the same day

@ddlyh @mcc Uhhh... there USED to be a page over at https://sizeof.cat/project/the-devault-report/ that talkes about it, but it seems to be both gone, and excluded from wayback machine O.O

@lritter I mean, to me the design suggests the hoster will never do anything bad to me, but the design also suggests the hoster will never do anything good for me, just in general this screams "I do not care about any opinions other than my own", which is not necessarily the relationship I want from this particular piece of software

@mcc @lritter you have absolutely nailed ddv there, whether intentional or not.

@mcc when you meet the admin, these are exactly the vibes :)

@ddlyh @mcc oh here we go: https://dmpwn.info/

@zkat @ddlyh @mcc has anyone done a deeper dive into the accusations stated here? I’m still unsure of how to feel about it, as it dropped right at the time of the Stallman report, which apparently DeVault was rumoured to have at least partially authored.

I know he also tried to help the Hyprland community/dev be less “toxic” and blatantly bigoted (an effort that proved to be futile as the main dev is a nazi), so I wonder if that didn’t draw him some targeted ire.

@aud @mcc @ddlyh I keep looking and haven't been able to find a thorough deep-dive into it, just people remarking about starting to go down that path and claiming it checked out

@dysfun @mcc and with this design it's never going to be so popular that i need to worry.

@lritter @mcc true, but also it might be so unpopular that you need to worry

@dysfun @mcc unlikely.

@dysfun @mcc don't you folks ever learn? groupthink kills us every time. diversify. all eggs in different baskets.

@zkat @mcc @ddlyh well, and, both things being true is certainly a possibility: that he was investigated and this written explicitly because his actions had drawn the ire of certain parties.

I recall some of the stuff seeming circumstantial and not very solid (whereas others seemed like they were probably more true), which is part of what set off my “the author may be grinding an axe here” alarm. It seems DeVault dipped out of fedi shortly after that dropped and what with everything else going on in the world, verifying it one way or another dropped to the bottom of my priority list pretty quickly… especially as I have no way to do that.

Still, thanks for talking about what you’ve found so far.

@aud @mcc @ddlyh I have no doubt that there was an axe to grind here, yeah. None whatsoever.

@aud @mcc @ddlyh but like, the existence of a creep who goes around stalking someone because they don't like them looking for dirt and who then documents said dirt in a clear act of beef just means... you have two creeps now

@zkat @ddlyh @mcc the bit mentioning "a tendency to ban projects he personally dislikes", linked to the announcement about banning cryptocurrency-related projects, does make me wonder who was behind this

@zemlanin NO AFFORDANCES FOR YOU

@mcc the “official solution” to this is to have a separate page on the “hub” (just plain sr.ht) which connect whatever repos, todo trackers mailing lists, etc. you might have into one place with some landing page.

My problem with it is that it positions itself as a bunch of modular pieces that you connect together in a way that best fits your project, but in reality the way they connect isn’t that modular, and you get the same, non-flexible connections. I floated the idea of having something IFTTT-like to have automation between services, but drew didn’t like the idea, and now like 5 years later there is a project hub that halfway works for a bunch of inflexible integrations.

I contributed a bit a long while ago, but the decision to transition the backend services to Go for some reason put me off of contributing anymore. And like, one of the quoted reasons was the poor performance of Python backend, but there was zero effort put in to make it even a little more performant. My first contribution was adding a bunch of indices on foreign keys after a total of an hour of work showed me that most of the latency came from database querries searching for the resource by scanning the whole table for matching user ID and resource name. Last time I profiled it I found that like half of time in requests was being spent in some right-to-left writing systems handling code which took the rendered HTML, parsed it with BeutifulSoup, went through every element with text, checked if it had any RTL-indicating characters, added some tags if they did, and then renderd it all back into HTML. I think that code is still running today, I have zero reason to believe anything changed on that front. But hey, rather work on a riced go implementation with GraphQL, it’s took only 5 years to get into a decent state.

@mcc ngl my biggest ick is them using email protocols for stuff.

Yes, it's good for not having to have account and some sort of federation but also... imo ActivityPub is way nicer for forges.

@erindesu yeah I am not setting that up

@erindesu Email I mean. Are there forges that support activitypub or account federation? Does Forejo?

@mcc Forgefed protocol is nice and Forgejo is implementing it but imagine using uhm, Misskey for software forge.

@erindesu I mean I'd love it to use AP and comment on a smol forge's issue pages with my Mastodon account (m.s will of course be blocked because of our spam problem)

@mcc NodeBB forum software does so and it's actually fun.

@mcc https://forgefed.org/ i know Forgejo has some support but idk how complete it is.

@zkat @ddlyh @mcc I am only halfway through and I wanna throw out.