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.

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".

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.

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?

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.

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").

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.

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!

Kinda ironic isn't it?

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."

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

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)

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)

- no more silo-ing, moat BS, by design - they are working on vouching which is becoming more important in the age of AI PRs

What does anti-AI mean? Don't really see anything about it in the design doc except "no AI copilot".

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.

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.

Aspecially as now adding responsive mobile takes 15 min (or less).

> 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?

Looking forward to seeing even more features, gitdot.

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

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.

Did you check if I name my project 朽木?

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 :)

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.

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.

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?

Most people would also agree that building a better Github is not a super easy two-person task.

I bet they will sort it out, and is most likely a top priority.

> We don't.

This cannot last forever. What's the plan when it runs out?

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

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!

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

Hmmm... no. Why should I? Just let me use git.

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.

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

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.

If you're sell is being an unenshittified alternative to github, just give it time

lol. really stretching the word "better"

Personally if I wanted to leave Github, I would just move over to Gitlab.

Personally while I appreciate something not being AI slop, writing something in Rust has no meaning to me.

> 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.

If I'm not mistaken about that, you should remedy that to ensure email providers don't dump your emails to spam.

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.

In 2026 not being mobile first is a bit of a disappointment to be honest