April 28, 2026
Commitment issues, but for code
Before GitHub
The old internet is crying, and the comments are fighting over what broke it
TLDR: The writer says GitHub became the social home of open-source software, replacing older do-it-yourself setups and changing how people built communities online. Commenters are split between mourning that lost era, blaming GitHub-style convenience for today’s mess, and arguing over what a healthier future should look like.
The post itself is a wistful walk through the pre-GitHub era: personal servers, clunky project pages, and a time when sharing software meant doing a lot more work yourself. The writer says GitHub didn’t just store code — it became the social hangout where careers, friendships, and whole communities formed. And now that GitHub feels like it’s fading from that role, readers are reacting like they’ve just watched their favorite neighborhood café get turned into a chain store.
But the comments? Absolutely not content with quiet nostalgia. One camp says GitHub’s real revolution was making projects about people, not just formal, intimidating “official” software names. That made it easier for ordinary creators to throw something online and be seen. Another camp is furious about the tradeoff: they argue convenience made everyone lazy, dependent on one giant website, and weirdly helpless about preserving software history. One commenter even called GitHub’s role as the internet’s software library a bad thing, saying it weakened everyone’s ability to archive things themselves.
Then came the spicy platform wars. One reader is still “salty” that Git beat other tools, while another rushed in to defend Codeberg as the more values-aligned future over corporate-owned GitHub. The biggest mood? GitHub made open source feel easy, social, and alive — and now people are fighting over whether that was liberation, dangerous centralization, or both.
Key Points
- •The author’s open-source projects were hosted on SourceForge, then on self-run Trac and Subversion infrastructure, later on Bitbucket, and finally on GitHub.
- •The article describes GitHub as a major part of the social infrastructure of open source, where collaboration and professional relationships formed.
- •The piece links GitHub’s rise to the spread of micro dependencies and lower-friction software publishing and consumption.
- •The article says earlier open-source ecosystems involved fewer practical dependencies, stronger emphasis on project history, and more direct trust in maintainers.
- •The author describes pre-GitHub open-source publishing as often requiring developers to run their own infrastructure, including repositories, documentation, and release files.