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

334 points by baepaul 3mo ago

What works now: user signups, org creations, private/public repos, and importing GitHub repositories (both as read-only mirrors and full migrations). So basically, you can create, push and pull to a repo, but we don't have many features quite yet (issues, PRs, CI). What is a bit unique is: 1) we built it in Rust and 2) the website is a little odd. Its design is inspired by CLIs (e.g., fzf, broot, vim) instead of web apps, and as such, lacks some affordances that you might typically expect in favor of keyboard-driven instant navigations (we have the very ambitious goal of an FCP of 100ms). In case you're curious, here's how we we built it: https://gitdot.io/designs https://gitdot.io/designs We recognize that we're making some bold claims here and are also well aware that we have much to learn. Building software is still hard, and that's a fact we seem to relearn everyday. But we wanted to share what we built so far nonetheless. Cheers, thank y'all for reading, and till the next —paul & mikkel.

johntash 3mo ago
fwiw when I opened the site, my fans spun up and firefox slowed a lot. No idea what it's doing, but it's definitely using a ton of cpu.
- deleted 3mo ago
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sspoisk 3mo ago
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Lethalman 3mo ago
“Written in X”. Every time I look elsewhere when I see it. When is people starting to think about features instead of “it’s better because I rewrote it in X!!”
Imustaskforhelp 3mo ago
This is really interesting. Especially as its open source and I really liked the UI design of it. I was thinking about creating my own git forge given the unreliability of Github and I wouldn't be able to create just at the moment incredibly reliable software like git forge although I could use AI to create a minimalist piece of software, I didn't because I didn't want to create yet another AI slop fighting another AI slop (github/gitlab). Forejo is incredible but I have always wanted to get more alternatives in this field. Much thanks for making it. I have signed up and I have high hopes for it too and I will try to either self host this on my servers or gitdot.io as well as Github I recommend making a small community in matrix (preferred), fluxer.gg, discord etc. as I'd like to join it. PS: small personal thing that I have made which helps in making communities: https://mirror.forum https://mirror.forum I am definitely interested in gitdot.io! This seems incredible I wish nothing but the best for you folks. Gonna create a local copy of the source code of gitdot.io right now! Thanks for open-sourcing the efforts too. I really appreciate it :-D The software is so nice! I genuinely hope that you guys and the project blows up and if you guys might ever hire a junior dev, I hope you all could remember me as the world right now needed such software that you have made!! :-D (Although I am more interested in managing servers/golang but that's because rust is hard to learn as a beginner but that's different topic but I like rust's ideas too and rust is a great/preferred language with golang for this type of service :-D)
- wjsekfghks 3mo ago
  Thanks for the support, we really appreciate it. We want to create/support communities within the app in the future (via issues, etc) but ya it's a good idea to form some channels. It might be a bit difficult to self-host at the moment (as we don't have a good documentation to do so) but you can try and let us know how it goes.
chwzr 3mo ago
the design looks neat. + for hexagonal pattern on the backend - that fits perfectly!
- wjsekfghks 3mo ago
  thanks!
mathisdev7 3mo ago
I hate that when we scroll through a codebase files, it changes the file we are hovering, I'd rather having to click to see the file
- wjsekfghks 3mo ago
  If you click the file row (not the filename as that will navigate to file page), then hovering over other files won't change the preview.
- tadfisher 3mo ago
  Yes, this particular UX is poor. It's not intuitive that clicking the filename has different behavior from clicking elsewhere in the file's row. Expanding the row inline needs a leading widget. This particular issue is solved in GitHub proper, and derives from the Windows 95 tree view widget [1], which I seem to remember from Windows 3.x but can't find a screenshot. The hover behavior is just not an intuitive or accessible default. I can't imagine someone being able to use this if they have a hard time clicking without moving the mouse. It also wastes resources fetching file/directory contents while the user is moving the cursor to a predetermined file they presumably wish to open. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winauto/system-provided-user-interface-elements https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winauto/syst...
  - baepaul 3mo ago
    thank you both for the feedback, i'm revisiting it now and i do see what the both of you are illustrating. i think i will get rid of the change on hover, it is a distraction and perhaps was just my ambition to show people how fast we load. edit: fixed
School-Cotton 3mo ago
Why does it have to be a website? Why merely "CLI-inspired" and not actually CLIs?
- garbagepatch 3mo ago
  Removes a barrier of entry if you can look at it from a browser instead of installing a CLI/TUI. Don't try to make me install a random program if I can view it in my sandboxed browser safely. Also, browsers have greasemonkey to help me personalize websites easily. TUIs don't.
- baepaul 3mo ago
  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.
eqvinox 3mo ago
What's the differentiation against Forgejo going to be?
- baepaul 3mo ago
  forgejo is a pretty great piece of software. 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
  - KolmogorovComp 3mo ago
    > i think there's a lot of room to make things better I think the question is why not try to make the other FOSS forges better instead of reinventing the wheel.
  - eqvinox 3mo ago
    I'm a bit confused, aren't the Forgejo people trying to build the "best product possible", too? And there's more of them, and they have funding, and… between 2 good forges or 1 great one, I rather have 1 great one… I guess you're not interested in joining them because it's not Rust?
    - baepaul 3mo ago
      thank you both for asking. 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.
screamingninja 3mo ago
> 5. What features will gitdot not have? > AI. > We view AI as an implementation detail — and do not think that using it is necessarily good. > In fact, we think it makes many products worse by acting as a bandaid for poor design. > That isn’t to say we are blind to it, but that we will be judicious in our use of it instead. Not sure I follow. What feature are the developers referring to? I understand that AI will power tools that may or may not fit a particular use case. How is AI a feature and what does it mean to be anti-AI?
- ronsor 3mo ago
  That's not really anti-AI. Anti-AI would mean avoiding it as a value regardless of practicality. That sounds more like anti-enshittification.
  - trollbridge 3mo ago
    AI is rapidly becoming a synonym for enshittification. It can be a little aggravating. I am trying to judiciously use terms like "agent" or "LLM" so I can avoid just lazily saying "AI", which is often a pejorative term now.
- baepaul 3mo ago
  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. hope that's clearer and thank you for asking
- 7moritz7 3mo ago
  I'm honestly lost for words over how you can write something like this while the web app's source code is clearly heavily integrated with Claude Code. https://gitdot.io/bkdevs/gitdot/files https://gitdot.io/bkdevs/gitdot/files
Kiro 3mo ago
I think you're in an interesting space where there's a real opportunity to create something fresh. When people are actively looking for alternatives it will be easier to break out of the established norms. What does anti-AI mean? Don't really see anything about it in the design doc except "no AI copilot".
- baepaul 3mo ago
  thank you kiro! (i feel you may be slightly miffed about the AWS IDE taking your name haha) i replied in a separate comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48452052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48452052 but to reiterate: 1) no AI copilot and 2) no training or selling of your data. 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.
TazeTSchnitzel 3mo ago
The minimal look feels very refreshing, and yet it's not disorienting like many minimal web git UIs are in my experience; I actually feel like I know how to navigate this thing. Site feels very snappy too, especially with those instantly loading file previews when you hover. Congrats!
- baepaul 3mo ago
  thank you! of all things in this launch, i was the most anxious about the design as it is admittedly the most different. glad to hear the positive feedback :)
  - worldsayshi 3mo ago
    It seems like the site is currently getting hugged so I can't look but I'm glad someone is trying to achieve a more minimalistic take on the UX of a software forge. It seems like an area with good room for improvement.
    - baepaul 3mo ago
      the hn hug is real indeed, hopefully this link is fine. a bit wordy, but goes into quite a lot of the thinking that went into the design: https://gitdot.io/designs/gitdot-designed-by-developers https://gitdot.io/designs/gitdot-designed-by-developers
SwiftyBug 3mo ago
I absolutely love the minimalist UI. I see code reviews is in the roadmap, I can't wait to try it.
- chaoxu 3mo ago
  Feels like one can just copy the UI and use it for forgejo. It would get something similar very quickly, and avoid handling all the difficult stuff I guess.
garbagepatch 3mo ago
I like the terminal aesthetics but please, for accessibility's sake, make input boxes look more like input boxes and buttons look like buttons.
- baepaul 3mo ago
  thank you for the feedback, yeah i've been going and trimming a few places where i think my own tendencies have gone a bit too far. i will also say on accessibility, i recognize the site is a bit too small font in general — and will fix it soon.
  - mentos 3mo ago
    Generally probably shouldn’t try to innovate in too many places at once
    - baepaul 3mo ago
      we are well aware and duly noted. thank you for the feedback
  - nine_k 3mo ago
    I would humbly suggest that a reasonable site should assume that the user has set the comfortable font size in the browser, and make all other font sizes in percentages, or using rem units.
kzdrenka 3mo ago
I came to these comments to see if other people were annoyed by the "written in Rust" comment. Glad it's not just me
Cieric 3mo ago
Seems interesting an I'll take more of a peek after work, but one thing that stood out to me is the only way back to the home page after navigating to a repo is the back button. Going back to the home page via the back button also doesn't retain that "new" was selected. But I agree with others, I do like the simplicity of the site.
- wjsekfghks 3mo ago
  you can press "h" to go back to homepage :)
- baepaul 3mo ago
  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.
  - Cieric 3mo ago
    I think I can understand that reasoning. I do have a tendency to explore, especially at the start since it gives me a view of what the site can already do, cause I wouldn't want to run into issues with my own projects without knowing of the possible limitations ahead of time. If anything since the keyboard shortcut already exists, you could always put it in little cursor menu at the bottom of the screen. But yeah up to you, I look forward to your progress.
  - mbreese 3mo ago
    I’m not sure I agree with all of your takes either. For example, I’m not anti-AI for coding, so that immediately made me click away. I’m glad I read the comments though because I think the take of “not using your code to train AI” makes a lot more sense. But, I wanted to say thanks for posting this and being really open in the comments. It’s hard to get so much feedback so quickly. It’s a firehouse of criticism that’s hard to deal with. You’re handling it well.
jacques_chester 3mo ago
It is ... problematic ... to lead with "anti-AI" and then bury terms like "judicious in our use of it" in the fine print. IMO a team like yours can either: * Use LLMs, in which case you aren't "anti-AI". * Not use LLMs currently, but the non-use is not due to following a principle, in which case you aren't "anti-AI". * Not use LLMs and promise never to do so. I'm happy you are trying something new. But you hurt yourself by engaging in something very old: disingenuity. (edits for presentation and grammar)
- baepaul 3mo ago
  yeah this has been pointed out a few times, will revise the copytext later but will keep it up for the duration of the post. hope our sentiment is clearer in the comments that i've made, i think i've made the mistake of phrasing here with the "anti", i'll revisit it. edit: dang has removed it, apologies for the confusion i caused, that was my mistake.
  - jacques_chester 3mo ago
    Thanks, I appreciate it.
- dang 3mo ago
  I've taken that bit out of the title for the time being, since it was causing confusion.
abathologist 3mo ago
Would be interested in a comparison with https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/ (which has a comparable minimal aesthetic, but also has the deep benefit of being FOSS.
- Imustaskforhelp 3mo ago
  Gitdot is FOSS as well from my understanding.
skrtskrt 3mo ago
Love the idea of someone tackling this space in Rust, but please just make a normal UI, I have no idea what I am looking at.
- 382hi 3mo ago
  I personally prefer the GitDot UI over the bloated corporate style UIs that all feel the same
  - gerardojbaez 3mo ago
    Agree!
7moritz7 3mo ago
There is a dozen CLAUDE.md in the gitdot source. The "Anti-AI" in your title seems a bit disingenuous.
isatty 3mo ago
Maybe it’s the HN effect but /files takes a while to load. Personally while I appreciate something not being AI slop, writing something in Rust has no meaning to me.
- baepaul 3mo ago
  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.
ramon156 3mo ago
A lot of fuss that needs to be chiseled out first. There's an idiom that is followed a bit too black and white, but the grey is grey. No loading animation, but my screen jitters while loading in stuff. My internet speed is fine, so it's a performance/bug issue. I also did not initially understand the UI, but that'll come as I use it more
- baepaul 3mo ago
  yeah the site isn't perfect. 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. but thank you for giving it a shot nonetheless!
graypegg 3mo ago
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".
- baepaul 3mo ago
  thank you! 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. thank you sincerely this is dope.
flexagoon 3mo ago
Feels weird to ship a website without mobile support in this day. The desktop version looks nice though
- alienbaby 3mo ago
  Didn't work for me even when I chose to see the desktop site in my mobile browser :/
  - baepaul 3mo ago
    it is based off a minimum pixel as of now, apologies. the overall reason why we didn't ship a mobile site is that code is inherently very hard to read on mobile and i think to do that properly, you have to design explicitly for it. (and that is not, in fact, something that i do want to vibe code)
    - nine_k 3mo ago
      At least it would be reasonable to show a message like "Sorry, no mobile support yet".
      - quuxplusone 3mo ago
        As a banner or something, maybe. But I'd much rather see a broken-looking site on mobile than see nothing at all on mobile. In the same category: websites that display nothing but a splash screen "This site requires Internet Explorer X" or whatever. Don't nanny me, just feed my browser the HTML! Whether my browser can render it properly is my problem, not yours.
denysvitali 3mo ago
> Mobile support to come. In 2026 not being mobile first is a bit of a disappointment to be honest
applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
This is a violation of Git's trademark, and your usage of it is expressly prohibited by their policy. https://git-scm.com/about/trademark https://git-scm.com/about/trademark > [...] you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service. > Please be aware that GitHub and GitLab are exceptions to this Policy because they are subject to explicit licensing arrangements that pre-date, and thus take precedence, over this Policy. You might've known that if you hadn't vibe-launched this while for some reason marketing it as anti-AI, but here we are in a world where basic research is a dead art.
- deleted 3mo ago
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- clickety_clack 3mo ago
  I’d love to hear an IP lawyer weigh in on this, because I’ve never heard of this kind of thing before. It doesn’t seem correct that you can use trademark alone like this to extend beyond the actual word used in the trademark. Maybe it’s from licensing or something, ie maybe if a product uses the actual git product, then the git license means you can’t use the name as part of a word.
  - applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
    Trademark law is ridiculously slanted in favour of existing rightsholders. The most famous example I know of is "McSleep Inn", which was sued by McDonalds and forced to change their name. I think that ruling was complete bullshit, because Mc is so generic and usually a prime factor of trademark law is whether the businesses operate in similar domains, but it goes to show how broad the protections can be. Something like "GitFoo", which is explicitly being used specifically on a site for hosting Git repositories, doesn't stand a chance in hell, and rightfully so because this is actually trying to take advantage of Git's name to market their product.
    - clickety_clack 3mo ago
moojacob 3mo ago
I love the design. Clean and refreshing - you start at the left and every sub element goes to the right. Like a file browser. And the commit screen is dense but super readable. I would move the summary column from the right of the README to the left of the README on the /home screen (and call /home the /README). Loading files is very slow but I assume that's because HN is hammering the server. I am not a believer in negative advertising. So I don't give a poop you are anti-ai. Or "better" than Github (better for who??). Just imply you are a code forge thats made for serious developers who need something engineered to be fast and reliable. I wish you the best of luck, I can see Linear coming out with git repos after coming out with a diff reader. I have a suspicion there's space for many code forges in the market as you build out more features, especially if you lean into your products hacker-y-ness
daishi55 3mo ago
> anti-AI > mobile support to come Cmon lol. Give opus 20min and it will give you a mobile site throw in a better-looking desktop site for fun.
purple-leafy 3mo ago
I mean, no offence but nothing is more of a signal of marketing fluff to me than saying “built in Rust” or “anti-AI” Tell us why we should care outside of the marketing fluff - these aren’t highlights - if anything they are quite off putting. Your project needs to stand on its own actual merits. Critique over, congratulations on launching something or building something anyway. But what makes this different? And why have you chosen that philosophy - outside of marketing fluff
Sailemi 3mo ago
Big fan of the design! Different but easy to get a hand of. Having /profile also be linked on the homepage with the other main pages for ease of navigation would be nice, the profile link at the bottom feels like it clashes with the rest of the UI to my eyes.
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hntiz 3mo ago
Just one minor piece of feedback that's unlikely to be a priority. I cannot fully navigate when browsing in a terminal browser (chawan in my case, haven't tried with w3m or lynx). For example the "h" keymap for going home does not work. That said though, one of my pet peeves around browsing Github Web from the terminal was having to click "skip to content" just to get the body. So you definitely delivered there (after having read your design post). Good luck with the rest of the year.
- baepaul 3mo ago
  oh wow i have not thought about terminal browsers in a while (i used to use one back in the day in college haha). yeah, that admittedly is not priority, but thanks for taking the time to check it out.
HyperL0gi 3mo ago
> What is a bit unique is: 1) we built it in Rust The first unique characteristic is that it was built in Rust? Why does it matter from a user perspective? I was expecting the first point to be something that would convince me to check it out. Unless the goal is to find people to collaborate on building the software. I got a bit confused. Looking good regardless :)
- ecares 3mo ago
  I am tired of "built in Rust" as an argument, you are spot on, it should not matter. But you are shooting right at Rust culture here haha
  - saghm 3mo ago
    And I'm tired of the "tired of 'built in Rust'" arguments because it also shouldn't matter if someone happens to describe their project that you didn't have to go out of your way to talk about in a way that bothers you. But I'm shooting right at the "tired of 'built in Rust'" culture here. You can take these arguments to an unbounded level of depth; someone can be tired of my responses to the responses to so me someone happening to care about something different than them. It's all equally silly, and if you're convinced that your level of depth is reasonable but the others aren't, I'd highly recommend trying to think about why you're so confident that your opinion is important but ones that come after aren't, because it's very unclear to anyone who doesn't already agree with you, and that's usually a sign that there's no point in saying it at all.
- pitched 3mo ago
  I worry that what they’re trying to say is that it was vibe coded but vibe coded in a language with a pretty solid linter. What an irony that those exact safety guarantees that made it attractive are now a detriment because they make the project smell like AI.
- baepaul 3mo ago
  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.
domtron_vox 3mo ago
I signed up and the code email went to spam. A quick look at the DNS seemed to show you were lacking DKIM and DMARC records. If I'm not mistaken about that, you should remedy that to ensure email providers don't dump your emails to spam.
- wjsekfghks 3mo ago
  Thanks for flagging, we were missing DMARC, now added
  - Grimblewald 3mo ago
    Bit odd it was missing at all. Makes me wonder how well the core infrastructure you're building on is understood, and how trustworthy any of this really is. If all I'm getting is some vibeslop, with zero expertise or skill added, even basic stuff like this, why shouldnt I just vibe my own better version tailored to my needs exactly? Same headaches as with your app (though likely less give what's on display), only now I dont pay you to give me headaches and I retain control. The software was never the moat. The skills and experience crystalised within it was, and remains, the product.
usrbinenv 3mo ago
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.
- xp84 3mo ago
  I have to agree with the proposition that if you are aiming for the performant, no frills deal - and the aesthetic certainly telegraphs this - you really do not need client-side render, nor overengineered frontend frameworks like React & friends. Ditto for Styled Components (looks like you're not using the latter).
  - johnisgood 3mo ago
    I agree. I like the website, looks minimal, but minimalism is not reflected in the stack.
    - Semaphor 3mo ago
      The look only seems minimal as well. I need to zoom in to read, which eventually destroys the layout. A minimal website has at least basic accessibility by default, this uses some kind of "modern" styling stuff to ruin it.
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selectnull 3mo ago
> Install gitdot-cli to push and clone private repos Hmmm... no. Why should I? Just let me use git.
Simon-curtis 3mo ago
This project looks awesome. I’ve really enjoyed your blogs about the design process and learnings. Brave to jump into Rust while learning a new domain but very commendable. Wish I had a close programmer friend to do this stuff with, sounds like a great asset to have such great chemistry. You seem to be experienced devs, so I’m sure you already know, but don’t listen to the contrarians on HN. They’ll suck the life out of you because it’s not 100% the way they like it.
triyambakam 3mo ago
Sorry but the name is too hard to say. At least it's not as bad as Forgejo
NetOpWibby 3mo ago
Did you guys just make my own git forge plans useless? This looks great! I was gonna call mine EOL and I already bought the domain eol.sh...then again, I could just do mine in TypeScript and launch it anyway.
sigmonsays 3mo ago
that UI is way too opinionated
applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
[flagged]
- reactordev 3mo ago
  what makes you think they are abandoned? Maybe they are in-use...? Maybe the landscape shifted to where niche tools like that aren't monetizable?
  - applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
    The landing page is still a "join the waitlist" placeholder and there hasn't been a single commit since one week after they announced it, ten months ago. Together with the entire repo and the ShowHN post itself being vibed through and through, it seems apparent that putting any amount of human effort into that project was never on the agenda. Which naturally leads one to wonder, what makes this project different?
    - reactordev 3mo ago
      it's YC we are talking about, everything is vibed through.
  - Grimblewald 3mo ago
    1. It's unfinished 2. Textbook slop dump and run we can see one big initial push, not too suspect. Then a few superficial updates, and then nothing for months. Unfinished, broken, and ostentiably abandond due to being an unmaintaible nightmare as vibeslop tends to be.
  - sieabahlpark 3mo ago
    [dead]
- spiralcoaster 3mo ago
  We shouldn't trust the new project. Right from [1] you linked to: > The problems I kept running into: > - I'm lazy. That should tell you all you need to know about this super hype new fantastic GitHub written in Rust ! ! ! !
gerdesj 3mo ago
Big Brother seems to be built in to us humans. git itself is decentralised - all repos are equal. Mr T designed it that way because ... well that's all that was needed for Linux kernel development back in the day and it still seems to work. The management stuff can be managed quite well via email and some choice socials. Obviously that nonsense cannot possibly scale to the size of your enterprise thingies! Yet again we have a better Big Brother than Big Brother ... this time with Rust, yum!
syngrog66 3mo ago
unfortunate name: very similar to Godot at passing glance. my brain already stumbles going back and forth between seeing LLVM and LLM, IP (Internet protocol) and IP (Intellectual property). Don't me started on X vs X vs X vs ... I do like that it reinforces this rule of thumb: Q: "How do you know if any given piece of software is written in Rust? A: "Oh they'll tell you. They *will* tell you. Upfront and over and over again."
edfletcher_t137 3mo ago
> 7. How does gitdot make money? > We don't. This cannot last forever. What's the plan when it runs out?
mckee_plus_plus 3mo ago
Paul & Mikkel work at GitHub and are trying to offload traffic from gh
keyle 3mo ago
We've built a better SpaceX! says kid with cardboard rocket in the backyard. In Rust we trust! Common man, you're not even 5% of a Github replacement. Don't act like one. You've built a Git web UI with accounts, the easy part. > Building software is still hard You don't say.
- dang 3mo ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "Don't be snarky." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Obviously this is a project at an early stage and the title expresses what they're working on, not a claim to 100% feature parity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - alexpadula 3mo ago
    It's pretty honest, some times you have to be.
    - dang 3mo ago
      There are many ways to be honest, and some of them are within the site guidelines. Commenters should be honest in those ways.
      - keyle 3mo ago
        Thanks for reminding me, I appreciate it. However there is justice for commenting poorly, there doesn't seem to be justice for posting lies and deceit, which is borderline a serial case here(?).
        dang 3mo ago
        That question does comes up quite a bit, so I try to occasionally post an in-depth explanation. Maybe I'll do that here. We can answer the question by rephrasing it. I would put it this way: "is it ok to be wrong on HN"? The key change is to replace charged words like "lies" and "deceit" with the neutral word "wrong". People do lie and deceive, but to tell that apart from just plain being-wrong requires knowing someone's intent, and this is not something that moderators (or readers in general) can do. Even courts of law have a hard time doing that! HN comments don't contain nearly enough information to decide it. You would have to have a mind reader [1]. Worse, readers are far too quick to assume lies, deceit, etc., in other commenters that they happen to dislike or disagree with. The internet is rife with this, as we all know. Most of these insinuations are imaginary—we are all too inclined to attribute disingenuousness to the other side. One can easily see this by looking at how the same accusations are made against one's own side. Once the question has been rephrased in this way, it answers itself: of course it's ok to be wrong on HN. How could it not be? Most of us are mostly wrong about most things. Moreover, being wrong is part of eventually getting something right. Curious conversation, which HN exists for, often involves mistakes, and sometimes the mistakes (or seeming mistakes) turn out to be creative. Even if we decided it was not ok to be wrong, how would we enforce that? We don't have a truth meter [2]. As we have neither a mind reader nor a truth meter, we can't base moderation on anything that requires knowing people's intent or knowing the truth about things. We need criteria that can be decided from people's observable behavior on the site. As I sometimes put it, we can only moderate by effects [3]. That's why HN's guidelines are they way they are (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) - there's nothing in there which requires us to know what someone's intent is, nor whether they are right or wrong on a topic. At least I hope there isn't! What about the truth, then - do we care about it at all? Of course we do. It's critical! But working out what's true vs. what's false is the province of the community, not the mods. It's the commenters' job to do that, e.g. by answering bad arguments with better ones and false information with true. And they should do this within the site guidelines, e.g. by being respectful and curious rather than aggressive and accusatory. The moderators' job is to hold the container for this or (if you like) to keep the playing field fair. This isn't possible in any complete way - there are far too many factors pushing things into messy, unsatisfying places. But we do what we can. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22mind%20reader%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22truth%20meter%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=intent%20effects%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
carterschonwald 3mo ago
i want to view desktop on my mobile… and it wont lettt meeeee
skeledrew 3mo ago
I see "anti-AI" in the description and I wonder what that entails. Then I try to look at one of those tending links and all I encounter is "Mobile support to come.", and mobile is my primary device for checking things out. I want to stay positive about the future if this project, but Idk what to think here.
Grimblewald 3mo ago
FAQ point 5 is pure comedy.
999900000999 3mo ago
>As of now, all repositories are free, but we do envision charging for private repositories for teams in the future. Please don’t do this. Charge a fair price, in fact find a fair price and double it. I don’t want a free GitHub clone, I want one that works. How about 50$ 50 private repos, 50GBs of git LFS storage. Add collaborators for free. Actually respond to customers. At this level you only need 1000 paying customers to make it worth while for 2 developers.
- adrianwaj 3mo ago
  Would you pledge in a crowd-funding campaign to build something like this? You'd want something that doesn't allow training on private repos, so ideally not a private company that can change owners and managers and hence policies over time. It's an interesting business case - open source website, revenue generating with some type of "open" business structure. Its first repos could be of itself. I had this idea for enabling pull requests to be in "pipelines" with each request crowd-funded (as an option) to thereby entice action. A small split could return to the main site itself for upkeep.
  - 999900000999 3mo ago
    Or full blown encrypted repos where only you have the key. Or, if we go a step further you pay a licensing fee for Gitdot and self host it. The cookie jar of AI training data is very hard to resist even if it’s a non profit I think 50$ is the minimum you could charge and still have responsive customer support.
    - erlau 3mo ago
      Oxenai is private but their vcs is open source including the server, so you could self host it for free and use it with other people. The vcs itself is a little bit like git but with native large fial support I could be wrong but I think besides being able to self host for free you can also pay for something where they help you set it up and stuff Something nifty also that you can do is that instead of them training on your data they enable you to train your own models on it and download the weights. Definitely agreed its hard to trust anything you cant audit 100%. I think a non profit structured the right way would probably be pretty trustworthy not to do anything egregious like training on your data though. Or some way maybe to make the thing transparent so you know what happens with the data and you can basically audit the company somehow. I dont know if you would need to go as far as encrypted repos, that seems a little too paranoid but that would be a really interesting idea for a company although the target audience is probably limited
j3s 3mo ago
"we built it in rust" is not a differentiator - especially when the first thing that happens when i click a repo is "mobile not supported" lol. really stretching the word "better"
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
OSaMaBiNLoGiN 3mo ago
Most people would agree that Github isn't good software anymore. Most people would also agree that building a better Github is not a super easy two-person task.
Aeolun 3mo ago
Ooh, it's the same thing I'm building.
icase 3mo ago
is anyone else absolutely sick of hearing about rust?
- wseqyrku 3mo ago
  Yeah, what I did was reading about it instead, like, on purpose.
Uptrenda 3mo ago
So like: not to hijack thread -- but is there any way to post about what you've built on HN without making people angry if its vibe coded? What's the etiquette there because I have a thingy I am going to post soon (open source, non commerical) and don't really want to be ripped apart by HN. I am a software engineer but doubt that matters if it's all vibe coded.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- ericyd 3mo ago
  If you aren't willing to be ripped apart then posting isn't the right move, simple as that. Public critique is part of sharing your work in any space, HN included.
- philipwhiuk 3mo ago
  Be honest and transparent about who you are what you have and what you did. If it took you a year of solid development, it'll probably look like it did. If it took you 15 minutes in Claude... well it probably looks like it did too. If you are YC backed then say "YC Winter 2026" or whatever in your title frankly - people will work it out anyway. They said it was a better GitHub, which is a very high bar (despite the regular complaints about GitHub). They also said it was anti-AI, despite it being vibe-coded. Also, know your competitive space. Posting on HN is like pitching - not knowing about your competitors is not really going to work - you need an answer for, for example, why someone picks Gitdot over SourceHut.
  - Uptrenda 3mo ago
    this is very good advice thanks a lot. I will make sure to do this. Cheers.
smetannik 3mo ago
Please, stop using "written in Rust" as some kind of advantage or killer feature.
- mapcars 3mo ago
  You assume that its used to show advantage, but we are on a technical forum and for me, as an engineer, its always interesting what language or tech was used to create a project.
- yashasolutions 3mo ago
  This.
- chrishare 3mo ago
  Well, it probably is an advantage over the same product written in say C++, all other variables held the same - just not a big one.
- analog_daddy 3mo ago
  No, it is an advantage. I am not a rust evangelist, I am not a rust programmer or programmer at all; however while evaluating tools to use, anything written in Rust and Go at-least gets me to look at the project in more detail, since they most likely are able to ship statically linked binaries, which has been one of the key criteria for my personal evaluation of tools to select and use. So, you might not consider it as a valid signal, however it might be for other users. Even if it has a negative connotation for you. Which in itself, again might be a good filter in case you don’t want to use it.
  - altmanaltman 3mo ago
    How is statically linked binaries an unique advantage of rust or go? you can do the same with C, C++, pascal, ada, zig, and more. Rust even doesnt do the static binary file by default. You might have better devops experience as an end-user of the said software if its statically linked and its a good trend in software sure but it is not unique to go or rust. Admitting you don't know how to code and still trying to argue rust is better is just wild sorry.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
alexpadula 3mo ago
"Better" is a strong word without proven analysis or some kind of statistic, that honestly caught me off-guard as when you state that I expect something like a product like Bitbucket, obviously as you can imagine. Either way, cool project.
jacobianhessian 3mo ago
Nice. Also https://codex-infinity.com https://codex-infinity.com can do git hosting but isn’t open source
prosunpraiser 3mo ago
Lookout - next they will rewrite the color blue in Rust and claim advantages.
kbar13 3mo ago
"much better" in what way
- dev_l1x_be 3mo ago
  It is vibe coded in Rust. :)
jurschreuder 3mo ago
Too bad it's written in Rust so I won't use it.
hitoshi1964 3mo ago
Congrats on shipping this. Self-hosted + open source is exactly the combination I keep reaching for these days. Out of curiosity, how heavy is it to run — could it run comfortably on an M1 Mac (16GB RAM)?
andrewstuart 3mo ago
It’s weird that “written in Rust” is some sort of headline feature. It’s like “baby on board” stickers on cars - why are you telling me that? Then again Rust is so complex maybe it’s worth self congratulations.
itsafarqueue 3mo ago
What’s that line about vegetarians? Like how do you know if someone’s a vegetarian? They’ll tell you. This, but Rust.
linobino1 3mo ago
the domain is hard to speak... "git dot io" refers to git.io so you'll have to call it "git dot dot io"
- sippeangelo 3mo ago
  I'd say it's still better than "dotnet"
rashidae 3mo ago
Does it have a CLI like github? Does it follow GIT? I made an account and did not migrate my repos, as I'd like to test this before moving in... Thanks in advance!
dz0ny 3mo ago
Fair point is actually “less is les here.” It’s more of an alternative to Gitea than to GitHub, where managing Git is almost an afterthought. Or maybe you haven’t used GitHub recently. But sorry you cannot cal this better GitHub.
dcreater 3mo ago
Was excited until I found out this is a YC company. And a stereotypical one by the sound of it ("pivot hell" blah blah). If you're sell is being an unenshittified alternative to github, just give it time
guesswho_ 3mo ago
[dead]
badsectoracula 3mo ago
Well, for a more positive comment (since everything seems to be negative - and nobody brought that up) the site is very fast. In fact pretty much everything changes instantly when i click on stuff, which is very rare. The only exception seems to be when looking at some files with a long history (not sure why the history needs to be displayed by default though). That said, from a UX perspective, personally i prefer Forgejo - which isn't that much slower either (judging from Codeberg, it isn't instant but it is fast enough to feel "fast").
Tepix 3mo ago
Interesting design. Why rewrite from scratch? Wouldn't it be advantageous to start from an existing forge (there are many these days) and add a new UI?
nutifafa 3mo ago
I honestly do not see the point of all this. it has a font size problem for one, I can't see the edge it's confusing to use.
whereistejas 3mo ago
The UI is polarising, for sure. But, I will celebrate anyone who takes on the hard task of creating a new code forge. Best of luck!
InsideOutSanta 3mo ago
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.
cetinsert 3mo ago
I built https://GitFar.com https://GitFar.com to clone my private repos off GitHub and host them without their limits using 100%-GitHub compatible APIs! It is stateless, and only uses system tools like rg and git! Gives me complete freedom which I can truly enjoy pairing it with ZFS subvolumes tuned for the different content types in my repos (text, images, video, etc.)! Nothing that claimed to be a better GitHub was even GitHub enough to begin with. GitFar an internal a drop-in replacement for our devs to just change the hostname and keep using exactly the same APIs with exactly the same request and response shapes with extensions delivered through request and response headers!
- maxloh 3mo ago
  Will you open source it?
thiht 3mo ago
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
- dainank 3mo ago
  I agree that such a claim is a stretch, however, I personally love the minimalist look (it has its own charm). Saying it 'looks like the stylesheets failed to load' is your own exaggeration.
  - thiht 3mo ago
    > Saying it 'looks like the stylesheets failed to load' is your own exaggeration On mobile I literally refreshed the page because I thought my wi-fi broke... Maybe it looks a bit better on desktop
    - HenriTEL 3mo ago
      looks bad on desktop too, most content being uncentered (spread at the edges of the screen).
      - dv_dt 3mo ago
        If I've learned anything about AI recently, it's that AI has just as much trouble centering things consistently as human designers.
gr__or 3mo ago
Tangled (https://tangled.org https://tangled.org) is the next social coding platform to believe in imo because - no more silo-ing, moat BS, by design - they are working on vouching which is becoming more important in the age of AI PRs
Qhemlomo 3mo ago
Talking about loading animations etc. and then choosing a hard to read font and font size. Kinda ironic isn't it?
nullbio 3mo ago
A better Github, without 99% of the features that Github has.
- virajk_31 3mo ago
  haha
- anticorporate 3mo ago
  I mean, to be fair, a lot of the reason I use Gitea is that I don't want the other 99%.
- arecsu 3mo ago
  that's why it's better!
mgianluc 3mo ago
First of all, kudos for the work. Personally I dont care if it is written in Rust or anything else. What I do care is stability, security and features. I would have enhanced the dashboard a little bit. I understand most of the work was done in the backend. But dashboard is what folks see first. and might lead someone incorrectly judging the work just by looking at that.
- trwhite 3mo ago
  It seems to be a trend of HN lately. Downvote me into oblivion or whatever: It's not relevant to me in the slightest whether you built it in Rust or not, or even Python, Go, Java, Node, PHP etc. There is lots of great and terrible, fast and slow software written in each. OP might only have 3 months of programming experience for all I know. Why is "made with Rust" any more relevant than "made with Go" to an end user of a software product? It just doesn't matter.
  - devsda 3mo ago
    > It just doesn't matter. Pre LLMs it did matter, not rust specifically but the language itself. It meant the difference between asking the developer for a feature/fix and getting it done myself if needed. Now not so much with LLMs, but it does signal something about the development, deployment and supply chain risks involved.
dongbinlee 3mo ago
The CLI-inspired UI is the most interesting part here.
sprybear 3mo ago
Developers can champion their preferred language all they want, whether it's Rust, dirt, or grime. What matters to me is having viable alternative platforms and seeing active experimentation with new projects and features. Looking forward to seeing even more features, gitdot.
minraws 3mo ago
No ssh?????? I am fine with everything but this is really but no ssh??? I am out will check back once basic features are here.
stared 3mo ago
I wouldn’t claim boldly„better GitHub” in the tile while having „Mobile support to come”. Aspecially as now adding responsive mobile takes 15 min (or less).
virajk_31 3mo ago
Good work. However minimal doesn't mean better. Nothing wrong in showcasing the work but make sure to add the appropriate description.
WesSouza 3mo ago
Nit: the verification code check shouldn't be case sensitive.
john-h-k 3mo ago
The hard part of GitHub is scalability
- structwafel 3mo ago
  From quickly reading their source this morning, it does not seem to scale well. on-disk git repo's, and postgres for everything else (with objects on cloudflareR2 or GCP?)
phplovesong 3mo ago
Github is fine. It just has serious issues with the huge amount of traffic. I bet they will sort it out, and is most likely a top priority.
jillesvangurp 3mo ago
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?
- benrutter 3mo ago
  That's an awesome idea and one that's already being worked on![0] I really hope it works out, would bring so many benefits. [0] https://codeberg.org/ForgeFed/forgefed https://codeberg.org/ForgeFed/forgefed
thrownaway561 3mo ago
this thing looks slopped together in day. I don't even know what I'm looking at when I go to the home page. Good luck with it, but I think you have a VERY long road ahead of you. Personally if I wanted to leave Github, I would just move over to Gitlab.
Ygg2 3mo ago
Can't import repositories starting with uppercase :? Did you check if I name my project 朽木?
igorusovich89 3mo ago
[flagged]
1317 3mo ago
no one cares what language the program is written in
CodeCompost 3mo ago
More vibe-coded trash.
hresvelgr 3mo ago
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.
- leetrout 3mo ago
  Not asking to be pokey, genuinely curious because I have heard similar from a consistent couple camps... what stack you develop in and what VCS do you prefer?
  - hresvelgr 3mo ago
    Ironically, Git is my preferred VCS. I have used Perforce Helix, Mercurial, and SVN. It is the best of the worst. I don't think anyone in the space has made a truly great product.
    - leetrout 3mo ago
      Painting with a broad brush I feel like the people who still don't like git either worked with mercurial and liked it more, want to be sort of hipster or counter culture and use fossil, or work in microsoft shops or game dev shops. Sample size is small but it's been consistent for me over the past 20 years. I like p4/helix for the locking when working on something like a game where you need assets to be handled more carefully since there's a lot of binary floating around but despise the company and the sales / licensing games. I had a rep just ignore me completely when I emailed wanting to cancel and ended up having to go find the director of the sales org on linkedin and get him involved (and it was cancelled within 24 hours).
- moistoreos 3mo ago
valcker 3mo ago
Appreciate the effort you put into building and getting this product live. It's already more than most do even with LLMs! However, I think the value proposition should be much higher than simply "GitHub in Rust". GitHub is still a great, complex product, despite its recent problems. There should be some sort of x10 (or at least x5) improvement that will make people _consider_ migrating.
hyhmrright 3mo ago
The UI isn't very attractive; I’d like to see the font size increased, as my eyesight has deteriorated significantly from working at a computer for long periods.
- zemnl 3mo ago
  I agree with you for the font size, but other than that I really like the minimal UI
chaz6 3mo ago
Nice job! Please consider providing an oci (docker/etc) container image (or if you do already, make it easier to find!)
mmdhpan 3mo ago
[flagged]
sblantipodi 3mo ago
a better GitHub? what's better? The fact that is built in Rust isn't a killer feature nor something someone needs.
TrustLayerDev 3mo ago
This looks really cool!
mklifelife 3mo ago
[dead]
heliskyr2 3mo ago
[flagged]

334 points by baepaul 3mo ago

johntash 3mo ago

fwiw when I opened the site, my fans spun up and firefox slowed a lot. No idea what it's doing, but it's definitely using a ton of cpu.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

sspoisk 3mo ago

[flagged]

Lethalman 3mo ago

“Written in X”. Every time I look elsewhere when I see it. When is people starting to think about features instead of “it’s better because I rewrote it in X!!”

Imustaskforhelp 3mo ago

This is really interesting. Especially as its open source and I really liked the UI design of it. I was thinking about creating my own git forge given the unreliability of Github and I wouldn't be able to create just at the moment incredibly reliable software like git forge although I could use AI to create a minimalist piece of software, I didn't because I didn't want to create yet another AI slop fighting another AI slop (github/gitlab). Forejo is incredible but I have always wanted to get more alternatives in this field. Much thanks for making it. I have signed up and I have high hopes for it too and I will try to either self host this on my servers or gitdot.io as well as Github I recommend making a small community in matrix (preferred), fluxer.gg, discord etc. as I'd like to join it. PS: small personal thing that I have made which helps in making communities: https://mirror.forum https://mirror.forum I am definitely interested in gitdot.io! This seems incredible I wish nothing but the best for you folks. Gonna create a local copy of the source code of gitdot.io right now! Thanks for open-sourcing the efforts too. I really appreciate it :-D The software is so nice! I genuinely hope that you guys and the project blows up and if you guys might ever hire a junior dev, I hope you all could remember me as the world right now needed such software that you have made!! :-D (Although I am more interested in managing servers/golang but that's because rust is hard to learn as a beginner but that's different topic but I like rust's ideas too and rust is a great/preferred language with golang for this type of service :-D)

wjsekfghks 3mo ago
Thanks for the support, we really appreciate it. We want to create/support communities within the app in the future (via issues, etc) but ya it's a good idea to form some channels. It might be a bit difficult to self-host at the moment (as we don't have a good documentation to do so) but you can try and let us know how it goes.

chwzr 3mo ago

the design looks neat. + for hexagonal pattern on the backend - that fits perfectly!

wjsekfghks 3mo ago
thanks!

mathisdev7 3mo ago

I hate that when we scroll through a codebase files, it changes the file we are hovering, I'd rather having to click to see the file

wjsekfghks 3mo ago
If you click the file row (not the filename as that will navigate to file page), then hovering over other files won't change the preview.
tadfisher 3mo ago
Yes, this particular UX is poor. It's not intuitive that clicking the filename has different behavior from clicking elsewhere in the file's row. Expanding the row inline needs a leading widget. This particular issue is solved in GitHub proper, and derives from the Windows 95 tree view widget [1], which I seem to remember from Windows 3.x but can't find a screenshot. The hover behavior is just not an intuitive or accessible default. I can't imagine someone being able to use this if they have a hard time clicking without moving the mouse. It also wastes resources fetching file/directory contents while the user is moving the cursor to a predetermined file they presumably wish to open. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winauto/system-provided-user-interface-elements https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winauto/syst...
- baepaul 3mo ago
  thank you both for the feedback, i'm revisiting it now and i do see what the both of you are illustrating. i think i will get rid of the change on hover, it is a distraction and perhaps was just my ambition to show people how fast we load. edit: fixed

School-Cotton 3mo ago

Why does it have to be a website? Why merely "CLI-inspired" and not actually CLIs?

garbagepatch 3mo ago
Removes a barrier of entry if you can look at it from a browser instead of installing a CLI/TUI. Don't try to make me install a random program if I can view it in my sandboxed browser safely. Also, browsers have greasemonkey to help me personalize websites easily. TUIs don't.
baepaul 3mo ago
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.

eqvinox 3mo ago

What's the differentiation against Forgejo going to be?

baepaul 3mo ago
forgejo is a pretty great piece of software. 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
- KolmogorovComp 3mo ago
  > i think there's a lot of room to make things better I think the question is why not try to make the other FOSS forges better instead of reinventing the wheel.
- eqvinox 3mo ago
  I'm a bit confused, aren't the Forgejo people trying to build the "best product possible", too? And there's more of them, and they have funding, and… between 2 good forges or 1 great one, I rather have 1 great one… I guess you're not interested in joining them because it's not Rust?
  - baepaul 3mo ago
    thank you both for asking. 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.

screamingninja 3mo ago

> 5. What features will gitdot not have? > AI. > We view AI as an implementation detail — and do not think that using it is necessarily good. > In fact, we think it makes many products worse by acting as a bandaid for poor design. > That isn’t to say we are blind to it, but that we will be judicious in our use of it instead. Not sure I follow. What feature are the developers referring to? I understand that AI will power tools that may or may not fit a particular use case. How is AI a feature and what does it mean to be anti-AI?

ronsor 3mo ago
That's not really anti-AI. Anti-AI would mean avoiding it as a value regardless of practicality. That sounds more like anti-enshittification.
- trollbridge 3mo ago
  AI is rapidly becoming a synonym for enshittification. It can be a little aggravating. I am trying to judiciously use terms like "agent" or "LLM" so I can avoid just lazily saying "AI", which is often a pejorative term now.
baepaul 3mo ago
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. hope that's clearer and thank you for asking
7moritz7 3mo ago
I'm honestly lost for words over how you can write something like this while the web app's source code is clearly heavily integrated with Claude Code. https://gitdot.io/bkdevs/gitdot/files https://gitdot.io/bkdevs/gitdot/files

Kiro 3mo ago

I think you're in an interesting space where there's a real opportunity to create something fresh. When people are actively looking for alternatives it will be easier to break out of the established norms. What does anti-AI mean? Don't really see anything about it in the design doc except "no AI copilot".

baepaul 3mo ago
thank you kiro! (i feel you may be slightly miffed about the AWS IDE taking your name haha) i replied in a separate comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48452052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48452052 but to reiterate: 1) no AI copilot and 2) no training or selling of your data. 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.

TazeTSchnitzel 3mo ago

The minimal look feels very refreshing, and yet it's not disorienting like many minimal web git UIs are in my experience; I actually feel like I know how to navigate this thing. Site feels very snappy too, especially with those instantly loading file previews when you hover. Congrats!

baepaul 3mo ago
thank you! of all things in this launch, i was the most anxious about the design as it is admittedly the most different. glad to hear the positive feedback :)
- worldsayshi 3mo ago
  It seems like the site is currently getting hugged so I can't look but I'm glad someone is trying to achieve a more minimalistic take on the UX of a software forge. It seems like an area with good room for improvement.
  - baepaul 3mo ago
    the hn hug is real indeed, hopefully this link is fine. a bit wordy, but goes into quite a lot of the thinking that went into the design: https://gitdot.io/designs/gitdot-designed-by-developers https://gitdot.io/designs/gitdot-designed-by-developers

SwiftyBug 3mo ago

I absolutely love the minimalist UI. I see code reviews is in the roadmap, I can't wait to try it.

chaoxu 3mo ago
Feels like one can just copy the UI and use it for forgejo. It would get something similar very quickly, and avoid handling all the difficult stuff I guess.

garbagepatch 3mo ago

I like the terminal aesthetics but please, for accessibility's sake, make input boxes look more like input boxes and buttons look like buttons.

baepaul 3mo ago
thank you for the feedback, yeah i've been going and trimming a few places where i think my own tendencies have gone a bit too far. i will also say on accessibility, i recognize the site is a bit too small font in general — and will fix it soon.
- mentos 3mo ago
  Generally probably shouldn’t try to innovate in too many places at once
  - baepaul 3mo ago
    we are well aware and duly noted. thank you for the feedback
- nine_k 3mo ago
  I would humbly suggest that a reasonable site should assume that the user has set the comfortable font size in the browser, and make all other font sizes in percentages, or using rem units.

kzdrenka 3mo ago

I came to these comments to see if other people were annoyed by the "written in Rust" comment. Glad it's not just me

Cieric 3mo ago

Seems interesting an I'll take more of a peek after work, but one thing that stood out to me is the only way back to the home page after navigating to a repo is the back button. Going back to the home page via the back button also doesn't retain that "new" was selected. But I agree with others, I do like the simplicity of the site.

wjsekfghks 3mo ago
you can press "h" to go back to homepage :)
baepaul 3mo ago
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.
- Cieric 3mo ago
  I think I can understand that reasoning. I do have a tendency to explore, especially at the start since it gives me a view of what the site can already do, cause I wouldn't want to run into issues with my own projects without knowing of the possible limitations ahead of time. If anything since the keyboard shortcut already exists, you could always put it in little cursor menu at the bottom of the screen. But yeah up to you, I look forward to your progress.
- mbreese 3mo ago
  I’m not sure I agree with all of your takes either. For example, I’m not anti-AI for coding, so that immediately made me click away. I’m glad I read the comments though because I think the take of “not using your code to train AI” makes a lot more sense. But, I wanted to say thanks for posting this and being really open in the comments. It’s hard to get so much feedback so quickly. It’s a firehouse of criticism that’s hard to deal with. You’re handling it well.

jacques_chester 3mo ago

It is ... problematic ... to lead with "anti-AI" and then bury terms like "judicious in our use of it" in the fine print. IMO a team like yours can either: * Use LLMs, in which case you aren't "anti-AI". * Not use LLMs currently, but the non-use is not due to following a principle, in which case you aren't "anti-AI". * Not use LLMs and promise never to do so. I'm happy you are trying something new. But you hurt yourself by engaging in something very old: disingenuity. (edits for presentation and grammar)

baepaul 3mo ago
yeah this has been pointed out a few times, will revise the copytext later but will keep it up for the duration of the post. hope our sentiment is clearer in the comments that i've made, i think i've made the mistake of phrasing here with the "anti", i'll revisit it. edit: dang has removed it, apologies for the confusion i caused, that was my mistake.
- jacques_chester 3mo ago
  Thanks, I appreciate it.
dang 3mo ago
I've taken that bit out of the title for the time being, since it was causing confusion.

abathologist 3mo ago

Would be interested in a comparison with https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/ (which has a comparable minimal aesthetic, but also has the deep benefit of being FOSS.

Imustaskforhelp 3mo ago
Gitdot is FOSS as well from my understanding.

skrtskrt 3mo ago

Love the idea of someone tackling this space in Rust, but please just make a normal UI, I have no idea what I am looking at.

382hi 3mo ago
I personally prefer the GitDot UI over the bloated corporate style UIs that all feel the same
- gerardojbaez 3mo ago
  Agree!

7moritz7 3mo ago

There is a dozen CLAUDE.md in the gitdot source. The "Anti-AI" in your title seems a bit disingenuous.

isatty 3mo ago

Maybe it’s the HN effect but /files takes a while to load. Personally while I appreciate something not being AI slop, writing something in Rust has no meaning to me.

baepaul 3mo ago
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.

ramon156 3mo ago

A lot of fuss that needs to be chiseled out first. There's an idiom that is followed a bit too black and white, but the grey is grey. No loading animation, but my screen jitters while loading in stuff. My internet speed is fine, so it's a performance/bug issue. I also did not initially understand the UI, but that'll come as I use it more

baepaul 3mo ago
yeah the site isn't perfect. 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. but thank you for giving it a shot nonetheless!

graypegg 3mo ago

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".

baepaul 3mo ago
thank you! 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. thank you sincerely this is dope.

flexagoon 3mo ago

Feels weird to ship a website without mobile support in this day. The desktop version looks nice though

alienbaby 3mo ago
Didn't work for me even when I chose to see the desktop site in my mobile browser :/
- baepaul 3mo ago
  it is based off a minimum pixel as of now, apologies. the overall reason why we didn't ship a mobile site is that code is inherently very hard to read on mobile and i think to do that properly, you have to design explicitly for it. (and that is not, in fact, something that i do want to vibe code)
  - nine_k 3mo ago
    At least it would be reasonable to show a message like "Sorry, no mobile support yet".
    - quuxplusone 3mo ago
      As a banner or something, maybe. But I'd much rather see a broken-looking site on mobile than see nothing at all on mobile. In the same category: websites that display nothing but a splash screen "This site requires Internet Explorer X" or whatever. Don't nanny me, just feed my browser the HTML! Whether my browser can render it properly is my problem, not yours.

denysvitali 3mo ago

> Mobile support to come. In 2026 not being mobile first is a bit of a disappointment to be honest

applfanboysbgon 3mo ago

This is a violation of Git's trademark, and your usage of it is expressly prohibited by their policy. https://git-scm.com/about/trademark https://git-scm.com/about/trademark > [...] you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service. > Please be aware that GitHub and GitLab are exceptions to this Policy because they are subject to explicit licensing arrangements that pre-date, and thus take precedence, over this Policy. You might've known that if you hadn't vibe-launched this while for some reason marketing it as anti-AI, but here we are in a world where basic research is a dead art.

deleted 3mo ago
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clickety_clack 3mo ago
I’d love to hear an IP lawyer weigh in on this, because I’ve never heard of this kind of thing before. It doesn’t seem correct that you can use trademark alone like this to extend beyond the actual word used in the trademark. Maybe it’s from licensing or something, ie maybe if a product uses the actual git product, then the git license means you can’t use the name as part of a word.
- applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
  Trademark law is ridiculously slanted in favour of existing rightsholders. The most famous example I know of is "McSleep Inn", which was sued by McDonalds and forced to change their name. I think that ruling was complete bullshit, because Mc is so generic and usually a prime factor of trademark law is whether the businesses operate in similar domains, but it goes to show how broad the protections can be. Something like "GitFoo", which is explicitly being used specifically on a site for hosting Git repositories, doesn't stand a chance in hell, and rightfully so because this is actually trying to take advantage of Git's name to market their product.
  - clickety_clack 3mo ago

moojacob 3mo ago

I love the design. Clean and refreshing - you start at the left and every sub element goes to the right. Like a file browser. And the commit screen is dense but super readable. I would move the summary column from the right of the README to the left of the README on the /home screen (and call /home the /README). Loading files is very slow but I assume that's because HN is hammering the server. I am not a believer in negative advertising. So I don't give a poop you are anti-ai. Or "better" than Github (better for who??). Just imply you are a code forge thats made for serious developers who need something engineered to be fast and reliable. I wish you the best of luck, I can see Linear coming out with git repos after coming out with a diff reader. I have a suspicion there's space for many code forges in the market as you build out more features, especially if you lean into your products hacker-y-ness

daishi55 3mo ago

> anti-AI > mobile support to come Cmon lol. Give opus 20min and it will give you a mobile site throw in a better-looking desktop site for fun.

purple-leafy 3mo ago

I mean, no offence but nothing is more of a signal of marketing fluff to me than saying “built in Rust” or “anti-AI” Tell us why we should care outside of the marketing fluff - these aren’t highlights - if anything they are quite off putting. Your project needs to stand on its own actual merits. Critique over, congratulations on launching something or building something anyway. But what makes this different? And why have you chosen that philosophy - outside of marketing fluff

Sailemi 3mo ago

Big fan of the design! Different but easy to get a hand of. Having /profile also be linked on the homepage with the other main pages for ease of navigation would be nice, the profile link at the bottom feels like it clashes with the rest of the UI to my eyes.

deleted 3mo ago

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hntiz 3mo ago

Just one minor piece of feedback that's unlikely to be a priority. I cannot fully navigate when browsing in a terminal browser (chawan in my case, haven't tried with w3m or lynx). For example the "h" keymap for going home does not work. That said though, one of my pet peeves around browsing Github Web from the terminal was having to click "skip to content" just to get the body. So you definitely delivered there (after having read your design post). Good luck with the rest of the year.

baepaul 3mo ago
oh wow i have not thought about terminal browsers in a while (i used to use one back in the day in college haha). yeah, that admittedly is not priority, but thanks for taking the time to check it out.

HyperL0gi 3mo ago

> What is a bit unique is: 1) we built it in Rust The first unique characteristic is that it was built in Rust? Why does it matter from a user perspective? I was expecting the first point to be something that would convince me to check it out. Unless the goal is to find people to collaborate on building the software. I got a bit confused. Looking good regardless :)

ecares 3mo ago
I am tired of "built in Rust" as an argument, you are spot on, it should not matter. But you are shooting right at Rust culture here haha
- saghm 3mo ago
  And I'm tired of the "tired of 'built in Rust'" arguments because it also shouldn't matter if someone happens to describe their project that you didn't have to go out of your way to talk about in a way that bothers you. But I'm shooting right at the "tired of 'built in Rust'" culture here. You can take these arguments to an unbounded level of depth; someone can be tired of my responses to the responses to so me someone happening to care about something different than them. It's all equally silly, and if you're convinced that your level of depth is reasonable but the others aren't, I'd highly recommend trying to think about why you're so confident that your opinion is important but ones that come after aren't, because it's very unclear to anyone who doesn't already agree with you, and that's usually a sign that there's no point in saying it at all.
pitched 3mo ago
I worry that what they’re trying to say is that it was vibe coded but vibe coded in a language with a pretty solid linter. What an irony that those exact safety guarantees that made it attractive are now a detriment because they make the project smell like AI.
baepaul 3mo ago
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.

domtron_vox 3mo ago

I signed up and the code email went to spam. A quick look at the DNS seemed to show you were lacking DKIM and DMARC records. If I'm not mistaken about that, you should remedy that to ensure email providers don't dump your emails to spam.

wjsekfghks 3mo ago
Thanks for flagging, we were missing DMARC, now added
- Grimblewald 3mo ago
  Bit odd it was missing at all. Makes me wonder how well the core infrastructure you're building on is understood, and how trustworthy any of this really is. If all I'm getting is some vibeslop, with zero expertise or skill added, even basic stuff like this, why shouldnt I just vibe my own better version tailored to my needs exactly? Same headaches as with your app (though likely less give what's on display), only now I dont pay you to give me headaches and I retain control. The software was never the moat. The skills and experience crystalised within it was, and remains, the product.

usrbinenv 3mo ago

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.

xp84 3mo ago
I have to agree with the proposition that if you are aiming for the performant, no frills deal - and the aesthetic certainly telegraphs this - you really do not need client-side render, nor overengineered frontend frameworks like React & friends. Ditto for Styled Components (looks like you're not using the latter).
- johnisgood 3mo ago
  I agree. I like the website, looks minimal, but minimalism is not reflected in the stack.
  - Semaphor 3mo ago
    The look only seems minimal as well. I need to zoom in to read, which eventually destroys the layout. A minimal website has at least basic accessibility by default, this uses some kind of "modern" styling stuff to ruin it.

deleted 3mo ago

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selectnull 3mo ago

> Install gitdot-cli to push and clone private repos Hmmm... no. Why should I? Just let me use git.

Simon-curtis 3mo ago

This project looks awesome. I’ve really enjoyed your blogs about the design process and learnings. Brave to jump into Rust while learning a new domain but very commendable. Wish I had a close programmer friend to do this stuff with, sounds like a great asset to have such great chemistry. You seem to be experienced devs, so I’m sure you already know, but don’t listen to the contrarians on HN. They’ll suck the life out of you because it’s not 100% the way they like it.

triyambakam 3mo ago

Sorry but the name is too hard to say. At least it's not as bad as Forgejo

NetOpWibby 3mo ago

Did you guys just make my own git forge plans useless? This looks great! I was gonna call mine EOL and I already bought the domain eol.sh...then again, I could just do mine in TypeScript and launch it anyway.

sigmonsays 3mo ago

that UI is way too opinionated

applfanboysbgon 3mo ago

[flagged]

reactordev 3mo ago
what makes you think they are abandoned? Maybe they are in-use...? Maybe the landscape shifted to where niche tools like that aren't monetizable?
- applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
  The landing page is still a "join the waitlist" placeholder and there hasn't been a single commit since one week after they announced it, ten months ago. Together with the entire repo and the ShowHN post itself being vibed through and through, it seems apparent that putting any amount of human effort into that project was never on the agenda. Which naturally leads one to wonder, what makes this project different?
  - reactordev 3mo ago
    it's YC we are talking about, everything is vibed through.
- Grimblewald 3mo ago
  1. It's unfinished 2. Textbook slop dump and run we can see one big initial push, not too suspect. Then a few superficial updates, and then nothing for months. Unfinished, broken, and ostentiably abandond due to being an unmaintaible nightmare as vibeslop tends to be.
- sieabahlpark 3mo ago
  [dead]
spiralcoaster 3mo ago
We shouldn't trust the new project. Right from [1] you linked to: > The problems I kept running into: > - I'm lazy. That should tell you all you need to know about this super hype new fantastic GitHub written in Rust ! ! ! !

gerdesj 3mo ago

Big Brother seems to be built in to us humans. git itself is decentralised - all repos are equal. Mr T designed it that way because ... well that's all that was needed for Linux kernel development back in the day and it still seems to work. The management stuff can be managed quite well via email and some choice socials. Obviously that nonsense cannot possibly scale to the size of your enterprise thingies! Yet again we have a better Big Brother than Big Brother ... this time with Rust, yum!

syngrog66 3mo ago

unfortunate name: very similar to Godot at passing glance. my brain already stumbles going back and forth between seeing LLVM and LLM, IP (Internet protocol) and IP (Intellectual property). Don't me started on X vs X vs X vs ... I do like that it reinforces this rule of thumb: Q: "How do you know if any given piece of software is written in Rust? A: "Oh they'll tell you. They *will* tell you. Upfront and over and over again."

edfletcher_t137 3mo ago

> 7. How does gitdot make money? > We don't. This cannot last forever. What's the plan when it runs out?

mckee_plus_plus 3mo ago

Paul & Mikkel work at GitHub and are trying to offload traffic from gh

keyle 3mo ago

We've built a better SpaceX! says kid with cardboard rocket in the backyard. In Rust we trust! Common man, you're not even 5% of a Github replacement. Don't act like one. You've built a Git web UI with accounts, the easy part. > Building software is still hard You don't say.

dang 3mo ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "Don't be snarky." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Obviously this is a project at an early stage and the title expresses what they're working on, not a claim to 100% feature parity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- alexpadula 3mo ago
  It's pretty honest, some times you have to be.
  - dang 3mo ago
    There are many ways to be honest, and some of them are within the site guidelines. Commenters should be honest in those ways.
    - keyle 3mo ago
      Thanks for reminding me, I appreciate it. However there is justice for commenting poorly, there doesn't seem to be justice for posting lies and deceit, which is borderline a serial case here(?).
      - dang 3mo ago
        That question does comes up quite a bit, so I try to occasionally post an in-depth explanation. Maybe I'll do that here. We can answer the question by rephrasing it. I would put it this way: "is it ok to be wrong on HN"? The key change is to replace charged words like "lies" and "deceit" with the neutral word "wrong". People do lie and deceive, but to tell that apart from just plain being-wrong requires knowing someone's intent, and this is not something that moderators (or readers in general) can do. Even courts of law have a hard time doing that! HN comments don't contain nearly enough information to decide it. You would have to have a mind reader [1]. Worse, readers are far too quick to assume lies, deceit, etc., in other commenters that they happen to dislike or disagree with. The internet is rife with this, as we all know. Most of these insinuations are imaginary—we are all too inclined to attribute disingenuousness to the other side. One can easily see this by looking at how the same accusations are made against one's own side. Once the question has been rephrased in this way, it answers itself: of course it's ok to be wrong on HN. How could it not be? Most of us are mostly wrong about most things. Moreover, being wrong is part of eventually getting something right. Curious conversation, which HN exists for, often involves mistakes, and sometimes the mistakes (or seeming mistakes) turn out to be creative. Even if we decided it was not ok to be wrong, how would we enforce that? We don't have a truth meter [2]. As we have neither a mind reader nor a truth meter, we can't base moderation on anything that requires knowing people's intent or knowing the truth about things. We need criteria that can be decided from people's observable behavior on the site. As I sometimes put it, we can only moderate by effects [3]. That's why HN's guidelines are they way they are (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) - there's nothing in there which requires us to know what someone's intent is, nor whether they are right or wrong on a topic. At least I hope there isn't! What about the truth, then - do we care about it at all? Of course we do. It's critical! But working out what's true vs. what's false is the province of the community, not the mods. It's the commenters' job to do that, e.g. by answering bad arguments with better ones and false information with true. And they should do this within the site guidelines, e.g. by being respectful and curious rather than aggressive and accusatory. The moderators' job is to hold the container for this or (if you like) to keep the playing field fair. This isn't possible in any complete way - there are far too many factors pushing things into messy, unsatisfying places. But we do what we can. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22mind%20reader%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22truth%20meter%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=intent%20effects%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

carterschonwald 3mo ago

i want to view desktop on my mobile… and it wont lettt meeeee

skeledrew 3mo ago

I see "anti-AI" in the description and I wonder what that entails. Then I try to look at one of those tending links and all I encounter is "Mobile support to come.", and mobile is my primary device for checking things out. I want to stay positive about the future if this project, but Idk what to think here.

Grimblewald 3mo ago

FAQ point 5 is pure comedy.

999900000999 3mo ago

>As of now, all repositories are free, but we do envision charging for private repositories for teams in the future. Please don’t do this. Charge a fair price, in fact find a fair price and double it. I don’t want a free GitHub clone, I want one that works. How about 50$ 50 private repos, 50GBs of git LFS storage. Add collaborators for free. Actually respond to customers. At this level you only need 1000 paying customers to make it worth while for 2 developers.

adrianwaj 3mo ago
Would you pledge in a crowd-funding campaign to build something like this? You'd want something that doesn't allow training on private repos, so ideally not a private company that can change owners and managers and hence policies over time. It's an interesting business case - open source website, revenue generating with some type of "open" business structure. Its first repos could be of itself. I had this idea for enabling pull requests to be in "pipelines" with each request crowd-funded (as an option) to thereby entice action. A small split could return to the main site itself for upkeep.
- 999900000999 3mo ago
  Or full blown encrypted repos where only you have the key. Or, if we go a step further you pay a licensing fee for Gitdot and self host it. The cookie jar of AI training data is very hard to resist even if it’s a non profit I think 50$ is the minimum you could charge and still have responsive customer support.
  - erlau 3mo ago
    Oxenai is private but their vcs is open source including the server, so you could self host it for free and use it with other people. The vcs itself is a little bit like git but with native large fial support I could be wrong but I think besides being able to self host for free you can also pay for something where they help you set it up and stuff Something nifty also that you can do is that instead of them training on your data they enable you to train your own models on it and download the weights. Definitely agreed its hard to trust anything you cant audit 100%. I think a non profit structured the right way would probably be pretty trustworthy not to do anything egregious like training on your data though. Or some way maybe to make the thing transparent so you know what happens with the data and you can basically audit the company somehow. I dont know if you would need to go as far as encrypted repos, that seems a little too paranoid but that would be a really interesting idea for a company although the target audience is probably limited

j3s 3mo ago

"we built it in rust" is not a differentiator - especially when the first thing that happens when i click a repo is "mobile not supported" lol. really stretching the word "better"

deleted 3mo ago

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OSaMaBiNLoGiN 3mo ago

Most people would agree that Github isn't good software anymore. Most people would also agree that building a better Github is not a super easy two-person task.

Aeolun 3mo ago

Ooh, it's the same thing I'm building.

icase 3mo ago

is anyone else absolutely sick of hearing about rust?

wseqyrku 3mo ago
Yeah, what I did was reading about it instead, like, on purpose.

Uptrenda 3mo ago

So like: not to hijack thread -- but is there any way to post about what you've built on HN without making people angry if its vibe coded? What's the etiquette there because I have a thingy I am going to post soon (open source, non commerical) and don't really want to be ripped apart by HN. I am a software engineer but doubt that matters if it's all vibe coded.

deleted 3mo ago
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ericyd 3mo ago
If you aren't willing to be ripped apart then posting isn't the right move, simple as that. Public critique is part of sharing your work in any space, HN included.
philipwhiuk 3mo ago
Be honest and transparent about who you are what you have and what you did. If it took you a year of solid development, it'll probably look like it did. If it took you 15 minutes in Claude... well it probably looks like it did too. If you are YC backed then say "YC Winter 2026" or whatever in your title frankly - people will work it out anyway. They said it was a better GitHub, which is a very high bar (despite the regular complaints about GitHub). They also said it was anti-AI, despite it being vibe-coded. Also, know your competitive space. Posting on HN is like pitching - not knowing about your competitors is not really going to work - you need an answer for, for example, why someone picks Gitdot over SourceHut.
- Uptrenda 3mo ago
  this is very good advice thanks a lot. I will make sure to do this. Cheers.

smetannik 3mo ago

Please, stop using "written in Rust" as some kind of advantage or killer feature.

mapcars 3mo ago
You assume that its used to show advantage, but we are on a technical forum and for me, as an engineer, its always interesting what language or tech was used to create a project.
yashasolutions 3mo ago
This.
chrishare 3mo ago
Well, it probably is an advantage over the same product written in say C++, all other variables held the same - just not a big one.
analog_daddy 3mo ago
No, it is an advantage. I am not a rust evangelist, I am not a rust programmer or programmer at all; however while evaluating tools to use, anything written in Rust and Go at-least gets me to look at the project in more detail, since they most likely are able to ship statically linked binaries, which has been one of the key criteria for my personal evaluation of tools to select and use. So, you might not consider it as a valid signal, however it might be for other users. Even if it has a negative connotation for you. Which in itself, again might be a good filter in case you don’t want to use it.
- altmanaltman 3mo ago
  How is statically linked binaries an unique advantage of rust or go? you can do the same with C, C++, pascal, ada, zig, and more. Rust even doesnt do the static binary file by default. You might have better devops experience as an end-user of the said software if its statically linked and its a good trend in software sure but it is not unique to go or rust. Admitting you don't know how to code and still trying to argue rust is better is just wild sorry.

deleted 3mo ago

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alexpadula 3mo ago

"Better" is a strong word without proven analysis or some kind of statistic, that honestly caught me off-guard as when you state that I expect something like a product like Bitbucket, obviously as you can imagine. Either way, cool project.

jacobianhessian 3mo ago

Nice. Also https://codex-infinity.com https://codex-infinity.com can do git hosting but isn’t open source

prosunpraiser 3mo ago

Lookout - next they will rewrite the color blue in Rust and claim advantages.

kbar13 3mo ago

"much better" in what way

dev_l1x_be 3mo ago
It is vibe coded in Rust. :)

jurschreuder 3mo ago

Too bad it's written in Rust so I won't use it.

hitoshi1964 3mo ago

Congrats on shipping this. Self-hosted + open source is exactly the combination I keep reaching for these days. Out of curiosity, how heavy is it to run — could it run comfortably on an M1 Mac (16GB RAM)?

andrewstuart 3mo ago

It’s weird that “written in Rust” is some sort of headline feature. It’s like “baby on board” stickers on cars - why are you telling me that? Then again Rust is so complex maybe it’s worth self congratulations.

itsafarqueue 3mo ago

What’s that line about vegetarians? Like how do you know if someone’s a vegetarian? They’ll tell you. This, but Rust.

linobino1 3mo ago

the domain is hard to speak... "git dot io" refers to git.io so you'll have to call it "git dot dot io"

sippeangelo 3mo ago
I'd say it's still better than "dotnet"

rashidae 3mo ago

Does it have a CLI like github? Does it follow GIT? I made an account and did not migrate my repos, as I'd like to test this before moving in... Thanks in advance!

dz0ny 3mo ago

Fair point is actually “less is les here.” It’s more of an alternative to Gitea than to GitHub, where managing Git is almost an afterthought. Or maybe you haven’t used GitHub recently. But sorry you cannot cal this better GitHub.

dcreater 3mo ago

Was excited until I found out this is a YC company. And a stereotypical one by the sound of it ("pivot hell" blah blah). If you're sell is being an unenshittified alternative to github, just give it time

guesswho_ 3mo ago

[dead]

badsectoracula 3mo ago

Well, for a more positive comment (since everything seems to be negative - and nobody brought that up) the site is very fast. In fact pretty much everything changes instantly when i click on stuff, which is very rare. The only exception seems to be when looking at some files with a long history (not sure why the history needs to be displayed by default though). That said, from a UX perspective, personally i prefer Forgejo - which isn't that much slower either (judging from Codeberg, it isn't instant but it is fast enough to feel "fast").

Tepix 3mo ago

Interesting design. Why rewrite from scratch? Wouldn't it be advantageous to start from an existing forge (there are many these days) and add a new UI?

nutifafa 3mo ago

I honestly do not see the point of all this. it has a font size problem for one, I can't see the edge it's confusing to use.

whereistejas 3mo ago

The UI is polarising, for sure. But, I will celebrate anyone who takes on the hard task of creating a new code forge. Best of luck!

InsideOutSanta 3mo ago

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.

cetinsert 3mo ago

I built https://GitFar.com https://GitFar.com to clone my private repos off GitHub and host them without their limits using 100%-GitHub compatible APIs! It is stateless, and only uses system tools like rg and git! Gives me complete freedom which I can truly enjoy pairing it with ZFS subvolumes tuned for the different content types in my repos (text, images, video, etc.)! Nothing that claimed to be a better GitHub was even GitHub enough to begin with. GitFar an internal a drop-in replacement for our devs to just change the hostname and keep using exactly the same APIs with exactly the same request and response shapes with extensions delivered through request and response headers!

maxloh 3mo ago
Will you open source it?

thiht 3mo ago

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

dainank 3mo ago
I agree that such a claim is a stretch, however, I personally love the minimalist look (it has its own charm). Saying it 'looks like the stylesheets failed to load' is your own exaggeration.
- thiht 3mo ago
  > Saying it 'looks like the stylesheets failed to load' is your own exaggeration On mobile I literally refreshed the page because I thought my wi-fi broke... Maybe it looks a bit better on desktop
  - HenriTEL 3mo ago
    looks bad on desktop too, most content being uncentered (spread at the edges of the screen).
    - dv_dt 3mo ago
      If I've learned anything about AI recently, it's that AI has just as much trouble centering things consistently as human designers.

gr__or 3mo ago

Tangled (https://tangled.org https://tangled.org) is the next social coding platform to believe in imo because - no more silo-ing, moat BS, by design - they are working on vouching which is becoming more important in the age of AI PRs

Qhemlomo 3mo ago

Talking about loading animations etc. and then choosing a hard to read font and font size. Kinda ironic isn't it?

nullbio 3mo ago

A better Github, without 99% of the features that Github has.

virajk_31 3mo ago
haha
anticorporate 3mo ago
I mean, to be fair, a lot of the reason I use Gitea is that I don't want the other 99%.
arecsu 3mo ago
that's why it's better!

mgianluc 3mo ago

First of all, kudos for the work. Personally I dont care if it is written in Rust or anything else. What I do care is stability, security and features. I would have enhanced the dashboard a little bit. I understand most of the work was done in the backend. But dashboard is what folks see first. and might lead someone incorrectly judging the work just by looking at that.

trwhite 3mo ago
It seems to be a trend of HN lately. Downvote me into oblivion or whatever: It's not relevant to me in the slightest whether you built it in Rust or not, or even Python, Go, Java, Node, PHP etc. There is lots of great and terrible, fast and slow software written in each. OP might only have 3 months of programming experience for all I know. Why is "made with Rust" any more relevant than "made with Go" to an end user of a software product? It just doesn't matter.
- devsda 3mo ago
  > It just doesn't matter. Pre LLMs it did matter, not rust specifically but the language itself. It meant the difference between asking the developer for a feature/fix and getting it done myself if needed. Now not so much with LLMs, but it does signal something about the development, deployment and supply chain risks involved.

dongbinlee 3mo ago

The CLI-inspired UI is the most interesting part here.

sprybear 3mo ago

Developers can champion their preferred language all they want, whether it's Rust, dirt, or grime. What matters to me is having viable alternative platforms and seeing active experimentation with new projects and features. Looking forward to seeing even more features, gitdot.

minraws 3mo ago

No ssh?????? I am fine with everything but this is really but no ssh??? I am out will check back once basic features are here.

stared 3mo ago

I wouldn’t claim boldly„better GitHub” in the tile while having „Mobile support to come”. Aspecially as now adding responsive mobile takes 15 min (or less).

virajk_31 3mo ago

Good work. However minimal doesn't mean better. Nothing wrong in showcasing the work but make sure to add the appropriate description.

WesSouza 3mo ago

Nit: the verification code check shouldn't be case sensitive.

john-h-k 3mo ago

The hard part of GitHub is scalability

structwafel 3mo ago
From quickly reading their source this morning, it does not seem to scale well. on-disk git repo's, and postgres for everything else (with objects on cloudflareR2 or GCP?)

phplovesong 3mo ago

Github is fine. It just has serious issues with the huge amount of traffic. I bet they will sort it out, and is most likely a top priority.

jillesvangurp 3mo ago

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?

benrutter 3mo ago
That's an awesome idea and one that's already being worked on![0] I really hope it works out, would bring so many benefits. [0] https://codeberg.org/ForgeFed/forgefed https://codeberg.org/ForgeFed/forgefed

thrownaway561 3mo ago

this thing looks slopped together in day. I don't even know what I'm looking at when I go to the home page. Good luck with it, but I think you have a VERY long road ahead of you. Personally if I wanted to leave Github, I would just move over to Gitlab.

Ygg2 3mo ago

Can't import repositories starting with uppercase :? Did you check if I name my project 朽木?

igorusovich89 3mo ago

[flagged]

1317 3mo ago

no one cares what language the program is written in

CodeCompost 3mo ago

More vibe-coded trash.

hresvelgr 3mo ago

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.

leetrout 3mo ago
Not asking to be pokey, genuinely curious because I have heard similar from a consistent couple camps... what stack you develop in and what VCS do you prefer?
- hresvelgr 3mo ago
  Ironically, Git is my preferred VCS. I have used Perforce Helix, Mercurial, and SVN. It is the best of the worst. I don't think anyone in the space has made a truly great product.
  - leetrout 3mo ago
    Painting with a broad brush I feel like the people who still don't like git either worked with mercurial and liked it more, want to be sort of hipster or counter culture and use fossil, or work in microsoft shops or game dev shops. Sample size is small but it's been consistent for me over the past 20 years. I like p4/helix for the locking when working on something like a game where you need assets to be handled more carefully since there's a lot of binary floating around but despise the company and the sales / licensing games. I had a rep just ignore me completely when I emailed wanting to cancel and ended up having to go find the director of the sales org on linkedin and get him involved (and it was cancelled within 24 hours).
moistoreos 3mo ago

valcker 3mo ago

Appreciate the effort you put into building and getting this product live. It's already more than most do even with LLMs! However, I think the value proposition should be much higher than simply "GitHub in Rust". GitHub is still a great, complex product, despite its recent problems. There should be some sort of x10 (or at least x5) improvement that will make people _consider_ migrating.

hyhmrright 3mo ago

The UI isn't very attractive; I’d like to see the font size increased, as my eyesight has deteriorated significantly from working at a computer for long periods.

zemnl 3mo ago
I agree with you for the font size, but other than that I really like the minimal UI

chaz6 3mo ago

Nice job! Please consider providing an oci (docker/etc) container image (or if you do already, make it easier to find!)

mmdhpan 3mo ago

[flagged]

sblantipodi 3mo ago

a better GitHub? what's better? The fact that is built in Rust isn't a killer feature nor something someone needs.

TrustLayerDev 3mo ago

This looks really cool!

mklifelife 3mo ago

[dead]

heliskyr2 3mo ago

[flagged]