It's cool to see such an impactful project choose sovereignty. I hope more projects follow their example.
If you're a backbone-of-the-internet project like FFmpeg is, living on GitHub seems horrible. You will be subjected to thousands of low quality pull requests and issues from people searching for typos to fix, adding a line of white space for a contrived reason, or similar nonsense changes. Just so they can put "FFmpeg contributor" on their CV (or whatever).
Aurornis 2 hours ago [-]
Rejecting useless or white space-only PRs is quick and easy. It’s not as big of a problem as you’re suggesting.
I’ve gone through a few projects and updated the documentation as I explored the codebase. Reception ranges from thankful to people scorning me for attempting to make contributions that weren’t code changes. It’s frustrating when maintainers are more interested in keeping people out than in considering actual code or doc improvements.
reconvene1290 43 minutes ago [-]
It’s all in the approach: start with a “thank you for the project”, and a “hope you don’t mind but I’ve corrected a few typos” and nobody will shout you down. Only go with a blank PR description and it’ll come across as arrogant and spammy.
42lux 35 minutes ago [-]
There are people hunting double spaces or typos in code? For what contributor credits?
tzury 2 hours ago [-]
This issue has only worsened with LLMs "assisting" contributors in submitting PRs that end up wasting maintainers' time.
Tools like OpenAI Codex, which can connect directly to repositories, are likely to amplify this problem even further.
That said, this is also the real measure of the actual value of LLMs and coding agents: the day we see top open-source projects having dozens of bugs effectively fixed per day by LLMs, we’ll know they’ve matured into a solid, reliable resource.
pmontra 44 minutes ago [-]
FFmpeg seems to have dealt with that problem when they still were on github. This is the paragraph at the end of the readme:
> Contributing
> Patches should be submitted to the ffmpeg-devel mailing list using git format-patch or git send-email. Github pull requests should be avoided because they are not part of our review process and will be ignored.
An agentic LLM bot is likely to have no problems at creating a patch and mailing it but it's a major pain for most human developers. Furthermore they can ban source email addresses and vet potential contributors before letting them in the mailing list.
mmmmbbbhb 37 minutes ago [-]
I have to say you're exaggerating, ignoring prs isn't such a chore.
jambutters 2 hours ago [-]
Thousands is quite the exaggeration when there are only 379 on ffmpeg github. If you look through them, its actually 5-10% if not less
picafrost 2 hours ago [-]
Another way to frame this is that even though the FFmpeg repository clearly indicates it's a mirror repository and has had a single open pull request titled "WARNING: PULL REQUESTS ON THIS REPOSITORY ARE IGNORED" [0] sitting in the pull requests page for 10 years, they've still had to close hundreds of pull requests.
That’s fair, but it would be trivial to use GitHub’s actions/API (and probably just an existing open source tool in either case) to automatically close them without anyone wasting their time.
I think you’re definitely right that being a massive project on GitHub that accepts PRs there would be a nightmare though.
cdrini 53 minutes ago [-]
Is the version on Forgejo closed to public contribution?
nine_k 3 hours ago [-]
Typos may be quite impactful, don't discount them.
My only contribution to node-grpc fixed missing quotes, but only because that produced real crashes.
miohtama 3 hours ago [-]
But the parent does not refer to fixing crashes
usr1106 21 minutes ago [-]
In my previous work we were strict about typos, whitespace and general consistency in reviews. And even fixed them later if they slipped through. I found it a bit ridicolous a times.
In my current company nobody cares. It can be seen in the whole code quality. Full of smaller and bigger bugs as well as horrible hacks. It can be seen whether coders look twice or more at their own stuff before putting it to review or not, just trying to avoid ridicolous comments. It's a whole attitude. I write good code in a messy source base is unlikely to work in practice.
That said, I have submitted cleanup commits to open source projects only in the same MR with a real code change I wanted to make and only in vincinity of that change.
delta_p_delta_x 3 hours ago [-]
The comments on this page are a complete cesspool.
A full third of them complaining about the anti-bot protection mascot (yes, it's a cartoon character; get over it), others splitting the finest of hairs over software development groups and company politics, and more.
Self-hosting is generally good, well done to FFmpeg. Many large projects self-host, and my own ex-company has physical servers in the city we work at that can be unplugged if necessary.
I just wish Git itself had a more robust means of issue-handling (no, email is a 1980s protocol, it's not good enough, even if it is for Linux) and CI/CD, rather than relegating the matter to different hosts.
And now everyone has to learn GitHub Actions, Gitlab pipelines, Jenkins pipelines, and more.
KronisLV 2 hours ago [-]
> yes, it's a cartoon character; get over it
I think it's cute. It wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't cute. It's inoffensive and doesn't get in the way of the software serving its function, the only critique I could do if I wanted to is people unfamiliar with the project would get a bit confused if they only saw the character for a split second: https://anubis.techaro.lol/
I think even Cloudflare gives you a second or two to see what's going on before forwarding you to the page behind it, that would be a nice UX improvement.
Otherwise, agreed about self-hosting and the ability to choose whatever platform aligns with your goals the closest to be a good thing!
> And now everyone has to learn GitHub Actions, Gitlab pipelines, Jenkins pipelines, and more.
A part of me doesn't like the churn of new CI solutions coming in all the time. On the other hand, after learning GitLab CI, I'd generally prefer it to something like Jenkins, it just feels more pleasant. But with something like Drone CI or Woodpecker CI my non-work needs are also covered wonderfully, especially with a lot of the software I build being packaged in Docker containers, which further simplifies and somewhat standardizes things! A lot of the time I can also encapsulate most of the logic in shell scripts that are easy to run regardless of the environment (CI server or locally), which makes it even more portable.
HappMacDonald 1 hours ago [-]
So wait, is the cartoon mascot at issue the Annubis one for the Cloudflare-like DDoS protection, or is it an actual FFmpeg mascot? Because I don't see any cartoon characters on the FFmpeg code, main, or wiki websites. But I am curious what kinda -tan they came up with. :P
KronisLV 41 minutes ago [-]
It's the Anubis one, there are a few other drawings on the homepage of theirs.
> The comments on this page are a complete cesspool.
I noticed this. I'm quite appalled. Definitely outside the usual HN standards.
I suspect the very idea of self-hosting one's code instead of using GitHub is triggrering many people beyond reasonable levels for reasons I'd love to get an explanation for.
Are people projecting their GitHub FOMO? Are people thinking that the value of the GitHub they cherish decreases with each project not picking it because of the weaker network effect?
LegionMammal978 1 hours ago [-]
I do have a sense of unease about most smaller hosting services and self-hosting solutions, in that I don't trust them to stay up in the long term, once no one is left to care about projects on them, or at least not about the old versions. (This isn't so big an issue for something as big as FFmpeg, but I'm talking about the general case.) Just try to download some old version of a minor library from the late 90s or early 2000s: unless it's been continuously using the same source control repo, the odds are better than not that the files disappeared during the intervening decades.
In contrast, whatever its faults, I fully expect public repos on GitHub to last for the next 10 years, likely the next 20, barring active removal by the author. (The biggest medium-term risk is a "GitHub is evil, take down all your repos" campaign a la Reddit.) Of course, it's not foolproof, the only way to get that would be to replicate the project in dozens of places, but I find it much better than the old status quo of files slipping away once forgotten.
jraph 1 hours ago [-]
That's a totally valid concern that I also have and that does need to be addressed.
I'm thinking of setting up mirrors for my stuff for this exact reason. Now that codeberg exists, that could be the solution and why not accept contributions from codeberg too if it doesn't make the development process too messy.
OTOH GitHub is a huge SPOF. I also trust that my stuff that matters is checked out by other people who will reupload somewhere else should something happen.
eviks 1 hours ago [-]
> beyond reasonable levels for reasons I'd love to get an explanation for.
Since you're ignoring the reasons by calling them unreasonable, the armchair psychology alternative won't help get you what you love
jraph 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not calling people or reasons unreasonable, but the level at which they are triggered. And I stand by my point: being mad that someone chooses to self host is unreasonable and no amount of accusing me of doing armchair psychology will change anything to this.
hulitu 2 hours ago [-]
> I suspect the very idea of self-hosting one's code instead of using GitHub is triggrering many people beyond reasonable levels for reasons I'd love to get an explanation for.
The cloud companies do not want you to selfhost. It is good that Ffmpeg did not experience a DDOS attack yet, because that's what happened to someone who moved his email to selfhosting. We are living in a time when companies have become like mafia.
jraph 2 hours ago [-]
Do you have evidences that these individual HN accounts are from some cloud company mafia?
I don't think this is it and I would not want to dismiss individual spontaneous, genuine feeling too early.
cryptonector 2 hours ago [-]
> I just wish Git itself had a more robust means of issue-handling (no, email is a 1980s protocol, it's not good enough, even if it is for Linux) and CI/CD, rather than relegating the matter to different hosts.
Just shove the issues into Git itself. That's what Fossil does for its wiki and issues, while GitHub only does it for its wiki. There are several open source ways to do this with Git itself.
Aurornis 2 hours ago [-]
> Self-hosting is generally good
I’ve contributed to a number of projects that try to self-host, with mixed results. It gets frustrating when someone’s GitLab (or other) server is so slow that every page load takes several seconds, or when the self-hosted solution goes down for a week because the admin is on vacation and missed something.
I’ve contributed to one server that feels the need to periodically delete dormant accounts for some reason. Every time I come back to the project I find myself creating a new user account.
With the anubis-protected servers the anti-bot protection has a lot of false positives, so occasionally I have to switch browsers just to not deal with page load failures.
One server adopted some black list that had my home IP in it for some reason, so I was just banned from accessing the server without a VPN.
It all just feels old and tiring after a while compared to the breath of fresh air of just using a site like GitLab or GitHub that simply works.
I understand why they’d want to do it, but I don’t think it’s without some tradeoffs.
strogonoff 2 hours ago [-]
Contribution-wise, I find Sourcehut’s approach[0] very sound: you could never have troubles with your account because you don’t need one in the first place. If you want to contribute, create a patch and send it to respective mailing list.
As a positive side-effect, a contributor is compelled to write a reasonable explanatory message to maintainers and keep the patch minimal and contained (compared to a typical Github PR with a dozen of commits mixing together fixes, features, newlines and indentation changes all over the place).
[0] They did not invent it, obviously—it is what Linux kernel, the origin of Git, had (has?) been doing for a long time!
hulitu 2 hours ago [-]
> server is so slow that every page load takes several seconds,
Welcome to DE, where _every_ page takes several seconds to load.
elric 1 hours ago [-]
I strongly disagree with the issue handling & CI/CD part of your comment. Those are concerns are orthogonal to distributed version control and greatly complicate any system.
Not everyone even has to learn Jenkins/GH-Pipelines/whatever. In most teams I've worked on those are typically managed by one or two people, or by a different team entirely. And it's not even a hard skill to learn.
0xbadcafebee 2 hours ago [-]
Cesspool is pretty strong language, dawg. They're critical and opinionated, sure, but so are your own comments. None of it is empirical, just personal opinion.
I personally couldn't give a rat's ass how it's hosted. Still uses a protocol there's open source clients for? Cool. Not that I have pulled the ffmpeg source more than once in my life (which I suspect's the same for 99% of the people here). I'll continue to get it packaged for me by somebody else, who will pull it from wherever it's hosted, however they can. I'm just glad it still exists.
jraph 17 minutes ago [-]
> Cesspool is pretty strong language, dawg. They're critical and opinionated, sure,
There's nothing wrong about critical and opinionated but respectful, but the comments that are now flagged, and some of the downvoted ones are very low quality, not just critical and opinionated.
nine_k 1 hours ago [-]
> 1980s protocol
TCP is even older; so what? It works, as does email. It's merely a transport layer.
What is required is a well-defined standard to encapsulate relevant data into it: PR definitions, code review comments, approval / rejection votes. This all could be a zipped JSON attachment, for instance.
The code change proper can continue be passed in the patch format. Or the whole thing could arrive via an exposed API endpoint, or even be pushed by git protocol.
A tool could interpret the extracted data and update a database that powers a nice GUI / TUI, and controls a CI/CD interface.
(Now if I only had time to properly design and implement that.)
__loam 2 hours ago [-]
Anubis is funny because I think it's in the license that you have to keep the mascot. If you want to remove it you have to pay them.
commoner 2 hours ago [-]
Anubis has a commercial version called BotStopper that allows the mascot to be changed:
> A full third of them complaining about the anti-bot protection mascot (yes, it's a cartoon character; get over it)
If you're going to force people to stare at a screen with nothing but your quirky anime girl OC for a few seconds every time they visit your website, then in my opinion it's completely reasonable for those people to point out how immature it is. Telling people to "get over it" just makes you sound equally as immature.
strogonoff 2 hours ago [-]
The “branding of your captcha page is immature” point is a downside unless you consider it not merely self-expression but an intentional motivator for “more mature” (which not infrequently goes hand in hand with “financially able”) people to subscribe to a commercial offering, thus helping keep an open-source project alive and in an honest business, despite competition with a VC-backed behemoth that’s become nearly a monopoly.
bakugo 2 hours ago [-]
> unless you consider it not merely self-expression but an intentional motivator for “more mature” (which not infrequently goes hand in hand with “financially able”) people to subscribe to a commercial offering
I'm fairly confident in saying that self-expression is the #1 motivator here and the commercial offering was an afterthought.
I don't have a marketing degree, but I'm pretty sure that if selling your software to professional businesses is the goal, making the non-commercial version feel extremely unprofessional is really not the best way to do it, considering most people are likely going to find out about the project's existence by seeing it, and it won't leave a good first impression.
delta_p_delta_x 2 hours ago [-]
> If you're going to force people to stare at a screen with nothing but your quirky anime girl OC for a few seconds every time they visit your website
It is a damn sight better than the maliciously-compliant and deeply annoying GDPR 'we use cookies' banners, pop-ups, and dark patterns like having to uncheck thousands of 'partner' boxes.
This is merely a response to AI companies abusing scraper bots and having a callous, selfish disregard for Internet and server bandwidth. It was on this very website where I saw it put quite succinctly—AI-scraping bots have essentially started mass DDOS attacks on all small servers.
> immature
Maturity is empathy, human connection, understanding, perspective, compassion, altruism, and more. Not some arbitrary 'this is a cartoon, therefore it is immature'.
25 years ago Microsoft, the professional software behemoth, decided to put a cartoon dog and paperclip with googly eyes in its operating system and office software. A major mobile OS has a cartoon robot in its logo.
Cartoons are metaphors and windows into the artist's frame of mind. They are much more mature than your shallow portrayal of them.
mockingloris 2 hours ago [-]
> Maturity is empathy, human connection, understanding, perspective, compassion, altruism, and more.
Maturity is FFmpeg moving to Forgejo knowing and weighing the tradeoffs.
bakugo 2 hours ago [-]
> Cartoons are metaphors and windows into the artist's frame of mind.
Maybe they are. But, in this case, nobody cares about the "artist's frame of mind". We care about accessing a website that has nothing to do with art.
timeon 2 hours ago [-]
That is just what LLM era brings.
talles 3 hours ago [-]
OK, not GitHub "because Microsoft". But is there any particular reason why Forgejo and not GitLab, Gitea, or Gogs?
I'm not throwing shade at Forgejo or anything like that, I'm genuinely curious if there's anything about Forgejo that made it a better alternative than the other options.
nightpool 3 hours ago [-]
Forejo is/was a soft fork of Gitea due to some licensing / trademark bruhaha that I think got blown somewhat out of proportion. (And Gitea was famous for using Github instead of dogfooding their own software, which I've always thought was a pretty strange choice). I'm not familiar enough with the development roadmap of both teams to make a good call on whether following the fork is a good idea or not, but I know a lot of projects are just bandwagoning on the fork due to generally frustrating Gitea governance. GitLab is open core and I know a lot of people are frustrated with their UX and with their high resource consumption for self-hosting (although I would expect YJIT probably made a big improvement here). I've only seen maybe one project use Gogs seriously, I don't get the sense that it has the same level of adoption as the other three.
lotyrin 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, Issue with GitLab is their "Enterprise" maximalist feature set. Seems like they want to be the solution for the entire SDLC for every conceivable team.
I remember thinking a decade ago "wow these guys are biting off a lot to chew, maybe in a decade they'll be able to tackle all these things in a comprehensive way" and my opinion now is they are still probably a decade out. I appreciate their ambition and wish them luck, but it's not for me.
If if a project requires more maintenance than I could potentially do by myself in a pinch because of complexity or having a massive supply chain of dependencies that keep it on a treadmill I will hesitate to depend on it.
cyberpunk 2 hours ago [-]
A decade out? They do Code, Artifacts and CI basically that all works.
What missing sdlc features are going to take them a decade
to write?
lotyrin 27 minutes ago [-]
It's not about features or if they work it's about the conceptual load presented to the user by the quality of how those features are integrated, how much configuration they require to do only what you want them to, ask of you only what you want them to, and no more.
When I'm interacting with a maximalist system designed to be everything to everyone, I still only want to have to worry about the things I care about.
They do seem to hold this as a value, but it's secondary to the maximalism.
ksec 3 hours ago [-]
So Forego forked from Gitea and Gitea is forked from Gogs?
Edit: Google AI has a surprisingly decent answer.
Gitea is a self-hosted Git forge, similar to GitHub or GitLab, providing features like Git hosting, code review, issue tracking, and more. It is known for being lightweight and easy to deploy.
Forgejo is a soft fork of Gitea, initiated by the Codeberg e.V. non-profit organization. The name "Forego" in this context highlights Forgejo's decision to "forego" or move away from the direct development and governance model of Gitea, particularly after Gitea transitioned to being controlled by a for-profit company (Gitea Ltd.).
Key aspects of this "foregoing" include:
Governance and Stability:
Forgejo emphasizes stability through extensive testing (including end-to-end and upgrade tests) and operates under the umbrella of a non-profit organization, prioritizing the public interest over profit maximization.
Divergence in Features and Development:
While initially a soft fork, Forgejo has accepted features and changes not available in Gitea and has diverged in other ways, including a focus on forge federation.
Community Concerns:
The fork was driven by concerns within the Gitea community regarding the lack of transparency surrounding the formation of Gitea Ltd. and the potential implications for the project's open-source nature.
In essence, "Gitea Forego" signifies Forgejo's independent path, driven by a different governance philosophy and a commitment to a community-centric, non-profit model for developing and maintaining a Git forge.
nightpool 3 hours ago [-]
The bit about the name seems to be a complete hallucination / tokenization error. The project's docs say: "Forgejo (pronounced /forˈd͡ʒe.jo/ (hear an audio sample)) is inspired by forĝejo, the Esperanto word for forge." I would expect the rest of the AI summary to be similarly unreliable / hallucinated—I compared the test directories for both projects and they both seemed to have about the same amount of activity.
ksec 33 minutes ago [-]
Thank You for pointing this out. Although I am not entirely why my comment was downvoted into oblivion .
esperent 5 hours ago [-]
Opening this site I get "Oh Noes! Invalid Response" with an anime girl.
Tried refreshing, opening in a private windows, same thing.
EDIT: tried it again and got to "Making sure you're not a bot" with the same cringey anime girl, then the site loaded without CSS. Tried one more time, finally it loaded.
EDIT 2: clicked on a link and I'm back to "Oh Noes!...".
I’ve never had problems getting to any Anubis site even with uBlock origin and uMatrix. You have to enable cookies and scripting for the main domain.
esperent 3 hours ago [-]
I pass multiple proof of work checks from Cloudflare everyday using this browser (Brave on Android). I have JavaScript and cookies enabled.
Plus, I did manage to pass it once at least.
1gn15 3 hours ago [-]
AI-misia backfired and made human browsing inconvenient.
(PoW is fine, just wish it didn't spin it as an anti-AI thing.)
armarr 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, because AI made hosting inconvenient.
Aurornis 3 hours ago [-]
That’s the anubis anti-bot mechanism.
I understand where they’re coming from with all the choices made, but honestly I suspect the anubis anime girl and associated sporadic failures (that I’ve seen, too, despite having a rather standard environment) functioning as a filtering mechanism that attracts a certain in-crowd person and makes a lot of others uninterested in staying around, and I think that’s intentional.
4 hours ago [-]
elric 51 minutes ago [-]
It's interesting (and a little sad) how all git "forges" (for want of a better word) converge on the same layout. An alphabetical list of files, when they were last modified, and an expanded readme file.
IMO a list of recent commits would be more useful as a landing page, or maybe even just the readme. When checking out a new project, I'm interested in what it does, not in its folder structure when its LICENSE.md was last modified.
usr1106 37 minutes ago [-]
Pick one of the open source forges that takes MRs (not using the giant's terminology, hardly ever calling git pull either...) and contribute your ideas.
That said, it's a bit like QWERTY. Maybe a bit weird, but it eases quick orientation on a new keyboard or repo if everyone uses the same layout.
reconvene1290 41 minutes ago [-]
I agree. My ideal forge would be SourceHut but with GitHub style PR workflow (as opposed to email).
thrdbndndn 4 hours ago [-]
The biggest news is not what software they use but they finally moved away from mail list, which is a big win.
setheron 5 hours ago [-]
Dunno why but lately I can't visit any Anubis protected websites from my phone (Android).
Just says Invalid Response :(
Dwedit 2 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile, my phone is a potato that is slow to actually solve the proof of work challenges.
kiwijamo 4 hours ago [-]
I can access it ok on Firefox on Android FWIW.
ipaddr 3 hours ago [-]
Not sure how that helps the parent commenter.
gapan 2 hours ago [-]
You can take it as another data point. Here's another one: it works for me on Firefox/Android too. It might imply that the issue is probably not with that specific combination but something else. Maybe disabled cookies? Just an idea.
roer 2 hours ago [-]
It might help narrow in on the specific issue in case they are using some other browser
ericbarrett 3 hours ago [-]
Did you block cookies?
ec109685 6 hours ago [-]
Why did it move to Forgejo?
bigfishrunning 6 hours ago [-]
They were using an old fashioned mailing list to pass patches around, I would imagine features like pull requests and issue tracking made forgejo an attractive option
### July 22nd, 2025, Modernization of contributions
The project is modernizing its contribution methods and switching to a software
forge.
We have setup a platform on [code.ffmpeg.org](https://code.ffmpeg.org/). The new
process features continuous integration on all commits and merge requests,
labelling for categorization, conflict resolution, and logging in via OpenID or
Github.
The main repository will become
[code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg](https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg), with all
others being mirrored to it. Users are encouraged to begin using it, effective
now.
Mailing lists have supported our development for nearly 25 years, but as more
and more contributors started to become involved, the ratio of merged patches to
total mails begun falling. Mailing lists became a source of friction, with
discussions frequently stalling and uncategorized noise drowning out patches by
bumping them down in inboxes.
Although [patchwork.ffmpeg.org](https://patch.ffmpeg.org/) was set up to track
submissions, it was less than reliable, with many patches and mails slipping
though. Since its activation exactly 9 years ago, it recorded 54,476 patches,
with 53,650 patches having the state of not archived. In comparison, the mailing
list has had a total of 150,736 emails during the same time period.
Additionally, new users have frequently encountered difficulties with mailing
list development. From finding out the correct SMTP login details, configuring
git send-email, new email security mechanisms interfering with mailing list
operations, and finally not having a comfortable workflow to review patches.
After years of discussions, and a vote, we officially announce the new platform,
[code.ffmpeg.org](https://code.ffmpeg.org/), running
[Forgejo](https://forgejo.org/). Documentation will be updated to reflect the
change.
Mailing lists will continue to be monitored, and used for project discussions
and other topics better discussed elsewhere, but traffic and noise should become
significantly reduced over time.
Bugs/issues will be accepted on [code.ffmpeg.org](https://code.ffmpeg.org/),
alongside with [trac.ffmpeg.org](https://trac.ffmpeg.org/) for the time being.
We are also hoping that this will significantly reduce the amount of unmerged
patches. If you submitted a patch which received no replies or conclusion, we
apologize, and you are encouraged to resubmit it on the new platform.
rs186 4 hours ago [-]
I wish a certain open source project would take notice of the reasoning here...
Aurornis 3 hours ago [-]
The friction and overhead of mailing list development is seen as a feature, not a bug, for certain devs who prefer an exclusive environment.
Moving to a modern platform with real collaborative development features is a mature move.
Well, for one it's much faster than the github mirror. Browsing files is at least 10x faster. And getting away from the mailing list send-patch workflow is huge. Though they could have that for free also.
self hosting could drain too much resources I fear.
mpalmer 4 hours ago [-]
With the calm, respectful understanding that everything is subjective and there's no accounting for taste -
and in my personal capacity -
I do not understand how cutesy anime characters have been deemed sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne enough to be displayed to literally every single person who visits my site.
With apologies to fans of the art style, it is a negative signal to me. I do not prefer to use Cloudflare for things like this, but I would not use Anubis unless I could disable the imagery, and every time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"
OhMeadhbh 4 hours ago [-]
It's the kids. They all like the anime. Not at all like the serious teams I worked with at IBM and DEC that slapped trek logos over everything.
scythe 3 hours ago [-]
In the radiology department at Westchester Medical Center, all of the portable X-ray machines have little nametags on them that read, variously, "Enterprise", "Voyager", "Defiant", etc.
some-guy 3 hours ago [-]
Define kids? I know plenty of Gen X and elder millennials into anime
hitekker 3 hours ago [-]
I think the GP is speaking tongue-in-cheek; it's a fun little joke
nine_k 1 hours ago [-]
Kids as in "kids these days" and "get off my lawn".
brookst 2 hours ago [-]
There are boomers, and there are kids.
c0balt 4 hours ago [-]
> but I would not use Anubis unless I could disable the imagery, and every time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"
They do offer an unbranded version, botstopper. It is part of their commercial offering [0] and intended for "professional" environments
Can't fault the logic. Will never use it if that's part of what they've chosen to paywall.
xena 4 hours ago [-]
Once the project is sustainable (where I define sustainable as monthly recurring revenue--not one time donations--to be at $5000 USD per month as that is the point where my bank account stays flatlined not accounting for tax), an option to remove it will be added to the version you don't have to pay for.
Otherwise, it's MIT licensed software. You can remove it all you want, but I will use that as a signal to focus my time and energy as I see fit.
mpalmer 4 hours ago [-]
I appreciate the response, and your point is valid. FWIW there's no sarcasm in what I said up top; I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum.
I have been reading your stuff for a while, and if anything disproves my original point, it's your published output. cheers -
xena 4 hours ago [-]
Thank you. I'm sorry if I was overly abrasive or rude, but it's getting really old. People have sent me horrible things because of this. I've had to start withdrawing from joining new places under my main identity. Just please take one femtoiota of care that the other side is also a human being with thoughts, feelings, and that they may just be incredibly tired of hearing people complain about something.
KronisLV 2 hours ago [-]
Hey, thanks for working on the software, you made something really cool!
__loam 2 hours ago [-]
It's kind of an ingenious way to weed out people who are engaging in bad faith. Like if you're choosing not to use a very useful piece of software because of some aesthetic sensibility, maybe I want to be able to identify you more easily.
Fwiw I like the mascot but I also don't associate this username with my actual identity because I draw anime style pixel art, so I get it.
mpalmer 3 hours ago [-]
I legit didn't read any rudeness, it was a graceful retort.
> People have sent me horrible things because of this.
That sucks, and I see how it makes my (somewhat) measured reaction scan differently.
> Just please take one femtoiota of care that the other side is also a human being with thoughts, feelings, and that they may just be incredibly tired of hearing people complain about something.
Your shit rocks, your stuff on Tailscale in particular inspired me greatly, and I'm sorry you caught me seeing orange.
squeaky-clean 3 hours ago [-]
> Can't fault the logic. Will never use it if that's part of what they've chosen to paywall.
Is pretty damn rude. It's the kind of thing you say online but would never say face-to-face.
some_furry 3 hours ago [-]
I can't wait for it to be sustainable so I can send a PR to let people use gratuitously furry characters instead. :3
Like... imagine Anubis, but with the "anubis is overdrawn" meme.
So on one hand you wouldn't use it as-is for anything professional, because of the artwork, but on the other, you'd be unwilling to pay to use it -- for something professional -- because removing the artwork is the paid feature?
Unbelievable.
pineaux 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah this is a very weird logic. I would love some kind explanation of mpalmer.
Duralias 4 hours ago [-]
It has simply been normalized and for a lot of smaller scale sites, that this was first made for, being a little less professional isn't a problem.
But for situations where a company simply won't use Anubis because of its branding then they do sell a unbranded version.
What an ingenious approach for a sustainable OSS project: serve the free version with playful art that you enjoy and that expresses your individuality, but which some people are bound to find triggering/improper; sell a bland lifeless corporate edition to those people.
Krssst 3 hours ago [-]
> some others would find triggering/improper
I guess the main point is branding clash if you're a large company website (most companies care a lot about how their brand is shown, if they care about spacing/padding around their logo they also care about what pictures are shown when joining), hopefully nobody is triggered by this kind of art. (though resentment could build up if actual humans get frequently unexpectedly rejected as bots by this system, not sure if this actually happens however, didn't ever for me at least)
The approach they took here looks very reasonable from that standpoint indeed.
strogonoff 3 hours ago [-]
Branding clash also happens with Cloudflare. It’s only immediately clear when it is set up on a website you already know (e.g., Stack Overflow), but I remember when seeing it first I was visiting a new to me website and genuinely thought that’s what it looks like, and was taken by surprise when something with a completely different colour scheme, logo, typography popped up. I also recall Cloudflare did not (maybe still doesn’t) put up its own name up front on its captcha page, adding to the confusion. In any case, after a couple of times it’s no longer a problem to most people.
The resentment point is a fair one! If that happens and maintainers care about public perception of the mascot, I can imagine them wanting to change it somewhat.
> hopefully nobody is triggered by this kind of art
I’ve known at least one person who genuinely seemed triggered by anime-like visual style.
miohtama 3 hours ago [-]
Triggered people should buy their software from Microsoft
bakugo 2 hours ago [-]
Is there anything stopping anyone from just making a fork and removing it manually?
xena 2 hours ago [-]
It's MIT licensed software. You can do whatever you want as long as you comply with the terms of the license. I can also choose to allocate my time wherever I want.
eddd-ddde 4 hours ago [-]
How is it different from the classic corporate caricature of a person with unnatural body proportions?
It's just art style.
mpalmer 4 hours ago [-]
Not sure what you're referring to, or what you mean by "it's just art style". It's a style that is likely to clash with the website branding it precedes, in my opinion.
Art styles aren't picked randomly out of a hat. Humans are pattern matching machines and will draw conclusions based on choice of art style or mascot.
> classic corporate caricature of a person with unnatural body proportions
Corporate Memphis is an abomination and I harshly judge any company that uses it. Everyone hates Corporate Memphis and makes fun of it.
userbinator 4 hours ago [-]
I couldn't care less about the art, but the user-agent discrimination is far worse. Implying that anyone not using an "officially sanctioned" browser is an AI bot is such a devious scheme that I don't think even Google themselves would've come up with it.
TJSomething 3 hours ago [-]
I think you've got the logic backwards. It defaults to assuming that user agents that have "Mozilla" in them might be bots. Uncommon browsers don't get challenged. It wouldn't make sense for bad faith bots to use uncommon, easy to block user agents.
kelnos 3 hours ago [-]
All real browsers have Mozilla in the user agent string.
sdrinf 4 hours ago [-]
I actually _like_ this, and so does the comfyweb & weebs who are a very significant portion of the driving force behind calm, decade-long projects.
nine_k 3 hours ago [-]
Hmm, does the cutesy anime Octocat bother you? It's all over GitHub; admittedly, not as large, but definitely more pervasive.
My point is that people get used to such things, and stop to even notice.
gblargg 3 hours ago [-]
Worse, it prevents people with older browsers from even visiting the site.
numpad0 1 hours ago [-]
~15 years ago I'd come across tweets sharing how European art teachers are struggling with cultural intrusions of anime into fine arts(lol), ~10 years ago Chinese companies started serving anime-style online games, ~5 years ago COVID kickstarted VTubers in anglosphere, now an anime art is in a major OSS like an AC/DC reference.
It's funny how vehemently people respond to anime the first time, it's often so strong that they would not be consistent with their judgements or even own moral standards. It then subsides, and then it'll be something that "doesn't look like anything" to them. Anime wasn't always accepted in Japanese culture(where it was born); it always existed and was growing consistently over the entire postwar history, but there were still plenty of cancellation forces on Twitter when it launched in late 2000s.
Don't worry, companies like Apple would be having an ultra sexualized silver gimpsuit teenager mascot by 2030 and anime hate would be replaced by something by then at this rate.
clickety_clack 4 hours ago [-]
I respect the expression of individual taste, but it suggests strongly that the platform has not reached professional maturity.
4 hours ago [-]
pineaux 1 hours ago [-]
Its the cool kids doing it. It's the same kind of h4x0r esthetics as the nyan cat or unicorns and beavers everywhere.
WhereIsTheTruth 2 hours ago [-]
It could have been worse, it could have been a crab
bowsamic 3 hours ago [-]
I do find the fact that anime is inescapable among mainly the American youth (not seen it as much here in Germany) to be alienating. I guess it’s just what it feels like to get old
overboard2 4 hours ago [-]
I for one don't see anything wrong with anime characters, though I suppose neither of us are likely to change our minds.
I would say you are being unnecessarily pedantic: the GP said "anything wrong", and the original comment obviously believes that there is "something wrong" which makes the choice not "sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne" (/me looking up "anodyne").
The obvious positive reading of the GP comment is that they disagree anime characters make it not "sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne".
nightpool 3 hours ago [-]
You are replying to the GP.
necovek 3 hours ago [-]
I am replying to the "parent" comment which replies to the "grandparent" comment on the "original comment".
You seem to be unnecessarily pedantic too, while being wrong at the same time (I would get those relationships wrong sometimes if I thought it was clear enough).
squeaky-clean 3 hours ago [-]
GP is overboard42. mpalmer is GGP / OP.
odo1242 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, Anubis does allow you to change the image to whatever you want. (edit: apparently the feature is behind a paywall unless you edit the source code)
I kinda like the Anubis girl though (as you said, subjective)
AndyKelley 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mpalmer 4 hours ago [-]
okay
EDIT: zig is very cool thank you
4 hours ago [-]
kelnos 3 hours ago [-]
Delightful, now Anubis is giving me "invalid response" (Firefox Android). Great to see that AI bot protection is blocking legitimate use now too. Would love to check this out, but I can't.
reactordev 4 hours ago [-]
What's with the anime girl?
I couldn't get past her. Is that a Fargejo thing?
Once I reach the $5000 per month goal across all funding platforms, features currently exclusive to the private fork of Anubis for corpos (including changing the images and soon HTML templating support: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper) will be merged into the open source repo.
foresto 3 hours ago [-]
Any news on the no-script feature?
I love the idea of Anubis, but in practice, it has turned more than a few sites that I visit into sites that don't work without javascript. So instead of being happy to see it, I find myself disappointed and frustrated, often deciding not to bother with the site after all.
It's off by default while the false positive, true positive, true negative, and false negative rates are being evaluated. This is how you make changes like that without breaking user expectations.
jraph 3 hours ago [-]
That's good news. That'll make me consider using Anubis.
Thanks for fighting the AI bots.
You get some hate for this anime girl image but this paid white label thing is a good idea I think. It's nice we have alternative ways of funding free software that doesn't involve ads and tracking and thank you for choosing this path.
xena 3 hours ago [-]
There's a solid strategy behind it: give people what they want with a flaw that makes it unviable for corpos. Then sell the cure. I remember being told that monetization model as a joke and figured this would be one way to test it. The horrifying part in my book is that Anubis is a relative success story as far as open source funding goes, and it's barely a third of what a junior level software developer makes. It's maddening.
jraph 3 hours ago [-]
Interesting. I suppose I need to try this if I ever happen to build something to which it could apply. Thanks for the inspiration.
A third of a junior salary is not much but I guess it could help with at least turning a full time position into part time.
> I remember being told that monetization model as a joke and figured this would be one way to test it
Ah ah. Awesome.
It has happened to me once or twice that I jokingly share an idea, and it gets picked up seriously (in a professional setting). "But it was a joke! Too late. Oh no." - I guess it's not too bad in the end and shouldn't be fighted too hard. I guess I'll just make sure that if the idea is horrible, I don't make the joke if I think people around could seriously pick it up.
wpm 4 hours ago [-]
For reasons I struggle to understand, some people are into that sort of thing.
MiiMe19 4 hours ago [-]
Because it can be
bakugo 3 hours ago [-]
Go take a look at the author's websites/socials and it should become pretty obvious why.
temptemptemp111 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
elric 1 hours ago [-]
Not a very good one, given the apparently large number of complaints by presumably legitimate users in this thread.
Seems like it doesn't like users who take privacy enhancing measures.
Every obscure browser I've thrown at it has passed except for Opera Mini because it doesn't support real Javascript. Compared to the alternatives (Cloudflare/Google RECAPTCHA), compatibility is great in my experience.
If you're one of those NoScript people you'll probably end up stuck unless site admins enable the meta refresh challenge. If it proves effective, that may get turned on by default in the future, though, which would solve that problem too.
timeon 1 hours ago [-]
> non-Big Browser
Surprisingly there was no problem for me with Servo and Links. Which browsers are not working?
4 hours ago [-]
shmerl 5 hours ago [-]
Congrats! I was waiting for them to start using a decent bug tracker.
sergiotapia 5 hours ago [-]
How exactly does mailing list contributions work? I've only ever seen a few urls of messages but they are extremely obtuse. You would need to click parent parent parent to get context on the message you originally read.
I must be missing something and since mailing lists are dying, would love to understand this relic of the past.
0xbadcafebee 1 hours ago [-]
Simple: you don't use the browser at all. You download the source code via your VCS client. You find the thing you want to change, make a branch, modify it, generate a patch. You email the list with your patch and a very detailed description of what you're doing and why. Lots of people reply, and your email client shows you the threads hierarchically. It makes sense to you because you started the whole conversation and see their in-line replies in your email client.
As an old fogey who started with mailing lists, and still uses them to send patches, it's actually much simpler than browser-based workflows. Most of it is your own workflow in your own repo clone in your own environment. The patch and email threads are a universal abstraction; you add the rest yourself, with any method you're familiar with. This removes any complexity that would otherwise be imposed by the browser, remote web app, etc. It's like sending someone a letter in the mail, rather than choosing between 15 different messaging systems, protocols, apps, OSes, etc. If you can read words you can figure out your own way to deal with the contents.
And as far as it dying out: I actually think it's faster to communicate via mailing list. The thing a GitHub clone gets you is co-located collaboration, and CI tests. Those things are very powerful, and really should be integrated into a single open source standard, rather than a lot of custom web apps. But the modern software developer doesn't understand the value of standards.
homebrewer 5 hours ago [-]
You're supposed to use a proper email client which solves this problem. Sourcehut uses the email contribution workflow and has the documentation to support it; have a look at it:
Seems you have to remember what -v you are sending as you respond to feedback. Pretty troublesome... Glad ffmpeg is moving to a more modern solution.
Aurornis 3 hours ago [-]
The web view is meant to be the publicly searchable archive, not the primary interface. Developers are supposed to use an email client and git integrations. You can follow a number of different guides to get set up to contribute but it’s not actually easy to use the workflows.
To be honest I think the difficult and learning curve is part of the goal. The people who operate in these worlds don’t want it to be easy for anyone to come along and get involved. One of the main objections to moving to hosted platforms like GitHub or Forgejo is from people who worry it will result in a lot of low quality PRs that have to be dealt with. I’m not suggesting I agree, but it comes up a lot.
necovek 3 hours ago [-]
Linux kernel today is still managed with patches on the mailing list. It shouldn't be hard to see how this can be extremely effective for a maintainer running a programmable editor like Emacs or Vim.
aaron695 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
splittydev 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jraph 4 hours ago [-]
Why would you think this?
It is the self hosted part that bothers you?
I self host my code. If you can't bother creating an account or sending an email to share your contribution, I guess I'm quite fine not to have it. I'm sure ffmpeg don't need your contribution as well.
I don't get this stance. Sending an email or creating an account is so low effort compared to any meaningful contribution.
The friction is not intentional but I guess it's a feature, it probably filters out some low quality interactions.
Note that ffmpeg has been using mailing lists, they are not migrating away from github. I'll just assume you wrote your comment without going further than your initial gut reaction to the title, which kinda proves my point.
splittydev 3 hours ago [-]
I have contributed to a lot of open source projects for many years. They sure don't need my contribution, but if it were more accessible, I might actually contribute one day.
Given that ffmpeg was apparently using mailing lists before (which I didn't know at the time of writing), this is obviously an improvement. But it's still a lot of friction, and it seems that it's friction for no particular reason.
Hosting your code on something as obscure as Forgejo actively makes it hard for people to contribute. Most developers use GitHub, and only have experience with GitHub.
If I have an issue with something, I'll make a PR and move on with my day. But if making that PR involves creating an account on some obscure website and learning a new user interface just to contribute code to a single project, I'll simply pass. It's not worth the hassle.
GitHub is the most popular service by far for a good reason. People build their whole professional portfolio on GitHub, and it's well-known and globally recognized.
If you're afraid GitHub is gonna go down one day or kick you out, just mirror your repo to your own git instance. It's been done for decades, and it works very well, without introducing friction.
jraph 3 hours ago [-]
> Most developers use GitHub, and only have experience with GitHub.
> GitHub is the most popular service by far for a good reason. People build their whole professional portfolio on GitHub, and it's well-known and globally recognized.
I see those things as a big issue. I hate it that github is a monopoly, that open source software projects rely on proprietary software for their infra and that we all depend on Microsoft of all companies for our open source activity.
I personally don't want to participate in helping MS maintain this monopoly.
Hopefully with these developments around forge federation, the "having to create an account is too big of a friction" thing will be less of an issue.
In the meantime, Forgejo already allows login in with open id providers, in many case you are already able to login with your github account.
necovek 3 hours ago [-]
Since we are talking Git hosting infrastructure here and comparing it to GitHub, can you explain to me what do you mean with "git instance" in "just mirror your repo to your own git instance"?
timeon 52 minutes ago [-]
Interesting how clueless but determined you were in your first comment. Maybe you should pause a bit and reconsider your whole outlook so you can advance with better success.
Humility is good tool more people should use it.
OptionX 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
necovek 4 hours ago [-]
Are you not familiar with SourceForge? Did you know what a (non-software) "forge" is?
The term actually predates Git (SourceForge started with CVS and SVN IIRC).
I am not saying documentation should not be better — it should — but I am surprised someone in software development would not know of the term. And knowing how good free software projects are at documentation, not turn to searches first (or is it just software projects? I've recently tried to find out what VMWare product I can run virtual machines on Windows with, and it took me a bit too).
Edit: the homepage at https://forgejo.org/ actually has phrases like "self-host your projects and get everyone involved in delivering quality software on the same page" or "Self-hosted alternative to GitHub"
RossBencina 3 hours ago [-]
> I am surprised someone in software development would not know of the term.
It is not a software development term. Are you trolling?
I know what SourceForge is. I had repositories there. I have never heard of a web portal for software project management (SCM front end, issue tracker) referred to as a "forge." Just because a product uses a weird name does not make it a term of art.
jraph 2 hours ago [-]
It's a widespread term. You just happened to not run into it yet or more likely you never made the connection. It happens. It's fine, but also we can't do much about this.
The GitHub monopoly obviously doesn't help.
Edit: I see your later "TIL" comment.
tonyhart7 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Nursie 4 hours ago [-]
Boomer means what now, anyone over 40?
tonyhart7 3 hours ago [-]
anyone that is old and grumpy at internet (+ real life)
neck beard balding would be pissed to me since I'am not being pedantic
timeon 49 minutes ago [-]
That is the irony. Not sure how old are you but you are the one supporting "grumpy" (bitching about Forgejo) in this thread.
necovek 3 hours ago [-]
Someone did not read the homepage, did not do a web search and complained about the term "software forge" in a HackerNews comment, and I am "old and grumpy at internet"? :D
There are so many opportunities to learn it, and recognize it from one of the existing projects still using it in the name, and it's better to complain on HN?
(Though I guess I still classify as a millenial, but I would love to be closer to boomer when it comes to CS experience)
jraph 2 hours ago [-]
The term boomer is just ageist, and comments like this don't deserve any other answers than "stop being ageist".
And nope, I'm not in the target, so I'm not being defensive here.
Although we all know many nice people who are targeted by this term.
wilsonnb3 4 hours ago [-]
It does say “a self hosted alternative to GitHub” on the main page
tylerritchie 4 hours ago [-]
this is one where "software forge" is industry specific jargon (similar to "isostaticrebound" in earthquake science and "evapotranspiration" in biology) which the intended audience would tend to know the definition of. that said, it's a fair complaint for the quality of their marketing material (if not their technical documentation).
as an aside, i checked and it takes four taps (with an thumb highlight thown in ) to define it from my phone.
RossBencina 3 hours ago [-]
Curious, what part of the industry is "software forge" a term of art? I have been programming since the late 90s and have never heard it. Looks like it was popular from 1988 to 2007:
Oh, thanks, so it's even worse than I thought - it's an intentional degradation of user experience for financial benefit
skylurk 43 minutes ago [-]
I'm fond of it. Even if I was paying, I don't think I would change it.
jraph 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like most tech companies with their ads and and tracking.
mmaunder 5 hours ago [-]
Why not GitHub?
mrcsharp 5 hours ago [-]
Does it make a difference? More alternatives to Github is a good thing and alternatives mean nothing if no one is using them.
frollogaston 4 hours ago [-]
It's impressive how much GitHub dominates with so little lock-in. It's so easy to add a new git remote. Yeah GitHub has its own features too, but for a long time free private repo wasn't one of them.
necovek 3 hours ago [-]
So little lock-in?
Git itself is simple, but is their .md file renderer open? Are their workflow runners available anywhere to re-use? The API also has gaps (esp if you wanted to migrate your PRs or Issues over), though I don't remember what was the thing I couldn't achieve with it.
But I guess you are referring to indirect, incidental domination like "social" lock-in (I always smile at job application forms asking for a GitHub link — I've got thousands of free software commits in their own, dedicated software forges, but very few things on GitHub directly, or at least, in mirrors not tied to my GH account), "marketing" lock-in (I've heard many junior and not-so-junior engineers refer to GitHub as "Git"), etc...
jraph 3 hours ago [-]
> but is their .md file renderer open?
This part seems mostly interoperable. GitHub's alternatives seem to have implemented something mostly compatible. If you migrate from github to gitlab or gogs or gitea or forgejo, that part will probably just work.
Worst case, markdown is still mostly readable as is and a commit can fix the odd non working thing.
But 100% agree with the rest of your comment.
GitHub has managed to create a network effect by trying to be a social network and succeeding. They managed to create fomo for code hosting. This very HN post shows this.
_kb 3 hours ago [-]
The lock in is issues, pull requests, and all the conversations that shape long term software projects. The actual implementation and what's tracked is often just what falls out of that.
jazzyjackson 5 hours ago [-]
official reasoning is posted elsewhere, but GitHub means you rely on Microsoft.
Forgejo is a fork of Gitea which is a clone of Github.
arcastroe 4 hours ago [-]
Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, which is a fork of Gogs, which is a clone of Github
rice7th 4 hours ago [-]
Yes but it isn't controlled by it, that's the point.
xeonmc 5 hours ago [-]
Oh boy do I have some recent news for you…
prabinlamsal19 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
crote 4 hours ago [-]
It is quite common for larger open-source organisations to self-host their repositories and issue trackers. After all, they would quite literally stop existing if Github were to do an oopsie. Voluntarily putting the keys of your entire existence in the hands of a third party isn't exactly an attractive option.
bapak 4 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure GitHub will go out of their way to avoid mishandling such important projects (i.e. they'll reach into their backups if things go awry)
talles 4 hours ago [-]
"Literally stop existing"? Having broken links and notifying everyone when a migration happens is for sure a hassle, but migrating a git repo is the easiest thing in the world.
That's kinda the whole point of a distributed VCS.
rogerrogerr 4 hours ago [-]
Migrating the repo is easy, migrating issues and MRs and whatever other ancillary features you’re using is not.
necovek 3 hours ago [-]
I invite you to migrate all your GH workflows to GitLab pipelines as the "easiest thing in the world" as an exercise for the reader.
ashton314 4 hours ago [-]
Lemme guess: you might think that everyone should just write their blogs on Substack, right?
The web thrives on diversity. More forges is good.
Furthermore, GitHub has been making moves that understandably worry some and so it’s great that there are some excellent alternatives.
KingMob 3 hours ago [-]
Bit of a side note, but nobody should use Substack for anything.
For those out of the loop, Substack has been overlooking Nazis on their platform for a few years, and recently pushed a notification to all subscribers to check out a blog with a Nazi swastika.
Don't use the most used platform for blogging reach in 2025 because .0000001% of users are people you hate?
Sounds silly. Don't use wordpress because a store I don't like uses it? I hate to tell you this but friend and foe are using Google search.. time to move on.
timeon 1 hours ago [-]
What does it tell about you when you dismiss concern about Nazis "as people you hate"?
> Don't use wordpress because a store I don't like uses it?
Store I do not like have not murdered half of my family.
themafia 3 hours ago [-]
> I mean, everyone is using it.
Throughout my entire life this has been a reliable sign to move elsewhere. Monocultures and monopolies tend to have negative long term outcomes.
> this just means that the devs at FFmpeg are having so much fun
A real problem. This should be dealt with immediately.
> Trying around github alternatives for memes.
I have a feeling that if this attitude pervaded the open source community then Gérard Lantau (a.k.a. Fabrice Bellard) would have never started work on or released publicly ffmpeg in the first place.
There's a real feeling of modern corporate entitlement encoded into your comment.
cornstalks 4 hours ago [-]
The FFmpeg culture is… very different. It’s hard to explain. But one hard requirement they had is that they did not want to give someone else control over their infrastructure. And it had to be open source. Only self hosting options were considered.
jraph 4 hours ago [-]
[It should be overly clear that] there's nothing special in wanting to have control in one's own processes, in wanting to avoid monopolies, and for free software projects to want to rely on free software. There are also many other reasons to want to avoid github specifically (there's at least a "github is down" thread every month on HN these days - having something that works at all is one of them).
Many important free software projects use there own self hosted solution.
I don't even understand how this is a question, and your parent comment is needlessly inflammatory and didn't deserve any answer.
rice7th 4 hours ago [-]
Well github is very much owned by Microsoft, and with the recent changes of the CEO there are a lot of reasons to prefer a non closed source and non-gigant-tech-corp-controlled software forge.
ipaddr 3 hours ago [-]
Many big successful open source projects host their own code. They also join/create foundations and create lasting legacy. Get real sponsorship dollars.
So do some smaller projects.
Culturally hosting yourself is one of the key elements of the hacker ethos.
crabmusket 4 hours ago [-]
Why GitHub?
bhaney 6 hours ago [-]
I'm finding out about Forgejo (and their reasons for forking Gitea) right now for the first time. I already migrated my Gogs install to Gitea, and now I have to migrate Gitea to Forgejo? This shit is why people just stay on Github.
homebrewer 6 hours ago [-]
We've been using gitea for 6 years, and I see no reason to migrate anywhere at this moment. Gitea sees faster development and has more features (even though many patches flow to Forgejo — the reverse is impossible due to license restrictions).
It is possible to migrate from 1.22 to Forgejo simply by changing the binary, and downgrading from 1.24 to 1.23, and from 1.23 to 1.22 is possible if you know your way around PostgreSQL and have a spare hour. I always write downgrade scripts for each release and test them before upgrading Gitea to make sure that I can always back out and move to Forgejo if Gitea folds. Haven't seen much reason to do it up to this moment, though.
edit: for example, here's a 1.23 → 1.22 downgrade script; I don't have access to 1.24 → 1.23 atm:
Why would you have to migrate? If you're happy with Gitea just stay there.
bhaney 6 hours ago [-]
According to Forgejo[1], Gitea underwent a secret hostile takeover by a for-profit company and has been moving from free software to "open core" bullshit. The reason that I, and I assume a lot of other people, made an effort to switch from Github to Gogs/Gitea was to evade the for-profit corpo nonfree crap. The more I'm looking into it, the more it looks like the real development is happening on Forgejo too.
A more charitable framing of the situation is: the for-profit company is because people always complained about Gitea "why is it developed on GitHub, not your own hosting" but that means money has to be involved in the cloud hosting project; it is just the same Gitea core developers it has always been, not a takeover.
The "open core" (Gitea Enterprise) is not Gitea, it is a downstream fork by CommitGo, who you can pay for contract development for custom features. The features are expected to be upstreamed, there are open PRs, they just don't yet meet Gitea's code review standards. You can run them from the PRs if you like.
monster_truck 4 hours ago [-]
This sounds like a lot of work for no benefit
homebrewer 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it's hard to take them seriously when they've been saying very nasty things about the project their whole foundation is built upon, and from where they continue to draw most of their functionality. Gitea is ahead on that despite patches flowing one way only. If you look at forgejo commits, more than half of them are merges of library updates made by the renovate bot, which artificially inflates the level of activity you see. About half of the rest are cherry-picks from the Gitea repo.
Look instead at the amount of features introduced with each version. Forgejo releases twice as often as Gitea does, so compare two releases of Forgejo with one release of Gitea made within the same time frame. I haven't been impressed so far.
> it's hard to take them seriously when they've been saying very nasty things about the project their whole foundation is built upon
I'm not sure why that would make them hard to take seriously unless the things they're saying are false. Is that what you're claiming?
> If you look at forgejo commits, more than half of them are merges of library updates made by the renovate bot, which artificially inflates the level of activity you see
If I thought number of commits strictly equals activity then I guess it would look like that, but I don't. From what I'm seeing, a lot of the Gitea devs left to go to Forgejo and are now working on it exclusively, while the work being done on Gitea gets selectively merged into Forgejo too. I don't actually care about that either - Gogs had all the features I wanted when I first installed it years ago and all I really want out of the maintainers is security patches. I'm mostly just concerned about licensing and ownership models that incentivize the software org to inevitably turn evil in the future.
homebrewer 5 hours ago [-]
None of the really heavy hitters from the "core team" have left. As long as 100% FOSS Gitea pulls ahead in functionality, and can be downgraded relatively easily with an hour of work, I personally see no reason to move anywhere. You can part in different ways, the vibes you give off certainly matter, even when you're 100% technically correct.
And I suggested comparing releases, not commits; Gitea is ahead here both in what it supported at the moment of the hard fork, and in what has been introduced since then (counting only the MIT version).
overfeed 4 hours ago [-]
> And I suggested comparing releases, not commits...
Who's asking for all those new features? Enterprise users? I love the old Gitea because it was light enough to run on a Raspberry Pi Zero. I've been delaying trying Forgejo due to concerns about bloat, but you've just sold it to me. All I need for it is to mirror Git repositories I care about every couple of days. Like gp, I consider Gogs/Gitea to have been feature-complete years ago
srcreigh 4 hours ago [-]
What features is non-Enterprise Gitea ahead by? I can’t find any
rowanG077 5 hours ago [-]
I don't think they are saying nasty things about the project they were born out of. They are saying nasty things about the corporate takeover.
joshbaptiste 5 hours ago [-]
Why leave Gitea just because an alternative exists..
Incipient 6 hours ago [-]
I use gitea and it "just works". I'm definitely not going anywhere.
000ooo000 6 hours ago [-]
Oh no! Options - scary!
bhaney 6 hours ago [-]
That's pretty obviously not what I'm bitching about
jraph 4 hours ago [-]
I get the annoyance of having to migrate (although migrating from gitea to forgejo was a matter or replacing the gitea binary with the forgejo binary up to until recently - completely painless), but you don't have to migrate.
What are you bitching about, fundamentally?
Life happens.
xedrac 4 hours ago [-]
I looked into Forgejo, and the only new "feature" I discovered was the ability to put pronouns in user profiles. I think I'll stick with Gitea.
WolfeReader 2 hours ago [-]
Why did you put the word feature in quotes? What you described is definitely a feature, no qualification needed.
tap-snap-or-nap 5 hours ago [-]
It's very likely not so different in function and performance for users and better suit their dev needs than what you may be used to.
5 hours ago [-]
stepupmakeup 6 hours ago [-]
All 3 are still under active development.
mgraczyk 5 hours ago [-]
The site doesn't load any css for me on mobile, is it really worth it not to use GitHub or gitlab?
5 hours ago [-]
asveikau 5 hours ago [-]
I had that issue after it "verified I'm a human", I refreshed and it looked fine.
DeepYogurt 5 hours ago [-]
It's pretty good on desktop. Report the bug and I'm sure they'll get to it
bhaney 5 hours ago [-]
The CSS bug happened to me on desktop too (but went away after a refresh). It looks related to Anubis since the reason the stylesheet isn't applying is that it has HTML containing "<title>Making sure you're not a bot!</title>" prepended to it.
exikyut 5 hours ago [-]
How fascinating, the exact same thing happened to me!
If you're a backbone-of-the-internet project like FFmpeg is, living on GitHub seems horrible. You will be subjected to thousands of low quality pull requests and issues from people searching for typos to fix, adding a line of white space for a contrived reason, or similar nonsense changes. Just so they can put "FFmpeg contributor" on their CV (or whatever).
I’ve gone through a few projects and updated the documentation as I explored the codebase. Reception ranges from thankful to people scorning me for attempting to make contributions that weren’t code changes. It’s frustrating when maintainers are more interested in keeping people out than in considering actual code or doc improvements.
Tools like OpenAI Codex, which can connect directly to repositories, are likely to amplify this problem even further.
That said, this is also the real measure of the actual value of LLMs and coding agents: the day we see top open-source projects having dozens of bugs effectively fixed per day by LLMs, we’ll know they’ve matured into a solid, reliable resource.
> Contributing
> Patches should be submitted to the ffmpeg-devel mailing list using git format-patch or git send-email. Github pull requests should be avoided because they are not part of our review process and will be ignored.
An agentic LLM bot is likely to have no problems at creating a patch and mailing it but it's a major pain for most human developers. Furthermore they can ban source email addresses and vet potential contributors before letting them in the mailing list.
[0] https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/pull/153
I think you’re definitely right that being a massive project on GitHub that accepts PRs there would be a nightmare though.
My only contribution to node-grpc fixed missing quotes, but only because that produced real crashes.
In my current company nobody cares. It can be seen in the whole code quality. Full of smaller and bigger bugs as well as horrible hacks. It can be seen whether coders look twice or more at their own stuff before putting it to review or not, just trying to avoid ridicolous comments. It's a whole attitude. I write good code in a messy source base is unlikely to work in practice.
That said, I have submitted cleanup commits to open source projects only in the same MR with a real code change I wanted to make and only in vincinity of that change.
A full third of them complaining about the anti-bot protection mascot (yes, it's a cartoon character; get over it), others splitting the finest of hairs over software development groups and company politics, and more.
Self-hosting is generally good, well done to FFmpeg. Many large projects self-host, and my own ex-company has physical servers in the city we work at that can be unplugged if necessary.
I just wish Git itself had a more robust means of issue-handling (no, email is a 1980s protocol, it's not good enough, even if it is for Linux) and CI/CD, rather than relegating the matter to different hosts.
And now everyone has to learn GitHub Actions, Gitlab pipelines, Jenkins pipelines, and more.
I think it's cute. It wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't cute. It's inoffensive and doesn't get in the way of the software serving its function, the only critique I could do if I wanted to is people unfamiliar with the project would get a bit confused if they only saw the character for a split second: https://anubis.techaro.lol/
I think even Cloudflare gives you a second or two to see what's going on before forwarding you to the page behind it, that would be a nice UX improvement.
Otherwise, agreed about self-hosting and the ability to choose whatever platform aligns with your goals the closest to be a good thing!
> And now everyone has to learn GitHub Actions, Gitlab pipelines, Jenkins pipelines, and more.
A part of me doesn't like the churn of new CI solutions coming in all the time. On the other hand, after learning GitLab CI, I'd generally prefer it to something like Jenkins, it just feels more pleasant. But with something like Drone CI or Woodpecker CI my non-work needs are also covered wonderfully, especially with a lot of the software I build being packaged in Docker containers, which further simplifies and somewhat standardizes things! A lot of the time I can also encapsulate most of the logic in shell scripts that are easy to run regardless of the environment (CI server or locally), which makes it even more portable.
It was pointed out elsewhere in the thread that they also sell an unbranded version for companies: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper
Cool way to make money, to be honest!
I noticed this. I'm quite appalled. Definitely outside the usual HN standards.
I suspect the very idea of self-hosting one's code instead of using GitHub is triggrering many people beyond reasonable levels for reasons I'd love to get an explanation for.
Are people projecting their GitHub FOMO? Are people thinking that the value of the GitHub they cherish decreases with each project not picking it because of the weaker network effect?
In contrast, whatever its faults, I fully expect public repos on GitHub to last for the next 10 years, likely the next 20, barring active removal by the author. (The biggest medium-term risk is a "GitHub is evil, take down all your repos" campaign a la Reddit.) Of course, it's not foolproof, the only way to get that would be to replicate the project in dozens of places, but I find it much better than the old status quo of files slipping away once forgotten.
I'm thinking of setting up mirrors for my stuff for this exact reason. Now that codeberg exists, that could be the solution and why not accept contributions from codeberg too if it doesn't make the development process too messy.
OTOH GitHub is a huge SPOF. I also trust that my stuff that matters is checked out by other people who will reupload somewhere else should something happen.
Since you're ignoring the reasons by calling them unreasonable, the armchair psychology alternative won't help get you what you love
The cloud companies do not want you to selfhost. It is good that Ffmpeg did not experience a DDOS attack yet, because that's what happened to someone who moved his email to selfhosting. We are living in a time when companies have become like mafia.
I don't think this is it and I would not want to dismiss individual spontaneous, genuine feeling too early.
Just shove the issues into Git itself. That's what Fossil does for its wiki and issues, while GitHub only does it for its wiki. There are several open source ways to do this with Git itself.
I’ve contributed to a number of projects that try to self-host, with mixed results. It gets frustrating when someone’s GitLab (or other) server is so slow that every page load takes several seconds, or when the self-hosted solution goes down for a week because the admin is on vacation and missed something.
I’ve contributed to one server that feels the need to periodically delete dormant accounts for some reason. Every time I come back to the project I find myself creating a new user account.
With the anubis-protected servers the anti-bot protection has a lot of false positives, so occasionally I have to switch browsers just to not deal with page load failures.
One server adopted some black list that had my home IP in it for some reason, so I was just banned from accessing the server without a VPN.
It all just feels old and tiring after a while compared to the breath of fresh air of just using a site like GitLab or GitHub that simply works.
I understand why they’d want to do it, but I don’t think it’s without some tradeoffs.
As a positive side-effect, a contributor is compelled to write a reasonable explanatory message to maintainers and keep the patch minimal and contained (compared to a typical Github PR with a dozen of commits mixing together fixes, features, newlines and indentation changes all over the place).
[0] They did not invent it, obviously—it is what Linux kernel, the origin of Git, had (has?) been doing for a long time!
Welcome to DE, where _every_ page takes several seconds to load.
Not everyone even has to learn Jenkins/GH-Pipelines/whatever. In most teams I've worked on those are typically managed by one or two people, or by a different team entirely. And it's not even a hard skill to learn.
I personally couldn't give a rat's ass how it's hosted. Still uses a protocol there's open source clients for? Cool. Not that I have pulled the ffmpeg source more than once in my life (which I suspect's the same for 99% of the people here). I'll continue to get it packaged for me by somebody else, who will pull it from wherever it's hosted, however they can. I'm just glad it still exists.
There's nothing wrong about critical and opinionated but respectful, but the comments that are now flagged, and some of the downvoted ones are very low quality, not just critical and opinionated.
TCP is even older; so what? It works, as does email. It's merely a transport layer.
What is required is a well-defined standard to encapsulate relevant data into it: PR definitions, code review comments, approval / rejection votes. This all could be a zipped JSON attachment, for instance.
The code change proper can continue be passed in the patch format. Or the whole thing could arrive via an exposed API endpoint, or even be pushed by git protocol.
A tool could interpret the extracted data and update a database that powers a nice GUI / TUI, and controls a CI/CD interface.
(Now if I only had time to properly design and implement that.)
https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper
But, Anubis uses the plain MIT license, so you can modify it to remove the branding yourself: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/blob/main/LICENSE
If Anubis used a license with that mascot requirement, it would not be free and open source.
If you're going to force people to stare at a screen with nothing but your quirky anime girl OC for a few seconds every time they visit your website, then in my opinion it's completely reasonable for those people to point out how immature it is. Telling people to "get over it" just makes you sound equally as immature.
I'm fairly confident in saying that self-expression is the #1 motivator here and the commercial offering was an afterthought.
I don't have a marketing degree, but I'm pretty sure that if selling your software to professional businesses is the goal, making the non-commercial version feel extremely unprofessional is really not the best way to do it, considering most people are likely going to find out about the project's existence by seeing it, and it won't leave a good first impression.
It is a damn sight better than the maliciously-compliant and deeply annoying GDPR 'we use cookies' banners, pop-ups, and dark patterns like having to uncheck thousands of 'partner' boxes.
This is merely a response to AI companies abusing scraper bots and having a callous, selfish disregard for Internet and server bandwidth. It was on this very website where I saw it put quite succinctly—AI-scraping bots have essentially started mass DDOS attacks on all small servers.
> immature
Maturity is empathy, human connection, understanding, perspective, compassion, altruism, and more. Not some arbitrary 'this is a cartoon, therefore it is immature'.
25 years ago Microsoft, the professional software behemoth, decided to put a cartoon dog and paperclip with googly eyes in its operating system and office software. A major mobile OS has a cartoon robot in its logo.
Cartoons are metaphors and windows into the artist's frame of mind. They are much more mature than your shallow portrayal of them.
Maturity is FFmpeg moving to Forgejo knowing and weighing the tradeoffs.
Maybe they are. But, in this case, nobody cares about the "artist's frame of mind". We care about accessing a website that has nothing to do with art.
I'm not throwing shade at Forgejo or anything like that, I'm genuinely curious if there's anything about Forgejo that made it a better alternative than the other options.
I remember thinking a decade ago "wow these guys are biting off a lot to chew, maybe in a decade they'll be able to tackle all these things in a comprehensive way" and my opinion now is they are still probably a decade out. I appreciate their ambition and wish them luck, but it's not for me.
If if a project requires more maintenance than I could potentially do by myself in a pinch because of complexity or having a massive supply chain of dependencies that keep it on a treadmill I will hesitate to depend on it.
What missing sdlc features are going to take them a decade to write?
When I'm interacting with a maximalist system designed to be everything to everyone, I still only want to have to worry about the things I care about.
They do seem to hold this as a value, but it's secondary to the maximalism.
Edit: Google AI has a surprisingly decent answer.
Gitea is a self-hosted Git forge, similar to GitHub or GitLab, providing features like Git hosting, code review, issue tracking, and more. It is known for being lightweight and easy to deploy.
Forgejo is a soft fork of Gitea, initiated by the Codeberg e.V. non-profit organization. The name "Forego" in this context highlights Forgejo's decision to "forego" or move away from the direct development and governance model of Gitea, particularly after Gitea transitioned to being controlled by a for-profit company (Gitea Ltd.).
Key aspects of this "foregoing" include:
Governance and Stability:
Forgejo emphasizes stability through extensive testing (including end-to-end and upgrade tests) and operates under the umbrella of a non-profit organization, prioritizing the public interest over profit maximization.
Divergence in Features and Development:
While initially a soft fork, Forgejo has accepted features and changes not available in Gitea and has diverged in other ways, including a focus on forge federation.
Community Concerns:
The fork was driven by concerns within the Gitea community regarding the lack of transparency surrounding the formation of Gitea Ltd. and the potential implications for the project's open-source nature.
In essence, "Gitea Forego" signifies Forgejo's independent path, driven by a different governance philosophy and a commitment to a community-centric, non-profit model for developing and maintaining a Git forge.
Tried refreshing, opening in a private windows, same thing.
EDIT: tried it again and got to "Making sure you're not a bot" with the same cringey anime girl, then the site loaded without CSS. Tried one more time, finally it loaded.
EDIT 2: clicked on a link and I'm back to "Oh Noes!...".
Plus, I did manage to pass it once at least.
(PoW is fine, just wish it didn't spin it as an anti-AI thing.)
I understand where they’re coming from with all the choices made, but honestly I suspect the anubis anime girl and associated sporadic failures (that I’ve seen, too, despite having a rather standard environment) functioning as a filtering mechanism that attracts a certain in-crowd person and makes a lot of others uninterested in staying around, and I think that’s intentional.
IMO a list of recent commits would be more useful as a landing page, or maybe even just the readme. When checking out a new project, I'm interested in what it does, not in its folder structure when its LICENSE.md was last modified.
That said, it's a bit like QWERTY. Maybe a bit weird, but it eases quick orientation on a new keyboard or repo if everyone uses the same layout.
Just says Invalid Response :(
Moving to a modern platform with real collaborative development features is a mature move.
self hosting could drain too much resources I fear.
and in my personal capacity -
I do not understand how cutesy anime characters have been deemed sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne enough to be displayed to literally every single person who visits my site.
With apologies to fans of the art style, it is a negative signal to me. I do not prefer to use Cloudflare for things like this, but I would not use Anubis unless I could disable the imagery, and every time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"
They do offer an unbranded version, botstopper. It is part of their commercial offering [0] and intended for "professional" environments
[0]: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper
Otherwise, it's MIT licensed software. You can remove it all you want, but I will use that as a signal to focus my time and energy as I see fit.
I have been reading your stuff for a while, and if anything disproves my original point, it's your published output. cheers -
Fwiw I like the mascot but I also don't associate this username with my actual identity because I draw anime style pixel art, so I get it.
> People have sent me horrible things because of this.
That sucks, and I see how it makes my (somewhat) measured reaction scan differently.
> Just please take one femtoiota of care that the other side is also a human being with thoughts, feelings, and that they may just be incredibly tired of hearing people complain about something.
Your shit rocks, your stuff on Tailscale in particular inspired me greatly, and I'm sorry you caught me seeing orange.
Is pretty damn rude. It's the kind of thing you say online but would never say face-to-face.
Like... imagine Anubis, but with the "anubis is overdrawn" meme.
https://imgur.com/a/RubDWrR
Unbelievable.
But for situations where a company simply won't use Anubis because of its branding then they do sell a unbranded version.
https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper
I guess the main point is branding clash if you're a large company website (most companies care a lot about how their brand is shown, if they care about spacing/padding around their logo they also care about what pictures are shown when joining), hopefully nobody is triggered by this kind of art. (though resentment could build up if actual humans get frequently unexpectedly rejected as bots by this system, not sure if this actually happens however, didn't ever for me at least)
The approach they took here looks very reasonable from that standpoint indeed.
The resentment point is a fair one! If that happens and maintainers care about public perception of the mascot, I can imagine them wanting to change it somewhat.
> hopefully nobody is triggered by this kind of art
I’ve known at least one person who genuinely seemed triggered by anime-like visual style.
It's just art style.
Art styles aren't picked randomly out of a hat. Humans are pattern matching machines and will draw conclusions based on choice of art style or mascot.
> classic corporate caricature of a person with unnatural body proportions
Corporate Memphis is an abomination and I harshly judge any company that uses it. Everyone hates Corporate Memphis and makes fun of it.
My point is that people get used to such things, and stop to even notice.
It's funny how vehemently people respond to anime the first time, it's often so strong that they would not be consistent with their judgements or even own moral standards. It then subsides, and then it'll be something that "doesn't look like anything" to them. Anime wasn't always accepted in Japanese culture(where it was born); it always existed and was growing consistently over the entire postwar history, but there were still plenty of cancellation forces on Twitter when it launched in late 2000s.
Don't worry, companies like Apple would be having an ultra sexualized silver gimpsuit teenager mascot by 2030 and anime hate would be replaced by something by then at this rate.
The obvious positive reading of the GP comment is that they disagree anime characters make it not "sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne".
You seem to be unnecessarily pedantic too, while being wrong at the same time (I would get those relationships wrong sometimes if I thought it was clear enough).
I kinda like the Anubis girl though (as you said, subjective)
EDIT: zig is very cool thank you
[0]: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
Once I reach the $5000 per month goal across all funding platforms, features currently exclusive to the private fork of Anubis for corpos (including changing the images and soon HTML templating support: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper) will be merged into the open source repo.
I love the idea of Anubis, but in practice, it has turned more than a few sites that I visit into sites that don't work without javascript. So instead of being happy to see it, I find myself disappointed and frustrated, often deciding not to bother with the site after all.
It's off by default while the false positive, true positive, true negative, and false negative rates are being evaluated. This is how you make changes like that without breaking user expectations.
Thanks for fighting the AI bots.
You get some hate for this anime girl image but this paid white label thing is a good idea I think. It's nice we have alternative ways of funding free software that doesn't involve ads and tracking and thank you for choosing this path.
A third of a junior salary is not much but I guess it could help with at least turning a full time position into part time.
> I remember being told that monetization model as a joke and figured this would be one way to test it
Ah ah. Awesome.
It has happened to me once or twice that I jokingly share an idea, and it gets picked up seriously (in a professional setting). "But it was a joke! Too late. Oh no." - I guess it's not too bad in the end and shouldn't be fighted too hard. I guess I'll just make sure that if the idea is horrible, I don't make the joke if I think people around could seriously pick it up.
Seems like it doesn't like users who take privacy enhancing measures.
[0]: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
If you're one of those NoScript people you'll probably end up stuck unless site admins enable the meta refresh challenge. If it proves effective, that may get turned on by default in the future, though, which would solve that problem too.
Surprisingly there was no problem for me with Servo and Links. Which browsers are not working?
I must be missing something and since mailing lists are dying, would love to understand this relic of the past.
As an old fogey who started with mailing lists, and still uses them to send patches, it's actually much simpler than browser-based workflows. Most of it is your own workflow in your own repo clone in your own environment. The patch and email threads are a universal abstraction; you add the rest yourself, with any method you're familiar with. This removes any complexity that would otherwise be imposed by the browser, remote web app, etc. It's like sending someone a letter in the mail, rather than choosing between 15 different messaging systems, protocols, apps, OSes, etc. If you can read words you can figure out your own way to deal with the contents.
And as far as it dying out: I actually think it's faster to communicate via mailing list. The thing a GitHub clone gets you is co-located collaboration, and CI tests. Those things are very powerful, and really should be integrated into a single open source standard, rather than a lot of custom web apps. But the modern software developer doesn't understand the value of standards.
https://man.sr.ht/git.sr.ht/#sending-patches-upstream
https://git-send-email.io/
https://git-am.io/
Seems you have to remember what -v you are sending as you respond to feedback. Pretty troublesome... Glad ffmpeg is moving to a more modern solution.
To be honest I think the difficult and learning curve is part of the goal. The people who operate in these worlds don’t want it to be easy for anyone to come along and get involved. One of the main objections to moving to hosted platforms like GitHub or Forgejo is from people who worry it will result in a lot of low quality PRs that have to be dealt with. I’m not suggesting I agree, but it comes up a lot.
It is the self hosted part that bothers you?
I self host my code. If you can't bother creating an account or sending an email to share your contribution, I guess I'm quite fine not to have it. I'm sure ffmpeg don't need your contribution as well.
I don't get this stance. Sending an email or creating an account is so low effort compared to any meaningful contribution.
The friction is not intentional but I guess it's a feature, it probably filters out some low quality interactions.
Note that ffmpeg has been using mailing lists, they are not migrating away from github. I'll just assume you wrote your comment without going further than your initial gut reaction to the title, which kinda proves my point.
Given that ffmpeg was apparently using mailing lists before (which I didn't know at the time of writing), this is obviously an improvement. But it's still a lot of friction, and it seems that it's friction for no particular reason.
Hosting your code on something as obscure as Forgejo actively makes it hard for people to contribute. Most developers use GitHub, and only have experience with GitHub.
If I have an issue with something, I'll make a PR and move on with my day. But if making that PR involves creating an account on some obscure website and learning a new user interface just to contribute code to a single project, I'll simply pass. It's not worth the hassle.
GitHub is the most popular service by far for a good reason. People build their whole professional portfolio on GitHub, and it's well-known and globally recognized.
If you're afraid GitHub is gonna go down one day or kick you out, just mirror your repo to your own git instance. It's been done for decades, and it works very well, without introducing friction.
> GitHub is the most popular service by far for a good reason. People build their whole professional portfolio on GitHub, and it's well-known and globally recognized.
I see those things as a big issue. I hate it that github is a monopoly, that open source software projects rely on proprietary software for their infra and that we all depend on Microsoft of all companies for our open source activity.
I personally don't want to participate in helping MS maintain this monopoly.
Hopefully with these developments around forge federation, the "having to create an account is too big of a friction" thing will be less of an issue.
In the meantime, Forgejo already allows login in with open id providers, in many case you are already able to login with your github account.
Humility is good tool more people should use it.
The term actually predates Git (SourceForge started with CVS and SVN IIRC).
I am not saying documentation should not be better — it should — but I am surprised someone in software development would not know of the term. And knowing how good free software projects are at documentation, not turn to searches first (or is it just software projects? I've recently tried to find out what VMWare product I can run virtual machines on Windows with, and it took me a bit too).
Edit: the homepage at https://forgejo.org/ actually has phrases like "self-host your projects and get everyone involved in delivering quality software on the same page" or "Self-hosted alternative to GitHub"
It is not a software development term. Are you trolling?
I know what SourceForge is. I had repositories there. I have never heard of a web portal for software project management (SCM front end, issue tracker) referred to as a "forge." Just because a product uses a weird name does not make it a term of art.
The GitHub monopoly obviously doesn't help.
Edit: I see your later "TIL" comment.
neck beard balding would be pissed to me since I'am not being pedantic
There are so many opportunities to learn it, and recognize it from one of the existing projects still using it in the name, and it's better to complain on HN?
(Though I guess I still classify as a millenial, but I would love to be closer to boomer when it comes to CS experience)
And nope, I'm not in the target, so I'm not being defensive here.
Although we all know many nice people who are targeted by this term.
as an aside, i checked and it takes four taps (with an thumb highlight thown in ) to define it from my phone.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Software+Forge...
TIL
Git itself is simple, but is their .md file renderer open? Are their workflow runners available anywhere to re-use? The API also has gaps (esp if you wanted to migrate your PRs or Issues over), though I don't remember what was the thing I couldn't achieve with it.
But I guess you are referring to indirect, incidental domination like "social" lock-in (I always smile at job application forms asking for a GitHub link — I've got thousands of free software commits in their own, dedicated software forges, but very few things on GitHub directly, or at least, in mirrors not tied to my GH account), "marketing" lock-in (I've heard many junior and not-so-junior engineers refer to GitHub as "Git"), etc...
This part seems mostly interoperable. GitHub's alternatives seem to have implemented something mostly compatible. If you migrate from github to gitlab or gogs or gitea or forgejo, that part will probably just work.
Worst case, markdown is still mostly readable as is and a commit can fix the odd non working thing.
But 100% agree with the rest of your comment.
GitHub has managed to create a network effect by trying to be a social network and succeeding. They managed to create fomo for code hosting. This very HN post shows this.
Forgejo is a fork of Gitea which is a clone of Github.
That's kinda the whole point of a distributed VCS.
The web thrives on diversity. More forges is good.
Furthermore, GitHub has been making moves that understandably worry some and so it’s great that there are some excellent alternatives.
For those out of the loop, Substack has been overlooking Nazis on their platform for a few years, and recently pushed a notification to all subscribers to check out a blog with a Nazi swastika.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/substacks-nazi-p...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e...
Sounds silly. Don't use wordpress because a store I don't like uses it? I hate to tell you this but friend and foe are using Google search.. time to move on.
> Don't use wordpress because a store I don't like uses it?
Store I do not like have not murdered half of my family.
Throughout my entire life this has been a reliable sign to move elsewhere. Monocultures and monopolies tend to have negative long term outcomes.
> this just means that the devs at FFmpeg are having so much fun
A real problem. This should be dealt with immediately.
> Trying around github alternatives for memes.
I have a feeling that if this attitude pervaded the open source community then Gérard Lantau (a.k.a. Fabrice Bellard) would have never started work on or released publicly ffmpeg in the first place.
There's a real feeling of modern corporate entitlement encoded into your comment.
Many important free software projects use there own self hosted solution.
I don't even understand how this is a question, and your parent comment is needlessly inflammatory and didn't deserve any answer.
So do some smaller projects.
Culturally hosting yourself is one of the key elements of the hacker ethos.
It is possible to migrate from 1.22 to Forgejo simply by changing the binary, and downgrading from 1.24 to 1.23, and from 1.23 to 1.22 is possible if you know your way around PostgreSQL and have a spare hour. I always write downgrade scripts for each release and test them before upgrading Gitea to make sure that I can always back out and move to Forgejo if Gitea folds. Haven't seen much reason to do it up to this moment, though.
edit: for example, here's a 1.23 → 1.22 downgrade script; I don't have access to 1.24 → 1.23 atm:
https://paste.debian.net/plainh/7d8cab27
[1] https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/#why-was-forgejo-create...
The "open core" (Gitea Enterprise) is not Gitea, it is a downstream fork by CommitGo, who you can pay for contract development for custom features. The features are expected to be upstreamed, there are open PRs, they just don't yet meet Gitea's code review standards. You can run them from the PRs if you like.
Look instead at the amount of features introduced with each version. Forgejo releases twice as often as Gitea does, so compare two releases of Forgejo with one release of Gitea made within the same time frame. I haven't been impressed so far.
Also a bit more context: https://lwn.net/Articles/963608
I'm not sure why that would make them hard to take seriously unless the things they're saying are false. Is that what you're claiming?
> If you look at forgejo commits, more than half of them are merges of library updates made by the renovate bot, which artificially inflates the level of activity you see
If I thought number of commits strictly equals activity then I guess it would look like that, but I don't. From what I'm seeing, a lot of the Gitea devs left to go to Forgejo and are now working on it exclusively, while the work being done on Gitea gets selectively merged into Forgejo too. I don't actually care about that either - Gogs had all the features I wanted when I first installed it years ago and all I really want out of the maintainers is security patches. I'm mostly just concerned about licensing and ownership models that incentivize the software org to inevitably turn evil in the future.
And I suggested comparing releases, not commits; Gitea is ahead here both in what it supported at the moment of the hard fork, and in what has been introduced since then (counting only the MIT version).
Who's asking for all those new features? Enterprise users? I love the old Gitea because it was light enough to run on a Raspberry Pi Zero. I've been delaying trying Forgejo due to concerns about bloat, but you've just sold it to me. All I need for it is to mirror Git repositories I care about every couple of days. Like gp, I consider Gogs/Gitea to have been feature-complete years ago
What are you bitching about, fundamentally?
Life happens.