A year on SourceHut

2023-11-14

As of writing this article, it’s been a year and 4 days since I registered for an account on SourceHut. I followed the recommendation of Prokop, who joined SourceHut due to his disapproval of GitHub’s Copilot, which is trained on user data. My main motivation was SourceHut’s minimalist and fast design and the approach to user rights and privacy.

At first I moved all my personal projects. I left Tophat on GitHub, because I didn’t want to force the new platform onto others who are active in the project. After testing SourceHut for some time, I eventually moved Tophat as well.

I really liked the platform; in fact, I still like the same things about it. However in time, I started taking notice of some annoying things, which sometimes make the platform unpleasant to use. My main two pet peeves are:

• You have to manually issue trackers and mailing lists for your projects.
• It is hard to move between the different services - when I have a repository open, I can’t just easily switch to its builds page.

What’s more, while I like SourceHut’s approach to submitting patches, it’s a burden for most other people to learn the new system. This can drive away potential contributors, which is something I don’t like. For the reasons above, I will start moving some of my projects (back) to GitHub.

I hope I didn’t sound too critical in this post. As I said many times, I still like SourceHut. I intend to continue using the platform for some smaller more personal projects. My hope is that in a few years I can make another blog post announcing my move back to an improved version of SourceHut.

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