toastal

Hardly. It has shackled itself to Git’s internal format. There are more innovative VCSs than it.

Truly free… yet in its fork of Gitea it is copying more Microsoft GitHub features like Action YAML spaghetti instead of offering an improvement. Instead of being a better offering than Microsoft, they are cloning even more features where it is even more of a hard sell IMO by not offering anything new in the experience.

Note that Git also isn’t the only distributed version control system (DVCS); there maybe be other alternatives out there for you not just in code forge but the system underneath it too.

GitLab is open core, not open source. It is also a publicly-traded company in the US that does have shareholder obligations—which should cause some sort of long-term hesitation. It does have a better CI/CD system than the Microsoft product & the community edition can be self-hosted.

Literally from the first episode til like season 11 where it declines somewhat but still strong

King of the Hill

Tried it for a month, but key combos conflict far too often & I do not perceive it as fast as tmux.

Visibility to who? Normies? Search engines favoring corpo slop? You could make a readonly mirror if felt it necessary (it isn’t). If you have a modus operandi for you product or service, you would be better off choosing tools that align with those ideals. This instead says collaborator privacy/freedom is not our priority & we don’t actually follow our values.

Persistence is for forums. Chat has horrible discovery / search UX which makes it a black hole for knowledge—which is why it should be seen as temporary (I think even Signal sets 4 week expiry as default). Folks often say things the regret 5 years down the line in chat space & that sort of info needs to just fade away than be some target of some weirdo doxxing campaign.

You know you can have archive management & multi-devices without syncing the entire history right? Some protocols think holding onto the last 20 messages in a new group & the last year of private messages is good enough (can be saved local to the device if desired). Copying the Discord/Telegram/Slack model ain’t it.

Synpase is the reference server. It’s Python & slow as balls because of it, but the others are always playing catch-up. With Element moving with it & graceful fallbacks not being a high priority, shit just doesn’t work in practice using anything but Synapse / Element since most other users are using features on that setup. Technically having alternatives is not the same as the current situation in actual practice. Even if they can try to hide the some of the perf issues behind these gland concepts like sliding sync, there are literal fundamental issues with how the protocol is architected that a server of hand-written optimized assembly could never overcome—the eventual consistercy is by design.

That is nowhere near the mass of the centralized community & the fact it can’t be reasonable ran my medium-sized groups on a budget shows it doesn’t scale right & is not accessible. Sure you can run your own ATProto/BlueSky node if you have $80k USD / mo to host it—it’s technically open source! This is the kinda the same thing… costs too damn much so folks flock to the biggest instances.

One of the big flaws of snapshot-based VCSs like get is the patch order mattering—which causes conflicts. I would love to see an alternative built on Darcs or Pijul with their Patch Theory-based VCS system that does not have the flaws Git does.

Matrix literally syncs the entire data/metadata history to all other servers where someone pops in; chat is meant to have an ephemeral aspect to it. The whole network is de facto centralized on Matrix.org or the servers they host for others which means one org has access to almost everything—like the issue with Signal.

What’s scary to me is how expensive it is to run this eventual consistency model, which should not be a protocol requirement for this style of communication. It sucks so much RAM, so much storage, so wasteful—which causes medium-sized servers to shutdown on maintenance costs alone which causes more users to leave for the Matrix.org. These are not the characteristics of a revolutionary protocol—revolutionary is users & collectives to reasonably be self-hosting this stuff for their privacy & autonomy.