fair critique. i'll refrain from it in the future.
but i will say that the point of our post isn't to really sell anyone here or on anything. we kinda know that our product as-is isn't ready to use at real scale (we lack issues, prs, ci, gotta fix a lot of bugs, etc.)
we did just want to sincerely share what we built.
and rust is a part of that, we chose it cause we wanted to learn it and we then quickly found out that we really liked it too.
i will be honest and say that we didn't do our due diligence here (we simply assumed that it would be okay to do so, given the existence of GitHub, GitLab, GitKraken, GitButler, and so forth).
that portmanteaus are prohibited by the policy that the Git PLC enforces, which as Jeff notes in his email above, does grant incumbent advantages to grandfathered names (e.g., GitHub, GitLab).
we'll reach out to the conservancy, ask for explicit permission, and if not, rebrand.
i'm not aware of the old macOS inspector pattern, but this sounds super interesting and i agree with the critique of inconsistency in github's behavior.
this reminds me a tad of superhuman's right panel too which auto-populates upon writing a time (or typing a name i believe?), which is a feature i do find personally useful as well.
i haven't thought seriously about hovers on nouns quite yet, but this is giving me much to munch on.
my fixation here is to make everything load instant, but that is dependent on server latencies, which right now is admittedly slow as we only have one server in the US.
thank you mbreese, i know folks can be mean and i also recognize where they're coming from (we are certainly far from perfect), but this comment is nice to read.
yeah this is because we're currently (very temporarily) hosting things in NFS and git stat operations are very slow since they assume a fast file FS. we'll fix that in a few.
and yeahhhh, i do try to be very non-marketing in all that i say, but something about the title made me a bit ambitious, apologies.
i think the honest answer here is autonomy. the freedom to choose our own tech stack, our own product priorities, and our own design.
i'll also admit that i don't know forgejo's own priorities as well as i do our own, and that is negligence that we're due to correct. maybe they are perfectly aligned and it does make sense for us to join forces.
but just as with any FOSS project, they have the freedom to choose what they work on as do we, and i intend on respecting that.
this hn thread is interesting as it feels like i'm getting to revisit a lot of decisions i've made in the design haha.
i debated this for a while too, some of my thinking for how it is is that i wanted the focus of a repository page to be _the repository_. so as much as we can, trim things that might detract.
it was also done with the intention that it's actually pretty rare for a user to find or explore repositories on github (more likely you find them here on hn or on twitter), so had the restraint of really trying _not_ to make gitdot anything like social media.
but thank you nonetheless for the feedback, i'll revisit it proper and see if i can make this more intuitive.
a lot of this we've really come to know as we dug into both it, gittea, gitlab, and all of their internals.
i think the short answer as to a differentiator is design.
our goal's to just build the best product possible, one that we'd love to use and one that we hope developers do too.
some of the stuff we've been thinking about include: stacked diffs as PR primitive, a Nix-based CI (that's reproducible and locally testible), a super simple and intuitive bug tracker, and just making the site super duper fast and pleasant to use.
that is to say, there is a _lot_ of surface area that a software forge covers and i think there's a lot of room to make things better.
hope that's clear enough, apologies for any ambiguities, we do NOT have all the answers quite yet haha
but overall, the general ethos is to focus on the problems that AI is introducing as of now and how we can help solve them, rather than just build AI features with abandon assuming that they're good.
some stuff that we do know about: the influx of slop PRs / slop issues on popular repositories, losing agency our own of code as we AI generates more, and privacy/sovereignty of code.
i've talked a bit about stacked diffs which we do see as one concrete stab in that direction, but a lot here is to be admittedly sketched out.
yeah thanks for digging in, this was a bit ambiguous.
so take this to mean - 1) no AI copilot in the app and 2) no training on your data nor selling of it.
our take on AI is that we should focus on building tools that help address its limitations; one of the things we're particularly keen on is building stacked diffs into reviews as a primitive, so it's easier to review a large AI-generated (or assisted) PR. (e.g., diff 1 for API changes, diff 2 for backend wireup, diff 3 for front-end changes)
i think to do that, we're going to try and hook into the subscriptions that people already have and are paying for: Claude, Codex, rather than package our own, but some of that is a bit hacky to do.
hrm. so i guess if the question is why not just make a software forge that is _only_ based in the CLI, the answer i think is convenience.
it's very convenient to be sent a link (or find it on hacker news) and to be able to click around files, read the README, understand what a repository is about without having to clone it and open locally. plus -- if you only need a barebones git server with no web UI, git provides this by default.
if the question is, will you build a CLI / what will be in it?
the answer is yes, we do have a barebones CLI for auth as of now, do envision things like managing issues / PRs from the CLI, but want to make sure that strike the right balance there.
i think TUIs can be deceptively hard to build well, and admittedly, it hasn't been a priority for us quite yet.
but i will say that the point of our post isn't to really sell anyone here or on anything. we kinda know that our product as-is isn't ready to use at real scale (we lack issues, prs, ci, gotta fix a lot of bugs, etc.)
we did just want to sincerely share what we built. and rust is a part of that, we chose it cause we wanted to learn it and we then quickly found out that we really liked it too.