I’ve been evaluating sourcehut recently and I was involved in the Neovim/OpenBSD CI integration.
The testing infrastructure is really good and it’s really simple to fire up VMs running different BSDs and Linuxes. I much prefer it to travis, which is just a pain to set up.
The git side of things is very minimal, and you won’t see things like pull requests (they recommend using the email workflow). If you want PRs, then you can integrate sr.ht with GitHub. Personally I prefer the PR workflow and my guess is that the majority of others would too. Nonetheless, I moved one personal project (for which I don’t expect collaboration) to sr.ht and it all seems to work fine. Perhaps a little slow to push, but that’s geography for you.
I’ve not played with the mailing lists or todos much yet.
I’d say I’m likely to donate, as I’d like to see a BSD-friendly github alternative succeed.
It’s advertising an open source project, Source Hut, but also Janet, Zig, Nim, Samurai, Sway and other open source projects I like. Projects that get very little payment or gratitude for the work they do.
Yes sr.ht is a service too, a useful one at that. They support BSD well, unlike other companies, how else are they supposed to let people know this fact? Should they be paying largely unethical companies like google for ad space? Or should they just be more subversive so people don’t complain.
Let me put it this way, if every open source project was also a business, should we hate on every single one for advertising? sr.ht didn’t game the upvotes to get on the front page, people upvoted it by themselves.
I suppose there could be a tag ‘sponsored’ so people can ignore them. Not suggesting allowing lower quality from sponsored content either, probably the inverse.
The issue is that I see a Sourcehut “ad” every few days: “Sourcehut supports OpenBSD”, “Sourcehut supports migrations from Bitbucket”, “Sourcehut supports ASCII”. Yeah … we got it … A lot of these posts don’t have a lot of meat to them and at this point, it’s just getting spammy.
Yeah … we got it … A lot of these posts don’t have a lot of meat to them and at this point, it’s just getting spammy.
They don’t always have a lot of “meat,” but posts about SourceHut represent a capitalist ideology I can actually get behind. A single proprietor, working their ass off to try to change the software world, which has gotten extremely out of hand with regards to complexity, and the marketing of products that fix the complex systems we don’t need, at all, to begin with.
What’s the difference between a SourceHut post, and an post ad that complains that as an open source author I am not compensated fairly? Hint: one should be inspiration, for the other is actually possible.
payment for the service is optional, so no it doesn’t. All the things that make Sourcehut great in my opinion are the ways in which it denies capitalist ideology. Open Source Software, optional payments, etc.
It’s optional, right now, while in Alpha. It doesn’t seem the plan is that forever. Also, if it wasn’t clear, I’m extremely in favor of this model of charging people for a service, but releasing your software under a permissive license.
Just let me other another data point here. It was thanks to the “migration from Bitbucket” post that I found out Sourcehut had a nifty script to help migrations from Bitbucket and that saved hours of work as I migrated 20+ repos effortlessly. This current post made me realize that maybe I should be paying more attention to their CI system as it looks much simpler than others I’ve used. So, in the end, I’m appreciating these blog posts a lot. Yes they are related to a commercial venture but so what? You can self-host it if you’re not into SaaS outside your control. If we set a hard line like this, then it becomes impossible to post about any commercial project at all. It is already hard to monetize FOSS projects to make them sustainable, now imagine if they are not even allowed blog posts…
Same here. This string of posts made me aware of sourcehut and when I had to migrate from bitbucket, I then gave them a hard eval. I like their human, non-shitty business model of “I give them money and they give me services”, and that their products are professionally executed and no-frills.
I don’t know how to reconcile it. These articles were very useful to me, when most product ads weren’t and I’d be disappointed if this site became a product advert platform. I think people are right for flagging it is almost-an-ad, but in this one vendor’s case I’m glad I saw them and am now a happy sourcehut customer.
But there is no other way to get large numbers of people to know about something, following your advice would be suicide.
All these conversations are done like it’s all or nothing. We allow politics/marketing/etc on Lobsters or… it never happens anywhere with massive damage to individuals and society. Realistically, this is a small site with few monetary opportunities for a SaaS charging as little as he does. If the goal is spreading the word, it’s best done on sites and platforms with large numbers of potential users and (especially) paying customers. Each act of spreading the word should maximize the number of people they reach for both societal impact and profit for sustainability.
Multiple rounds on Lobsters means, aside from the first announcement with much fan fare, the author sacrificed each time opportunities to reach new, larger audiences to show the same message again to the same small crowd. Repeating it here is the opposite of spreading the word. Especially since most here that like Sourcehut are probably already following it. Maybe even buying it. He’s preaching to the choir here more than most places.
Mind-killer or not, anyone talking about large-scale adoption of software, ideology, etc should be using proven tactics in the kinds of places that get those results. That’s what you were talking about, though. I figured he was just trying to show latest BSD-related progress on one of his favorite tech forums. More noise than signal simply because he was sharing excitement more than doing technical posts or focused marketing.
Every blog post is an ad for something. It may not be a product, directly, but it’s advertising an idea, the person, or persons the idea was thought by, the writing (which, btw can be a product) of the author, etc.
If you want to sincerely flag advertising, you might as well get offline—it’s pervasive.
it seems that an advertisement has a precise definition: an ad is directly related to a paid product, not an idea.
This is a fairly pedantic interpretation. A person promotes an idea to sell something, if even themselves. That “sale” might only come later in the form of a job offer, or support through Patreon, etc, etc.. But, to say that you can’t advertise an idea is wrong. The cigarette industry’s ad campaigns have always been about selling an image, an idea that if you smoke you become part of something bigger. Oh, and btw, you’ll probably remember the brand name, and buy that kind instead of something else.
iPods were sold on the very basis of white headphones, TO THE POINT, that people without iPods started wearing white headphones to be part of the “club.” Advertisements sell you the idea of a better life, and hopefully you’ll buy my product to get it.
You’re right, and how virtuous Sourcehut may or may not be doesn’t change that. The line between ad and article is a spectrum, but this seems to be pretty well into the ad side of things. I apologise, I’ll be more discerning in the future.
If you crack some other good places to get the word out, I’d be interested in hearing. My online circle is pretty small (lobste.rs and HN), but I’m working on something I want to ‘advertise’ the hell out of quite soon…
I’ve been trying to engage more with Reddit for this reason. I don’t really like it as a platform or see it as doing a social good, but there are users there and I’d like to be there to answer their questions. I was going to make a Twitter account, too, but they wanted my phone number and a pic of my ID and a blood sample to verify my account so I abandoned that. Finding good ways to ethically grow Sourcehut’s audience is not an entirely solved problem.
The reason Twitter – and many platforms – asks for phone numbers is because spam and trolls are a persistent problem. Ban one neo-Nazi troll tweeting obscenities at some black actor for DesTROyinG WhITe SocIEtY and they’ll create a new account faster than you can say “fuck off Nazi”.
Reddit is often toxic as hell by the way, so good luck with that.
While I also see it as an ad, I’m interested in what it being announced as a Sourcehut user. But it seems you don’t have a RSS/Atom feed for the official blog… Or is there a mailing list I missed?
Somewhat amusing that this post with an interesting fully FOSS service, is marked -29 spam, whereas an actual advertisement about Huawei making macbook clones that run Linux has only -3 spam (one of which is mine).
Said FOSS service has been on the Lobsters front page multiple times recently. I suspect the reaction is: “We get it, sr.ht exists and SirCmpwn is apparently desperate to attract a paying customerbase, but a clickbaity title for a blogspam ad on the usual suspect’s software is probably crossing the line.”
Speaking as someone that has fought to get various upstreams to support OpenBSD, it’s awesome to see a CI pipeline that supports it!
I can’t tell you how many patches have been turned away by upstreams because “our CI doesn’t support OpenBSD”.
The icing on the cake is that I didn’t have to add support for the CI (I have attempted this in the past and it has fallen flat)!
I’ve been evaluating sourcehut recently and I was involved in the Neovim/OpenBSD CI integration.
The testing infrastructure is really good and it’s really simple to fire up VMs running different BSDs and Linuxes. I much prefer it to travis, which is just a pain to set up.
The git side of things is very minimal, and you won’t see things like pull requests (they recommend using the email workflow). If you want PRs, then you can integrate sr.ht with GitHub. Personally I prefer the PR workflow and my guess is that the majority of others would too. Nonetheless, I moved one personal project (for which I don’t expect collaboration) to sr.ht and it all seems to work fine. Perhaps a little slow to push, but that’s geography for you.
I’ve not played with the mailing lists or todos much yet.
I’d say I’m likely to donate, as I’d like to see a BSD-friendly github alternative succeed.
Nice ad. :|
I agree it is an ad, but…
I can get behind that.
Also at the moment according to the pricing page, payment is optional.
It’s advertising an open source project, Source Hut, but also Janet, Zig, Nim, Samurai, Sway and other open source projects I like. Projects that get very little payment or gratitude for the work they do.
Yes sr.ht is a service too, a useful one at that. They support BSD well, unlike other companies, how else are they supposed to let people know this fact? Should they be paying largely unethical companies like google for ad space? Or should they just be more subversive so people don’t complain.
Let me put it this way, if every open source project was also a business, should we hate on every single one for advertising? sr.ht didn’t game the upvotes to get on the front page, people upvoted it by themselves.
I suppose there could be a tag ‘sponsored’ so people can ignore them. Not suggesting allowing lower quality from sponsored content either, probably the inverse.
The issue is that I see a Sourcehut “ad” every few days: “Sourcehut supports OpenBSD”, “Sourcehut supports migrations from Bitbucket”, “Sourcehut supports ASCII”. Yeah … we got it … A lot of these posts don’t have a lot of meat to them and at this point, it’s just getting spammy.
They don’t always have a lot of “meat,” but posts about SourceHut represent a capitalist ideology I can actually get behind. A single proprietor, working their ass off to try to change the software world, which has gotten extremely out of hand with regards to complexity, and the marketing of products that fix the complex systems we don’t need, at all, to begin with.
What’s the difference between a SourceHut post, and an
postad that complains that as an open source author I am not compensated fairly? Hint: one should be inspiration, for the other is actually possible.payment for the service is optional, so no it doesn’t. All the things that make Sourcehut great in my opinion are the ways in which it denies capitalist ideology. Open Source Software, optional payments, etc.
It’s optional, right now, while in Alpha. It doesn’t seem the plan is that forever. Also, if it wasn’t clear, I’m extremely in favor of this model of charging people for a service, but releasing your software under a permissive license.
[Comment removed by author]
Just let me other another data point here. It was thanks to the “migration from Bitbucket” post that I found out Sourcehut had a nifty script to help migrations from Bitbucket and that saved hours of work as I migrated 20+ repos effortlessly. This current post made me realize that maybe I should be paying more attention to their CI system as it looks much simpler than others I’ve used. So, in the end, I’m appreciating these blog posts a lot. Yes they are related to a commercial venture but so what? You can self-host it if you’re not into SaaS outside your control. If we set a hard line like this, then it becomes impossible to post about any commercial project at all. It is already hard to monetize FOSS projects to make them sustainable, now imagine if they are not even allowed blog posts…
Same here. This string of posts made me aware of sourcehut and when I had to migrate from bitbucket, I then gave them a hard eval. I like their human, non-shitty business model of “I give them money and they give me services”, and that their products are professionally executed and no-frills.
I don’t know how to reconcile it. These articles were very useful to me, when most product ads weren’t and I’d be disappointed if this site became a product advert platform. I think people are right for flagging it is almost-an-ad, but in this one vendor’s case I’m glad I saw them and am now a happy sourcehut customer.
That is fair I guess. I’ll have to check the guidelines on things like that.
Yes. I flag those too. Advertising is a mind killer.
But there is no other way to get large numbers of people to know about something, following your advice would be suicide.
I also hate advertising, I just don’t see a way around it. I won’t argue further against banishing advertising from lobste.rs at least.
All these conversations are done like it’s all or nothing. We allow politics/marketing/etc on Lobsters or… it never happens anywhere with massive damage to individuals and society. Realistically, this is a small site with few monetary opportunities for a SaaS charging as little as he does. If the goal is spreading the word, it’s best done on sites and platforms with large numbers of potential users and (especially) paying customers. Each act of spreading the word should maximize the number of people they reach for both societal impact and profit for sustainability.
Multiple rounds on Lobsters means, aside from the first announcement with much fan fare, the author sacrificed each time opportunities to reach new, larger audiences to show the same message again to the same small crowd. Repeating it here is the opposite of spreading the word. Especially since most here that like Sourcehut are probably already following it. Maybe even buying it. He’s preaching to the choir here more than most places.
Mind-killer or not, anyone talking about large-scale adoption of software, ideology, etc should be using proven tactics in the kinds of places that get those results. That’s what you were talking about, though. I figured he was just trying to show latest BSD-related progress on one of his favorite tech forums. More noise than signal simply because he was sharing excitement more than doing technical posts or focused marketing.
Every blog post is an ad for something. It may not be a product, directly, but it’s advertising an idea, the person, or persons the idea was thought by, the writing (which, btw can be a product) of the author, etc.
If you want to sincerely flag advertising, you might as well get offline—it’s pervasive.
Not a native english speaker here. I may be wrong, but after looking at the dictionnary definition:
it seems that an advertisement has a precise definition: an ad is directly related to a paid product, not an idea.
This is a fairly pedantic interpretation. A person promotes an idea to sell something, if even themselves. That “sale” might only come later in the form of a job offer, or support through Patreon, etc, etc.. But, to say that you can’t advertise an idea is wrong. The cigarette industry’s ad campaigns have always been about selling an image, an idea that if you smoke you become part of something bigger. Oh, and btw, you’ll probably remember the brand name, and buy that kind instead of something else.
iPods were sold on the very basis of white headphones, TO THE POINT, that people without iPods started wearing white headphones to be part of the “club.” Advertisements sell you the idea of a better life, and hopefully you’ll buy my product to get it.
You’re right, and how virtuous Sourcehut may or may not be doesn’t change that. The line between ad and article is a spectrum, but this seems to be pretty well into the ad side of things. I apologise, I’ll be more discerning in the future.
If you crack some other good places to get the word out, I’d be interested in hearing. My online circle is pretty small (lobste.rs and HN), but I’m working on something I want to ‘advertise’ the hell out of quite soon…
I’ve been trying to engage more with Reddit for this reason. I don’t really like it as a platform or see it as doing a social good, but there are users there and I’d like to be there to answer their questions. I was going to make a Twitter account, too, but they wanted my phone number and a pic of my ID and a blood sample to verify my account so I abandoned that. Finding good ways to ethically grow Sourcehut’s audience is not an entirely solved problem.
The reason Twitter – and many platforms – asks for phone numbers is because spam and trolls are a persistent problem. Ban one neo-Nazi troll tweeting obscenities at some black actor for DesTROyinG WhITe SocIEtY and they’ll create a new account faster than you can say “fuck off Nazi”.
Reddit is often toxic as hell by the way, so good luck with that.
Huh…I have a twitter account and all I needed for it was an email. Maybe things have changed.
Nowadays they let you in with just an email, but after some time “block” your account and only unblock it after you give your phone number.
While I also see it as an ad, I’m interested in what it being announced as a Sourcehut user. But it seems you don’t have a RSS/Atom feed for the official blog… Or is there a mailing list I missed?
https://sourcehut.org/blog/index.xml
I’ve been meaning to make this more visible…
hold pleasedone.Somewhat amusing that this post with an interesting fully FOSS service, is marked -29 spam, whereas an actual advertisement about Huawei making macbook clones that run Linux has only -3 spam (one of which is mine).
Said FOSS service has been on the Lobsters front page multiple times recently. I suspect the reaction is: “We get it, sr.ht exists and SirCmpwn is apparently desperate to attract a paying customerbase, but a clickbaity title for a blogspam ad on the usual suspect’s software is probably crossing the line.”