Gitdot – A better GitHub. Open-source, written in Rust

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• I see a lot of people trying to capitalize on GitHub's recent failings, and I feel like everyone trying to shoot their shot in this space is missing one key aspect: Git is a terrible TERRIBLE piece of software.

  I have spent a considerable amount of time learning git, not because I wanted to, but because someone else in my team didn't and inevitably t-boned our repository with a proverbial freight train running commands they didn't understand. It is absolutely unacceptable for a program designed EXACTLY for the purpose of maintaining a history and backup of the evolution of a program to be so unwieldy and occasionally dangerous to use. We can absolutely do better than Git.

  by hresvelgr
• Interesting. It seems that perhaps a good mental model for solutions like this is to start federating to each other rather than to centralize and create replacement walled gardens. Mastodon style activity feeds might be a good starting point for this.

  The value of Github is not just hosting projects and issue tracking but the notion that it's probably the largest professional network of developers that can interact with each other, create pull requests and issues on each other's projects, etc. There are many GH alternatives but very few with the same global network of essentially almost every developer out there.

  Instead of everybody creating new accounts on each other's not quite Github clones with only a handful of users, why not improve on the state of the art here and allow people to use their user account from a server of their choice and create a proper alternative to Github?

  by jillesvangurp
• I like the terminal aesthetics but please, for accessibility's sake, make input boxes look more like input boxes and buttons look like buttons.
  by garbagepatch
• I like it a lot.

  The UI is a bit odd at first, and there are obvious things that need to be fixed (like the invisible input fields), but by the time I had created an account, I'd gotten used to it, and I appreciate how incredibly fast it is.

  I'm a bit worried about this:

  > How does gitdot make money? > We don't. > We are fortunate enough to have raised a small pre-seed > round from investors (...)

  I'd rather know now how you're making money than find out in three years when I'm invested in the platform.

  by InsideOutSanta
• Interesting stuff! I really like the design philosophy you're applying here, where the browser/web behaviour is actually part of the UX. Pretty rare for web application nowadays!

  If I could make one suggestion, I really like the old MacOS "inspector" pattern. Basically a consistent way to get meta-information about any "thing" the user chooses to inspect. Your right sidebar is going towards that, but it would need some work to make it more consistent between views.

  GitHub's UI has these weird meta-states/restrictions that are so badly explained in the UI they feel like bugs. Each line gets a [...] menu in github which lets you see the blame/spawn a issue linking to it/get a permalink/etc. It's a totally different UI in the diff view, and then totally different again if you're looking at a comment referencing a line in a diff AND different if it's referencing a permalink to a line in a file, even if it's the same code that would be in that diff!

  I want the UI to have obvious "nouns". If the UI is showing me a line of code, even if it's in a diff view, let me "inspect" it and get the exact same meta-info + tools I get for lines of code anywhere. It's "a line", not a weird meta state of "a line, but you're in the comment of a PR linking to this line".

  Same concept applies to comments/commits/authors/etc. If the UI shows me a username, I should be able to pull up a "who is that again" inspector. Going into github's commit view, clicking on a name... and being sent to a filtered list of that person's commits makes zero sense to me because this is the ONLY place where that happens. That behaviour should be a "recent commits" button inside some "user inspector".

  by graypegg
• Saying it’s better than GitHub is a bit of a stretch right now, when it doesn’t even support mobile and looks like the stylesheets failed to load
  by thiht
• Please, stop using "written in Rust" as some kind of advantage or killer feature.
  by smetannik
• No mobile version, but I'm visiting from a tablet, should work at least if switch to "Desktop" in the browser manually. I don't care if I get horizontal scroll - not showing your visitors anything at all is an automatic "I'm out".

  Second, when I browsed from an actual desktop, and clicked on links for files it was all slow as hell - specifically the part when you click on a file an expect it to just load, you instead get: 1) some layout switch which looks like page reload 2) then it says "loading..." for several seconds.

  After looking at the source code, it appears to be React or similar frontend framework... Ugh. I don't know why people choose to use that stuff, just have a regular SSR which would work a hundred times faster and is more pleasant. And if you really want an SPA, don't use React, Vue or Svelte (and similar), it's horrible and always slow.

  Finally, since this appears to be a YC company, it shouldn't matter what's it written in. In fact, I don't even know why Rust would be a good thing here when Go or even Rails/Django would work just fine - but again, it just reinforces the meme that if it's written in Rust, you'll surely hear about it.

  Overall, the minimalism idea is welcomed, but it supposedly should appeal to people like myself and it doesn't for all the reasons I mentioned above.

  by usrbinenv