It still exists. It's practically unusable without an adblocker (like slashdot) but the occasional old project is hosted there (particularly CDE. how the mighty have fallen)
It's becoming clearer and clearer that open-source is our only hope against enshittification. Everything that is VC backed or publicly traded will become enshittified, it's just a matter of time. At least with open-source, you can fork it and remove the "features" or point your agent to it and have it write the feature in your tech stack.
Hell, I just saw an amazing open-source alternative to Raycast[0] and just replaced it the other day.
> open-source is our only hope against enshittification. Everything that is VC backed or publicly traded will become enshittified
Solo founder here. My business is not VC-backed nor publicly traded, and I specifically avoided taking investment so that I can make all the decisions.
I avoid enshittification. This sometimes hurts revenue, but so be it. I wouldn't want to subject my users to anything I wouldn't like.
So, open-source is not the only hope. You can run a sustainable business without enshittification. The problem is money people. The moment money people (career managers, CFOs, etc) take over from product people, the business is on a downward path towards enshittification.
I believe you, it's just I've seen similar stories and the good-intentioned founder gets tired and eventually sells the business and the new owner ends up enshittifying the product. Not saying in the slightest it will happen to your company and I don't hold that against the founder. It's their prerogative after all.
Even when I use proprietary software, I sleep easier at night knowing that open-source alternatives keep them honest in their approach and I have an out if things do change.
> It's becoming clearer and clearer that open-source is our only hope against enshittification. Everything that is VC backed or publicly traded will become enshittified, it's just a matter of time.
In addition, they're doing some very shady stuff re: captchas and accessibility, most likely running some secret patches on their server that they're not publishing in their source tree.
Every company or entity changes over time. Codeberg is great, but with more people using it for free, without donating, and worse, more people abusing the service with some bs AI generate code, malware, etc, more expensive will get to keep it running.. for now they have money, but as e.V in Germany, you survive either from members or from donations.. So use Codeberg, but most important, support it!
> Its competitors are not magically immune to this kind of spam.
Sure; a platform is a platform is a platform. As for predictions, it is interesting to see whether self-hosting and smaller self-managed infrastructures will gain more traction again.
The desire for free stuff is one of the most effective psychological hacks there is.
The large majority of the dystopian web, like Gmail, Facebook, etc. depend on that.
People who avoid e.g. Github, Gmail, Facebook, Xitter, etc. out of concern for broader principles will always be minor outliers.
Xitter is one of the best examples. Everyone knows it's compromised, owned by an dangerously antisocial person who's actively working at multiple levels to make the lives of everyone else on Earth worse, yet very few have stopped using it.
The saying "There's no ethical consumption under capitalism" is far too weak. It should me more like, there are no ethics under capitalism.
Most larger orgs I worked for used Gitlab rather than Github.
Anyway, the core value of Github has always been collaboration - this is where people were. If people go to other platforms, this core value dwindles. And switching platforms is not that difficult.
