sourcehut - the hacker's forge on Sourcehut

What's cooking on SourceHut? Q2 2026

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone! It’s time for another quarterly update, keeping you up to date on what we’re cooking up here at SourceHut.

Drew’s update

This past quarter I found myself mostly focused on “invisible” labor for SourceHut, which will make for a boring update from me this time. Most of my time was spent preparing a grant proposal, jointly with some other open source forges and related partners, to apply for funding from the EU. We’ll learn how that went sometime next quarter!

What's cooking on SourceHut? Q1 2026

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hello again! It’s a new year and time for a new quaterly update from SourceHut. You may have read our last update in Q4 2025 – let us get you up to speed on how those plans have played out, and what’s coming in the near future.

Drew’s update

First up, I have an update on the pricing changes we proposed in December: the new prices are now in effect for new customers. Existing users are grandfathered into their current price-point, but there is a button on your billing dashboard which will allow you to opt-in to the new price point if you wish to support us by doing so (and lots of love to everyone who asked for the ability to do that). If you cannot afford the new prices, there is a special price that matches the earlier minimum price, and of course as always if that’s still too much then we are happy to provide financial aid for anyone who needs it.

Proposed price increases for SourceHut

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As we wrap up our end-of-year budget here at SourceHut, we find ourselves with a good opportunity to reconsider our pricing. We have always promised to evaluate any potential pricing changes in consultation with our community, which is why we’re bringing our proposal forward to you now for discussion. We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

tl;dr: We want to increase the base rates to €4/€8/€12, with current users grandfathered into their current rates. Furthermore, users in the EU who pay in US dollars will soon have to pay VAT when we rehome them with our EU business. Free service is still available to users who can’t pay. Read on for more details!

What's cooking on SourceHut? Q4 2025

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hi everyone! We hope you’re reading today’s update under as many blankets as possible, ideally in front of a warm fireplace, as the cold of winter starts to set in. You may have read our last update in the third quarter – it’s time again to take a look at what’s new and what’s next.

Drew’s update

I’ve been knee deep in refactoring over the past few months, and it has been very rewarding. The pile of tech debt has been steadily shrinking! Two of the goals I mentioned in my last status update were met: first, I rolled out ariadne-codegen to all of our frontends to handle their GraphQL requests to each other (and to their own backends) and I have found that it improves the frontend code substantially. And, the one we’ve been waiting years for: the legacy REST API has finally been removed (almost) entirely 🎉

What's cooking on SourceHut? Q3 2025

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone! It’s time for another quarterly update on what we’re up to at SourceHut. There’s a lot of great stuff going on since you last heard from us! Let’s get started.

Drew’s update

We finally rolled out the billing overhaul! God, that was so much work. Since the announcement in July we have successfully accepted a couple hundred payments in Euro – thank you to everyone for your support! The rollout was nearly flawless, with just a few things to sort out here and there and just few embarrassing problems to deal with (a fun one: a handful of users got invoices with a “SAMPLE” watermark).

SourceHut is now accepting payments in Euro

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m pleased to announce that, as part of our broader plans to migrate SourceHut to Europe, and after many months of hard work, SourceHut has begun to accept subscription payments in Euro today – one of our oldest and most highly demanded feature requests. The pricing is similar to the US dollar pricing at €2, €5, and €10 per month (slightly more expensive than USD due to the Euro’s purchasing power),¹ with two months free if you pay annually. We have added support for SEPA direct debits, iDEAL, and Bancontact.

What's cooking on SourceHut? Q2 2025

Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone! We’re back with another quarterly update for you on how things are going at SourceHut. It’s been a busy few months, and we’re happy to share what we’re working on with you all.

Drew’s updates

As readers of my personal blog might have noticed when I posted my LLM rant in mid-March, my assessment in the Q1 update that the LLM scrapers were “more or less under control” was a bit optimistic. Since then, I think that we have actually gotten it under control after deploying the nuclear option (Anubis). A few weeks after this blog post, I moved us from Anubis to go-away, which is more configurable and allows us to reduce the user impact of Anubis (e.g. by offering challenges that don’t require JavaScript, or support text-mode browsers better). We have rolled this out on several services now, and unfortunately I think they’re going to remain necessary for a while yet – presumably until the bubble pops, I guess.

You cannot have our user's data

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As you may have noticed, SourceHut has deployed Anubis to parts of our services to protect ourselves from aggressive LLM crawlers.¹ Much ink has been spilled on the subject of the LLM problem elsewhere, and we needn’t revisit that here. I do want to take this opportunity, however, to clarify how SourceHut views this kind of scraper behavior more generally, and how we feel that the data entrusted to us by our users ought to be used.

Announcing docs.sourcehut.org

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today, I’d like to show off our new documentation site dedicated to SourceHut’s (and hence sr.ht’s) GraphQL APIs: docs.sourcehut.org.

Our work to move from the legacy REST API to a GraphQL API is still ongoing, and certain features we are aiming for (such as federation) are still missing. Nevertheless, it is already the best - and preferred - way to programatically interact with SourceHut instances.

If you’ve never used GraphQL before, there will be a slight learning curve. But we aim to make our documentation as helpful as possible, for beginners and experts alike.

What's cooking on SourceHut? Q1 2025

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hello all! We’re back with another “What’s cooking”, after another too-long hiatus since September. We did promise to resume monthly updates, but in hindsight that seems a bit ambitious given everything on our plate. For now we’re going to aim for the more modest ambition of publishing updates quarterly.

Drew’s updates

My work has been proceeding as expected since September, with significant disruptions due to the LLM bot crisis, which to my consternation has occupied a substantial amount of time I would have rather spent on more important priorities. Nonetheless, I am happy to report that we have more or less got the bot crisis under control – though it consumed nearly all of my attention for several weeks, I can now occasionally enjoy up to several days in a row without one of our services being knocked out by LLM scrapers.

What's cooking on SourceHut? September 2024

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone! It has been some time since we last wrote a “What’s cooking” for you. We’d like to resume this tradition as of this September. We haven’t been totally radio silent – you can get caught up on what’s been happening over these past two years reading the blog archives – but we’ll be resuming monthly updates to keep you more informed about the minutiae of our operations. We’ll be presenting our updates from the perspective of each of our staff members, Drew and Conrad.

The European NGI fund must be renewed

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In 2022, SourceHut was selected for funding from the European Union’s NGI fund. This fund has been used to provide small grants to many free software projects since 2020, and the impact of these grants has been enormous. In SourceHut’s case, the grant is directly to thank for our comprehensive GraphQL APIs, which both underpins SourceHut’s internal communication needs and makes this platform possible, and are depended on by our users to achieve our goals of personal data ownership and platform independence.

Update on our infrastructure plans

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Now that Drew has provided an update on the general state of SourceHut, I would like to follow up with one focusing on our infrastructure. Much has happened under the hood, a lot has not happened, and plans come and go as reality changes its mind every now and then. So, let’s take a quick look at where we are right now, what our plans are, and how we hope to get there.

The state of SourceHut and our plans for the future

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Good morning! It’s been a tough year for SourceHut and I know many of our users are waiting to hear from us. Our last update was the post-mortem following the DDoS attack we sustained in January, and we have some additional news following this update as well as plans for the coming months to share.

I apologise for the reduced communication as of late. We are a small team dealing with a lot of big problems, and between keeping the lights on, dealing with issues as they arise, and leaving time for us to rest and spend time with our families, there has not been as much room for keeping you up to date. Nevertheless, our ship sails on, things have quieted down now, and we have an opportunity to get you filled in today.

SourceHut network outage post-mortem

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a busy couple of weeks here at SourceHut. At the time of writing, we have restored SourceHut to full service following an unprecedented 170 hour outage, and while we still have numerous kinks to sort out following an unscheduled emergency migration of all services across an ocean, all services are now fully operational.

Allow me to open this post-mortem by extending my deepest apologies to the SourceHut community for this interruption in service. This outcome was unacceptable: we failed you, and I am sorry. We know that you depend on SourceHut to be reliable, and you trust us to make sure that you can always depend on our services to be there for your projects. We value this trust profoundly, and we will strive to prevent a situation like the one we faced last week from recurring. The Internet can be a fragile place, and we will do what we can to re-enforce it.

Information regarding the SourceHut outage

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

SourceHut is currently experiencing an extended outage due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. We have been hard at work restoring service to our users, and expect the remaining services to come online this week. Thank you for your patience and words of support, we appreciate it very much.

Once we have finished handling the majority of the work associated with the outage mitigations, we will be publishing a full post-mortem. For up-to-date information regarding the status of the outage and work associated with it, please consult status.sr.ht.

SourceHut's 2022 Financial report

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In summary, SourceHut continues to be sustainable, profitable, and growing. We continued to grow YoY between 2021 and 2022. We were able to make some significant investments, particularly in establishing a new datacenter presence in Europe, and we intend to expand this investment over the course of 2023 and 2024, and we have plenty of capital to invest in this and other business initiatives.

Disclaimer: this report is a summarized approximation of our financials, and is not used for tax purposes.

SourceHut will (not) blacklist the Go module mirror

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Update 2023-01-31: Russ Cox of the Go team reached out to us to address this problem. After some discussion, an acceptable plan was worked out. The Go team is working on deploying an update to the “go” tool to add a -reuse flag, which should substantially reduce the traffic generated by this system for all users of Go.

In the meantime, the automated refresh traffic from proxy.golang.org was disabled for SourceHut, which the Go team assures us should have little-to-no impact on users and which reduces the burden on our system to a managable level. Following this change by the Go team, we have observed traffic from the Go module mirror reduced to an acceptable level. The Go team has decided that the automatic refresh behavior is their responsibility, not the responsibility of other operators, so any other small hosts will hopefully not be affected as the Go team will enable or disable the refresh behavior at their discretion with the burden on third-party operators in mind.

NLnet funding comes to an end

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Sourcehut was selected for an NLnet grant in January of this year. NLnet Foundation is a Dutch organization which funds many projects to promote an open and secure internet.

The typical NLnet grant is structured by milestones. At the beginning of the grant, a project plan is drafted containing the milestones to be completed and an agreed upon payment for each milestone. Once a milestone is completed, NLnet verifies that the milestone had been completed and approves the payment. If you think this might be a good fit for your project, consider applying for a grant!

Four years of SourceHut

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today is the fourth anniversary of SourceHut’s public opening. In these four years, we have developed a free software platform which hosts nearly 10,000 projects, among them more than 68,000 repositories, 5,000 mailing lists with nearly a quarter-million emails, 6,500 bug trackers hosting 50,000 tickets, and 914 build-days over 880,000 jobs on builds.sr.ht, all in the service of our 33,516 users.

I’m tremendously proud of the community that has grown on this platform. I offer my sincere thanks to the thousands of people who have joined SourceHut and helped build a welcoming, productive community of free software developers. I offer my thanks to you, dear reader, for your profound role in these achievements. I struggle to find the right words to express the enormity of my gratitude.

SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency-related projects to be removed

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

SourceHut is planning to roll out updates to our terms of service, effective in 2023. The changes most likely to impact users is the prohibition of cryptocurrency- or blockchain-related projects on SourceHut.

These domains are strongly associated with fraudulent activities and high-risk investments which take advantage of people who are suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality. Few to no legitimate use-cases for this technology have been found; instead it is mostly used for fraudulent “get rich quick” schemes and to facilitate criminal activity, such as ransomware, illicit trade, and sanctions evasion. These projects often encourage large-scale energy waste and electronics waste, which contributes to the declining health of Earth’s environment. The presence of these projects on SourceHut exposes new victims to these scams and is harmful to the reputation of SourceHut and its community.

What's cooking on SourceHut? October 2022

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Greetings! Today we’re joined by 623 fresh new users, bringing our total of 32,904. News is light for this month, since I’ve been taking some time off. However, things are still gradually rolling forwards, and we have some important internal changes landing soon. I’ll give you the details.

Planned maintenance next week

We are rolling out a major, high-risk software upgrade on Monday, October 24th. This will require an outage, and we have set up a maintenance window starting from 09:00 UTC. For details, see status.sr.ht.

How to help improve SourceHut's design

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

SourceHut is a software development forge and it is designed with the software engineer’s needs first and foremost. The design prioritizes things like page speed, minimal distractions, and information-forward layouts. It does not prioritize aesthetics, and perhaps it shows.

Like many free software projects, SourceHut encourages contributions from its community in the form of patches. Not all of these have to be changes to the software — we frequently receive patches improving the documentation, for example. There are many skillsets which are valuable to offer to a free software projects. One of these skills is design competence, and over the years a few people with this skillset have attempted to improve SourceHut’s design, but many of their changes were rejected. Why? How can a designer succeed in improving SourceHut?

SourceHut does not ask for IP assignment from employees or contributors

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A “standard” clause you’ll see in most employment contracts is an IP assignment clause. This clause assigns the intellectual property produced by an employee in the course of their work to the business that they work for. This generally extends both to copyrights and patents, and the more egregious of these clauses include work done outside of company time and without the use of the company’s assets and equipment. Often this is accompanied with a burdensome process of identifying every copyright owned by the employee on a little sheet that accompanies the employment contract.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? September 2022

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Guten Morgen, SourceHut! Today, I count 681 new users, for a grand total of 32281 registered users. As always, a warm welcome to them and the reminder to everyone else to help them feel welcome while they get settled. Today, I am filling in for Drew on short notice, so please excuse the brevity.

chat.sr.ht

Simon has done some excellent work simplifying the authentication workflow of chat.sr.ht for users. The new approach is based on standard OAuth, which means other users of soju (the IRC bouncer running on chat.sr.ht) can benefit from this feature and use any available OAuth server for authentication. You can read Simon’s blog post for all the details.

How does SourceHut's free software consultancy work?

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

SourceHut offers a consultancy in which we offer our services as experts in free software to work exclusively on free software development. Through this work we have developed improvements to Wayland, graphics, virtual reality, email, and more, entirely through free software developed in public. Our work can take the form of developing new free software from scratch, contributing improvements to projects that our client depends on, offering what sage advice we can spare, or, often, all of the above.

What's cooking on SourceHut? August 2022

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Good morning! 785 new users are joining us on this cool August morning, for a total of 31,600 SourceHut users. Remember to be kind and patient with our new members as they learn how to use the software and work with the communities here. We only have a short update for this month, so let’s get right into it.

GraphQL

Work on GraphQL has slowed this month as we get ready to tackle a major change: ID unification. Each of our services has a separate database with their own user tables synchronized with meta.sr.ht’s authoritative data, each of which has its own set of user IDs. This has worked fine thus far, but for the coming work on GraphQL federation, we will need to unify them. This is a major effort which will require thorough testing and a careful roll-out, and progress on other goals will slow as it’s being done. Stay tuned.

Planned deprecation of dispatch.sr.ht

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

dispatch.sr.ht is a SourceHut service which provides integrations between SourceHut and third-party services like GitHub and GitLab, and it is scheduled to be deprecated and shut down. Here’s the plan:

2022-08-01: Creation of new dispatch tasks is disabled.

2022-09-01: Dispatch users will be emailed with information about migration.

2022-10-01: Dispatch is shut off.

This blog post will explain the motivations for these changes and offer solutions for users who wish to migrate.

What's cooking on SourceHut? July 2022

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Good morning, SourceHut! Today we have 30,815 users, 1,203 of which are joining us for the first time this month — a big increase! To all of our new users: welcome! To all of our more tenured users: be sure to offer our new friends a warm welcome and do your part to help them learn how to use SourceHut.

GraphQL

Check this out:

meta.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✓ webhooks
git.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✓ webhooks
hg.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✓ webhooks
todo.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✓ webhooks
builds.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✓ webhooks
lists.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✓ webhooks
hub.sr.ht: ✗ read ✗ write ✗ webhooks
paste.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✓ webhooks
pages.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✓ webhooks

Adnan has been hard at work on GraphQL this month, and we’re almost done. The last remaining API to be implemented is hub.sr.ht, but before we implement it, we’ll be experimenting with GraphQL federation. This will allow us to access every GraphQL API through a single endpoint, seamlessly querying resources like git repositories and mailing lists in a single request. Since hub ties all of the services together, this will be a very good thing to have before we proceed with its API! This will also bring many improvements we’ve had planned for a long time, but will also require many serious internal design changes to our software, so it will require some effort to thoroughly test & validate them before rolling it out. Federation will also open some doors for long-requested features, such as linking resources like bug trackers back to the project they belong to.

SourceHut is committed to making IRC better

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a wonderful protocol with a 34-year history of helping free software, there at every step alongside the rise of the internet. Many real-time chat empires have risen and fallen during its tenure, some of them leaving behind lessons IRC might learn from. But even in its original form, IRC is a simple and beautiful protocol on top of which many independent, federated networks have been built, from simple line-oriented plain-text messages (mostly) adhering to open standards, and implemented with free software.

What's cooking on SourceHut? June 2022

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone! Let’s get straight into the news today. Our user count today is 29,612 users, of which 576 have joined since the last update. Remember to be patient with these new users as they learn the ropes. Welcome!

GraphQL

Adnan continues to ship GraphQL services for SourceHut, this month shipping webhooks for lists.sr.ht, and preparing to-be-reviewed patches adding webhooks to builds.sr.ht and paste.sr.ht. The latest GQL support matrix looks like this:

What's cooking on SourceHut? May 2022

Mon, 16 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone! We’re back at it for another month of news in the SourceHut sphere. Of our now 29,036 users, 630 are new this month: please offer them a warm welcome, and your patience, as they learn about the new platform.

todo.sr.ht

Comprehensive GraphQL-native webhooks shipped for todo.sr.ht this month.

Here’s the latest GraphQL support break-down:

meta.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✓ webhooks
git.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✓ webhooks
hg.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✓ webhooks
todo.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✓ webhooks
builds.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✗ webhooks
lists.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✗ webhooks
hub.sr.ht: ✗ read ✗ write ✗ webhooks
paste.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✗ webhooks
pages.sr.ht: ✓ read ✓ write ✗ webhooks

We’re getting there! The remaining webhooks should be fairly straightforward — lists will be the most complex of these — and updating hub.sr.ht will be the last major project before we complete the initial GraphQL implementation. Following this we will be experimenting with GraphQL federation as well, and once we have an answer regarding federation, the GraphQL milestone will be complete, and we’ll have taken the largest step towards the beta.

What's cooking on SourceHut? April 2022

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hello! Another month of improvements rolls on by, and I’m here to tell you all about them. In terms of site growth, we saw 510 new users join us, bringing our total to 28,406. As always, please be patient with our new peers as you help them learn about the site.

General news

This month we released our annual financial report. In summary, SourceHut is financially healthy. Feel free to browse the full report to get all of the details.

SourceHut's 2021 Financial report

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In summary, SourceHut is financially healthy, profitable, and growing. We enjoyed substantial YoY growth between 2020 and 2021. SourceHut hired its third full-time software engineer, and with the help of the NGI0 Discovery fund we had another developer join us to help with the GraphQL development work. We have a sustainable business model and sufficient capital with which to execute all of our planned expansions, such as a new European datacenter presence.

What's cooking on SourceHut? March 2022

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today we celebrate another 487 new members who’ve joined since our last update, bringing our community to 27,896 users in total. As always, I’m relying on you to be patient with them as they learn the ropes and to make sure they feel welcome here. This month saw many improvements, but much of them were internal changes or bug fixes, so this update will be somewhat short.

The Mumble meeting for this month is again cancelled, as the call for agenda items returned no answers. Going forward, we will set up meetings only for specific discussions, such as future discussions on billing changes for the alpha to beta transition.

What's cooking on SourceHut? February 2022

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hello again! Today is a rare sunny and beautiful day in Amsterdam, and I am spending it inside writing this post with the blinds down, as is befitting of a proper hacker. I’m pleased to welcome 529 new users to our service this month, who together bring our community to 27,409 members. I hope our new members are enjoying the service, and that our existing community does its part to make them feel welcome.

Welcoming Conrad Hoffmann, the newest SourceHut developer

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m pleased to introduce the SourceHut community to Conrad Hoffmann, aka bitfehler, who joins us this month as SourceHut’s third full-time FOSS developer. Like the rest of our full-time staff, Conrad’s role is to do self-directed work to “make FOSS better” per the mission of SourceHut, and in addition to working on the forge, Conrad will be working with many FOSS projects in the community, including projects on SourceHut and in the FOSS ecosystem as a whole.

What's cooking on SourceHut? January 2022

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hello and happy new year! After a bit of well-deserved rest during the holidays, our staff (and many of our contributors) have spun our work streams back up and development continues. Our userbase has grown this month by another 634 users, bringing the total to 26,880. As usual, I’m depending on you to make our new members feel welcome and to offer them your patience as they learn how we do things here.

SourceHut selected for NLNet NGI Zero funding

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m pleased to share that SourceHut has been selected by NLNet to receive funding as part of the NGI Zero: Search & Discovery fund for the purpose of completing API 2.0, our GraphQL API development. NLNet is providing monetary support to SourceHut contributor Adnan Maolood, aka ~adnano, who has agreed to work full-time to help with our API 2.0 efforts over the course of this year.

The NLNet Foundation is a Dutch organization which provides funding to various projects which promote open and secure digital infrastructure, and has provided funding for hundreds of free and open-source projects, many of which you rely on every day, and some of which rely on SourceHut! Prior recipients of NLNet funding include projects like Tor, WireGuard, postmarketOS, Jitsi, and more, and I’m proud to see SourceHut join them.

How does SourceHut's FOSS business model work?

Sun, 09 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

SourceHut makes a profit, but we are not motivated by profit. I founded SourceHut with the explicit goal of making my free software work sustainable full-time. As SourceHut grows, we aim to expand and generalize this approach. We want to make free software better, and the business is a tool we use to facilitate this.

We have two lines of business which provide us with revenue: the SourceHut software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, and free software consulting. You can run the SourceHut platform yourself (instructions are available here), but it’s expensive and time consuming to maintain the platform, so most people pay us to do it for them via monthly or annual subscription fees. This model sets up incentives which favor users over investors,¹ which gives us an honest focus on user-motivated design (as opposed to profit-motivated design) and ensures that we are dis-incentivized to use unethical means to make our margin, such as selling your personal information. Your payments also provide for the development and maintenance of the service, which we try to honor by ensuring reliable uptime & performance, comprehensive backups, and so on, via a robust operational strategy which is not economically practical for small-scale deployments.

What's cooking on SourceHut? December 2021

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hello and happy holidays! I hope that our 26,246 member userbase is enjoying the cold weather (or the warm weather, in the south). Remember to remind the people you work with on SourceHut, and others besides, that you care about them. We have many new users this month, and I hope you will extend them the same kindness and patience which you remember from your own first steps on SourceHut.

An interview with 100 rabbits

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hundred Rabbits is an artistic duo hacking their way around the Pacific on their sailboat. I invited them to sit down for an interview to talk about about their lifestyle, art, philosophy, and their SourceHut projects. This interview was conducted live in the #sr.ht.watercooler IRC channel on Libera Chat.

Drew: Hi Devine! Happy birthday, Rek!

Rekka: Haha, thanks!

Devine waves

Drew: Would you two introduce yourselves?

Rekka: We are two artists who live and work on a sailboat named Pino. We traveled around the Pacific Ocean for 5 years, learning about technological resilience. I am an illustrator, but I also write, and Devine is a programmer that also makes music.

Announcing chat.sr.ht: a persistent IRC session for sourcehut users

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

About one month ago, we began a private beta for chat.sr.ht, the next flagship sourcehut product. Starting today, this service is now available to all paid sourcehut users.

chat.sr.ht is a hosted IRC bouncer service, which maintains a persistent IRC connection for you and extends IRC with useful features like offline messaging, log persistence, and various other improvements. In addition to accepting connections from any third-party IRC client, chat.sr.ht offers a ready-to-use web client.

SourceHut's third year

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Three years ago today, I announced that SourceHut would be making its alpha open to the general public after two years of development in private. Since then, in addition to moving across the Atlantic ocean, I have overseen the development of a service, and a business, which has grown to exceed all of my expectations. Today, SourceHut is home to 25,000 users, 5,000 projects, 42,000 git repos and 5,000 Mercurial repos. 153,000 emails have made their way to the 3,000 mailing lists hosted here, and 26,000 tickets have been filed across 5,000 bug trackers. Our CI system has completed 625,000 builds totalling 2½ years of continuous build time.

What's cooking on SourceHut? October 2021

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome back for another month’s status update! As of today, our community numbers at 25,074 — the first time we’ve had over 25,000 users — after another 522 users joined our ranks. Please show them the courtesey and patience you’ve always done as they learn the ropes, and welcome these new users to our community with open arms.

This month’s Mumble meeting will take place on Monday, October 18th, at 10:00 UTC. We’ll be on voice.mnus.de, port 64738, in the sourcehut room. See you there!

What's cooking on SourceHut? September 2021

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Another month passes us by, recording further progress on the road to the sr.ht beta. Joining us on this journey are another 448 new souls, bringing our total number to 24,552. As always, I’m depending on you to show them kindness and patience as they learn how to use SourceHut.

This month’s Mumble meeting will take place on the tomorrow, September 16th, at 10:00 UTC. We’ll be on voice.mnus.de, port 64738, in the sourcehut room.

Introducing a GraphQL-native approach to webhooks

Wed, 25 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Today, we are shipping a new system for webhooks for use with our suite of GraphQL APIs, which are under development as part of our larger beta plans. We’re not the first to use this design for webhooks, but it is somewhat uncommon, so I’ll take this opportunity to explain it to those who may be unfamiliar with it.

Let’s first establish, for contrast, how traditional webhooks work. Here’s an example of a webhook payload from GitHub:

SourceHut is hiring FOSS software engineers

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This opening is now closed. Please check back again later for future openings. Thanks!

SourceHut is hiring paid software engineers to work exclusively on free and open source software. This is a full-time remote position. Our mission is simple:

We are here to make free software better. We will be honest, transparent, and empathetic. We care for our users, and we will not exploit them, and we hope that they will reward our care and diligence with success.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? August 2021

Sun, 15 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hello again! Today we’re joined by 434 fresh faces, bringing us to a total of 24,104 users. As always, I’m relying on you to give a warm welcome to our new colleagues and to exercise patience as they learn the ropes.

This month’s Mumble meeting will take place on the normal date tomorrow, August 16th, at 10:00 UTC. We’ll be on voice.mnus.de, port 64738, in the sourcehut room.

After another month of development, how much closer are we to beta?

The mythical 10× programmer is just a good leader

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There is some truth to the idea that some programmers are more productive than others. In practice, this is mainly a function of the breadth and depth of their experience, rather than an expression of innate talent. Under the right circumstances, the difference between two programmers can be significant, though a single programmer who is 10× more productive than the average is quite rare.

There does exist, however, a means of substantially improving productivity without relying on superstars: good leadership.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? July 2021

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hallo uit Nederland! Today’s “What’s cooking” is brought to you from Amsterdam, where I moved to at the start of the week. Due to this, I have had less time available for work, but there has been some new progress regardless. User signups haven’t slowed, for one: we now have 23,670 users, some 442 greater than June. Please show them your hospitality and help them learn about sourcehut!

The usual Mumble meeting for this month is, sadly, cancelled. I do not have the necessary equipment to participate yet. I’ll see you for the August meeting instead.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? June 2021

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Halfway through 2021! Things are on-track for my hopes to have the beta ship this year. Joining us on the way are 23,228 users, of which 640 are new this month. Remember to be patient with them as they learn the ins and outs of using sr.ht!

This month’s Mumble meeting will take place on the normal date tomorrow, June 16th, at 16:00 UTC. We’ll be on voice.mnus.de, port 64738, in the sourcehut room.

SourceHut is leaving Freenode

Wed, 19 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

SourceHut has been a proud user of the Freenode IRC network since its inception. Today we have five sr.ht-related IRC channels for end-user support, operational monitoring, staff coordination, and more.

We will be moving our channels to Libera Chat, effective today. You can connect at irc.libera.chat on port 6697 (with SSL) and join us in #sr.ht.

The Freenode network we once loved is the victim of a hostile takeover by corporate interests. We entirely reject the illegitimate new leaders who have used legal threats and back-room deals to steal the network. The dedicated volunteers at the heart of Freenode’s success — the staff — have left for Libera Chat. We are sad to hear news of Freenode’s fall, but proud to be following them, our friends and colleagues, to this new network.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? May 2021

Sun, 16 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Running a day late on this one — was travelling all day yesterday. We’ll also be moving the Mumble meeting to tomorrow, May 17th, this month. Thanks for your patience! Today, SourceHut has 22,588 users, 698 more since the last status update. Please offer our new colleagues a warm welcome, and be patient with them as they learn how to use the software.

The monthly Mumble meeting, one day later than usual, will take place at 16:00 UTC on May 17th, in the SourceHut room on voice.mnus.de, port 64738.

Sourcehut is the fastest. So what?

Sat, 08 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing this from 10,000 meters above the Pacific Ocean¹, typing it into a $200 ARM laptop, and I have had a pretty productive workday so far. In fact, with 600-1200ms latency, frequent network drop-outs, and bandwidth which would make a circa-2008 2G network hang its head in shame, I have had endured hardly any discernible difference from my workflow at home.

By objective measures, sourcehut is the fastest and most lightweight software forge² by a wide margin. I am able to load a git repository on git.sr.ht in about 3 seconds (DOM ready in 1.8s), while GitHub took 38 seconds (DOM ready in 20s)³. Working with any of the sourcehut services — browsing git repos, reading and filing tickets, reviewing build logs — is hardly any different in this situation than it is at my workstation at home. Browsing any other forge, on the other hand, is miserable. In the same amount of time I can load 3 pages on GitHub (one full minute!), I can load more than 30 on sourcehut.

Bug trackers are for tracking bugs

Thu, 29 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a reason that we call our bug tracking software “todo”: it designed to track things that need to be done. It’s not designed for end-user support, handling feature requests, and so on. This is a departure from the approach of some other popular forges.

We use our bug trackers for confirmed bugs and confirmed feature requests only. Due to learned behaviors from other platforms, many users do not understand this. For this reason, many project admins actually go so far as to set up read-only trackers, so that only maintainers can file tickets. This approach improves the quality of bug reports and sharply reduces duplicates, turning the tracker into a narrowly-focused tool for organizing the work of the contributors.

What's cooking on SourceHut? April 2021

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hello again! As another month rolls on by, sr.ht saw 849 new users join our ranks, bringing our total to 21,890. As always, please treat our new colleagues with patience while they learn the ropes.

Tomorrow’s monthly Mumble meeting is planned for 16:00 UTC, in the usual place: voice.mnus.de, port 64738. An important question will be discussed: should builds.sr.ht be made available only to paid sr.ht users? For details, see the builds.sr.ht update further on.

What's cooking on SourceHut? March 2021

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hi! Another month of development has passed, and I’m here to fill you in on what’s new. Another 686 signups this month has brought us to 21,041 users. As always, I’ll be counting on you to make the new users feel at home, please be patient with them and help them learn the ropes.

Last month, something suddenly came up and I had to skip the monthly Mumble call unannounced — my apologies! We’ll be holding the meeting as scheduled tomorrow at 16:00 UTC at voice.mnus.de, port 64738, in the sourcehut room.

Sourcehut pages

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce that a long-awaited feature is available today: sourcehut pages. SourceHut users can use this service to host static websites for any of their own domains, and every user is also being given “username.srht.site”.

Update: gemini support is now available as well!

You can use any static site generator: Jekyll, Hugo, Doxygen, or your own cool new thing. You can publish from git.sr.ht or hg.sr.ht, or you can set up any publishing workflow you prefer — you just need to upload a tarball. Every domain has TLS automatically configured for you. You get your personal subdomain on srht.site, unlimited bring-your-own-domains, and up to 1G of storage per site.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? February 2021

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Greetings! I’m happy to share that our community has surpassed 20,000 users this month. 708 new faces have joined our ranks, bringing the total to 20,355. We’ve become a pretty big community! Please be friendly and patient with them as they learn the ropes. This month’s “what’s cooking” is somewhat deficit in interesting user-facing developments, but I will dutifully report our progress nonetheless.

Our next public Mumble conference will be held tomorrow at 16:00 UTC, on voice.mnus.de, port 64738, in the sourcehut room. Feel free to join us to share your thoughts and ask your questions. I’ll see you hear you there!

What's cooking on Sourcehut? January 2021

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Another year begins, and hopefully with better prospects for us all. SourceHut has emerged from 2020 relatively unscathed, thankfully, and I hope the same is true of most of our users. A body which, by the way, today numbers 19,647 strong, up 623 from December. Please warmly welcome our new members, and be sure to lend them your expertise as they learn how to use our tools.

Tomorrow’s public Mumble conference will be held at 16:00 UTC, on voice.mnus.de, port 64738, in the sourcehut room. Feel free to join us to share your thoughts and ask your questions. See you there!

On the subject of ethics in our industry

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I am disappointed by our peers in the industry in terms of their failure to uphold a reasonable moral standard, and I am sorry that it is necessary for me to write about it today. I would much prefer that we compete in terms of our product’s utility and our technological expertise, and it shames me that we must also compete in terms of our respective levels of command over our moral compasses.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? December 2020

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A brisk wind of winter chill sets a stir down my spine, as I sit down with a fresh cup of coffee to yarn a story of careful engineering and passionate spirit that took place over the course of 30 days. The last 30 days. Cause this is the monthly “what’s cooking” post. Welcome! This month we’re joined by 815 new users, bringing the total to 19,024. Please give them your warmest welcome and help them learn the ropes.

SourceHut's second year in alpha

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Today is the second anniversary of SourceHut being made available to the general public during its alpha phase of development, and the end of the fourth year of development. What a year it’s been! If only I could send a warning to the younger me who wrote last year’s article. As the second anniversary comes around, despite the trials we’ve endured this year, I feel positive about our accomplishments.

One year ago, I wrote that I expected SourceHut to enter its beta phase in 2020, and I was wrong. However, we do have a well-defined, finite list of action items to be completed before we can kick off the beta. We hit a lot of important development milestones this year, and we’ll put the cherry on top in 2021.

SourceHut Q3 2020 Financial report

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In summary, SourceHut is financially healthy. Our revenue is still growing, and we are still profitable and becoming more so. However, growth has slowed significantly compared to Q2. In internal terms, Q3 has been characterized by an increased emphasis on planning, less visible development efforts, and a decreased emphasis in marketing — not to mention taking place during a series of global and national crises — some or all of which may provide an explanation. Regardless, this may not be indicative of a trend, and we have still experienced positive growth by all accounts.

Mailing lists are resistant to censorship

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As a US entity, SourceHut is obliged to comply with DMCA notices. In this event, our next step would likely be to coach the affected project through the counter-notice process, and contribute to their legal costs if we believe that they’re in the right. We know that the DMCA is a constantly abused force for censorship, and there are no friends of the RIAA here. They represent much that our mission statement — to support and improve the free- and open-source software ecosystem — stands in opposition to.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? October 2020

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Once again we meet to discuss the status of the ongoing SourceHut alpha, which has made progress by leaps and bounds this month. We’re joined by 521 new users this month, bringing our total up to 17,715. As always, please welcome them warmly and show our new friends the ropes.

Tomorrow, we’ll be holding the second public Mumble conference, where you’re welcome to join us to ask questions, share feedback, or just to listen in. We’ll be meeting tomorrow, October 16th, at 16:00 UTC, in the SourceHut room on voice.mnus.de, port 64738. I’ll see (or hear) you there!

Post-mortem: git.sr.ht's almost-outage today

Thu, 08 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

git.sr.ht almost suffered an outage today, when available disk space for repository storage got as low as 2.8 GiB. Thankfully, the problem was identified and a solution applied before an outage was incurred. This ended up being a good case study in the value of good monitoring and a solid understanding of the performance characteristics of your system. So, what caused this to happen, why didn’t it cause an outage, and what have we learned?

In-process work queueing for Go

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In the course of our API 2.0 efforts, it is necessary for us to implement some kind of mechanism for queueing and retrying work in our Go platform. The most obvious examples of this work is sending emails and delivering webhooks, but there are more subtle examples, too — just about anything which can be moved out of the request → response hot path would improve performance for the end-user. As such, some kind of task queue is called for.

SourceHut API 2.0 dev log

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Completing the project now known as “API 2.0” is one of the most important steps in finalizing the sr.ht beta, and I’ve been trying to keep the community abreast of developments, especially on the sr.ht-dev mailing list. I’m summarizing for the blog as well today, some of our recent developments in this respect and planned work to come.

Read more: why is API 2.0 is important to the beta?

SourceHut is a distributed system of "mini-services", each fulfilling its role in a particular domain — git.sr.ht handles git, builds.sr.ht handles CI, lists.sr.ht handles mailing lists, and so on. In order for these services to communicate effectively, good API design is critical. A good API is also necessary for SourceHut users to extend sr.ht with their own tools.

The legacy API was designed within the context of our Flask applications for the purpose of quickly meeting these needs during the design & development of the sr.ht alpha. It's... not great. The RESTful design implies a tree-like structure, which does not map as well onto our data model — the "graph" of GraphQL does much better in this regard. Additionally, the implementation is somewhat inconsistent and leaves a lot to be desired in terms of robustness. The stronger type system of GraphQL enforces a baseline of consistency which, while achievable with the legacy approach, is much easier with the 2.0 approach.

The API design is an essential participant in proving the architecture design of sr.ht. In order to meet the confidence level we need to start the beta, we need a greater degree of confidence than the legacy approach offered. API 2.0 meets this requirement. Additionally, stability is going to be important post-beta: this is our last opportunity to make a clean break with the legacy API and ship a better, more stable design into production which we can comfortably support for longer.

Progress updates

Some of the progress which has been completed recently includes:

What's cooking on Sourcehut? September 2020

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

SourceHut development continues its constant march through the alpha this month, and I’m here to tell you all about it. Our users now number 17,194, thanks to 511 new members joining us since the last update. To our new users: welcome! And to our older members: thanks for being here! I hope everyone new finds a warm welcome in the rest of the community.

Earlier this month, I held a public meeting to discuss the plans for the beta, and we felt that it was a pretty good way to connect with the community. Going forward, the day following each status update (so, tomorrow), I’m going to hold a public meeting where you’re welcome to join up and ask any questions or provide any feedback. In turn, I’ll have questions of my own for the community, and will be looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

SourceHut's PeerTube bootstrap fund: first batch

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In May we announced our initiative to fund video creators who wanted to get started on PeerTube. PeerTube is a free software project which creates a federated network of video sharing platforms, each of which owned and operated by independent, small groups of creators or users or both. This decentralized, democratized approach to video publishing, on an open source platform, is compelling to us, and we wanted to help bootstrap it with new content for users to enjoy on the platform.

SourceHut contributor spotlight

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

SourceHut is 100% free and open source software, and we accept contributions from any of our users. Dozens of your peers have contributed improvements to the services! I wanted to share a “thank you” with everyone who’s helped out, and draw attention to some of my favorite contributions.

From feature development, to bug fixes, to third-party packaging, to operations improvements and more, external contributors have left their impact in all facets of the software. Tools sr.ht users rely on every day were implemented by their peers, and the reliability and performance of the service has been guaranteed thanks in no small part to their hard work.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? August 2020

Sun, 16 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Another month passes and we find ourselves writing (or reading) this status update on a quiet, rainy Sunday morning. Today our userbase numbers 16,683 members strong, up 580 from last month. Please extend a kind welcome to our new colleagues! Thanks for reading these posts and keeping up with what’s new on the platform.

First, I’d like to extend a thanks to contributor наб, who has been sending an impressive number of patches lately, and is responsible for most of the features detailed in this update. Other contributors who deserve thanks this month include 2xsaiko, Amin Bandali, Chris Vittal, gildarts, and Peter Sanchez. Thanks, everyone!

Sourcehut Q2 2020 Financial report

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In summary, SourceHut is financially healthy. Our revenue continues to grow and we are profitable and becoming more so. We have also been able to re-invest some of our profits into the broader free software and free culture community.

Disclaimer: this report is a summarized approximation of our financials, and is not used for tax purposes.

Revenue sources

Sourcehut receives revenue from paid user subscriptions. During Q1, we processed 1,855 invoices. The invoices paid break down as:

What's cooking on Sourcehut? July 2020

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As the unfeeling hand of time drags us relentlessly through its cold maw, we occasionally spend some of our precious moments writing (or in your case, reading), monthly status updates on the progress of the SourceHut alpha. Today is such a day - welcome back! Our audience has grown by 645 members this month, bringing our total userbase to 16,103. Please give a hearty welcome to our new peers!

General news

A short outage for hg.sr.ht is planned to take place sometime in the next few weeks, as we migrate to a new box. The plan is outlined on sr.ht-dev, and we expect to experience anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes where hg.sr.ht is read-only. The final dates will be posted on status.sr.ht and announced on sr.ht-announce when the plan is finalized.

SourceHut adds continuous integration for mailing lists

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

SourceHut offers a continuous integration platform called builds.sr.ht, which will boot up a virtual machine from any of nine operating systems¹, including various Linux, BSD, and Plan 9 distributions, using KVM, then clone your source code repository (or repositories) and run user-defined tasks to validate the code, automate deployment, run linters, and so on. A simple example manifest from one of my projects is the following:

image: alpine/edge
sources:
- https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc
tasks:
- build: |
    cd scdoc
    make
- check: |
    cd scdoc
    make check

For some time now, we’ve automatically submitted these build manifests on your behalf when you push to your Git or Mercurial repository. To set this up for your repos, consult the tutorial and the documentation.

How we monitor our services

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Monitoring all of our services makes sure we’re aware of problems when they occur, but most importantly, it helps us detect problems in advance — before they become outages. Our main tool for this task is Prometheus, an open source time-series database. It takes a snapshot of various metrics across all of our services every few seconds, then allows you to write queries which model trends in that data. Our instance is publicly available for you to explore at metrics.sr.ht.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? June 2020

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hello! With May behind us and July looming, we have another month of progress on the alpha in our cap. Today we’re joined by 695 new users, bringing our total strength to 15,458 brave hackers. Give our new peers a warm welcome, please!

General news

Please be advised that today, June 15th, starting at 18:00 UTC, we have a planned outage. Services are expected to be intermittently available for a period of up to an hour. Each outage is expected to be limited to one service at a time, and should last no more than 15 to 30 minutes each. Consult the status page for more information.

How and why GraphQL will influence the SourceHut alpha

Wed, 10 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Often I will remind users that SourceHut is an “alpha-quality product”, even though many people are already using it today and find it well-suited to their present needs. What I mean by this is to remind you that, while many things already work, I am still working on refining the implementation before we commit to the design going forward. This foundational work is more important than many high-level features, because it will give us the basis from which the broader SourceHut platform is built and extended upon well into the future.

Achieving accessibility through simplicity

Wed, 27 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I have received many emails complimenting SourceHut’s simple design and lightweight pages¹, but I have received a surprising amount of positive feedback from a particular group of users: the blind community.

For many software teams, especially web developers, accessibility is an extremely burdensome task. Many companies have written checks with an uncomfortable number of zeroes on them to get the job done. Sprinkling ARIA tags all over your DOM to annotate elements with their purpose, and updating these as your DOM changes over time, is no small task, and makes your code more difficult to maintain. It’s not especially surprising that many blind users are constantly frustrated when trying to use the web.

The PeerTube content bootstrap fund

Fri, 15 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

PeerTube is an excellent project which aims to create an open and decentralized video “tube” for hosting video content with distributed governance and community-driven development. Chocobozzz, with the help of dozens of contributors, has put in the hard engineering work to build a great platform, and now we want to see it filled with content.

Notice: the first round of applicants has been processed. Check back in later - we may ask for more applications in the future.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? May 2020

Fri, 15 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Greetings! Another month of alpha development progresses and brings us that much closer to the SourceHut beta. We reached a few important milestones this month! Today we are 14,763 users strong, with 1,104 new users joining us this month. Please give them a warm welcome!

General news

Quick thanks to Eli Schwartz for patches across the board which simplify the installation process and improve support for a broader variety of distributions. Thanks also to Daniel Gröber and Thorben Günther for additional improvements in the installation process and self-hosted SourceHut experience.

SourceHut + Plan 9 = ❤

Mon, 11 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

My favorite operating system is Plan 9 from Bell Labs. The simplicity and cohesive design throughout really stands out. In my opinion, Plan 9 is much, much better than any other operating system I’ve used, and I’ve used a lot of operating systems. Plan 9 is not perfect, but it’s a substantial advance to the state of the art.

Bell Labs has moved on, but 9front keeps the dream alive as the most active (and sarcastic) fork of Plan 9. In the vain hopes that more people will become interested in Plan 9, and to provide better support to the existing community, and because I was bored, I spent some time this weekend adding 9front support to builds.sr.ht, providing the world’s first continuous integration service for Plan 9.

Announcing the SourceHut project hub

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce that the SourceHut project hub is now available for general use! This is one of the most important developments in the progress of the SourceHut alpha thus far. If you want to see how it works interactively, try checking out the SourceHut project, add your own projects, or browse the public project index. For a more wordy introduction, read on.

Prioritizing simplicity improves performance and reliability

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We recently put together some automated testing which evaluates the performance of various software forges without bias¹: the Software Forge Performance Index. The goal is to push our community of software forges to strive for higher performance, to tighten your workflow loop and to better service communities without access to high-speed internet or newer computer hardware. I also included results for accessibility testing, hoping that we can push each other to improve on that front as well.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? April 2020

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Greetings! Another month passes and we progress closer still to the beta. We are joined by 464 new users, bringing our new total to 13,659. Please provide them with a warm welcome!

General News

In case you missed it, be sure to check out the Q1 Financial Report, published earlier this week. In other general news, I recently overhauled our installation instructions, bringing them up to date with changes since their original time of writing, and completing the documentation overhaul I had planned. I hope you find these useful! We were getting tired of correcting the docs all the time in IRC as people were setting up their sr.ht instances.

Sourcehut Q1 2020 Financial report

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In summary, SourceHut is financially healthy.

Before we get into the stuffy business stuff, let’s get the inevitable out of the way. I hope that your family and friends are safe as you read this. I’m sure that many people reading today’s financial report are facing uncertain financial times for themselves. If this is the case for you, don’t hesitate to cancel your SourceHut subscription. We will be alright — take care of yourself and your loved ones first. On the other hand, if you are secure and want to help, we would appreciate it if you bought a paid subscription.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? March 2020

Sun, 15 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hello! This has been a very busy month for SourceHut. Thank you for supporting it during the alpha! Today our users are 13,195 in number, with 438 new users joining us since our last status update. Please give them a warm welcome!

General News

I’ve spent a lot of time this month working on a bunch of operations-related tasks, such as monitoring and backups improvements. Our backup system is now triple-redundant and kept in check by three separate monitoring systems. You’ll see some of these reports on our public operations mailing list, or can dig into the raw data on our public Prometheus instance. I’ve also written up an operations manual to keep track of our approach and future plans for operations, so that you can be aware of what steps we’re taking to keep things up and running, and perhaps apply our techniques to your own self-hosted instances of SourceHut.

What do we do when you lose your 2FA codes?

Wed, 04 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

By far the most common sort of support request I receive from SourceHut users on a day-to-day basis is from users who have lost access to their TOTP (Time-based One-time Password algorithm) codes. Losing your phone, getting a new one and forgetting to migrate the keys, or wiping it to install a new OS are common reasons to accidentally lose access to your two-factor authentication.

Naturally, we cannot just disable 2FA on your account, no questions asked. The purpose of 2FA is to increase the level of scrutiny that’s placed on attempts to make authorized requests for your account. Therefore, we seek some alternative method of authenticating that you are who you say you are.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? February 2020

Sat, 15 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hello again! Another month into 2020, and SourceHut development continues at a strong pace - a pace I expect to pick up a bit in the coming weeks. We’re joined by another 443 users this month, bringing our total to 12,757. Welcome to SourceHut, everyone! And to our older members, thanks for your continued support.

General News

Our meetup at FOSDEM went well - thanks to everyone who attended! I’m glad I got to meet more of you in person, and we had a great chat going over the plans for the future and getting your feedback on what’s important to you.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? January 2020

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to 2020! We kick off our first status update of the year with a community 12,314 users strong, up 387 from our last update of 2019. A warm welcome to all of our new members, and a big thanks to everyone for continuing to use and support SourceHut. This month was heavy on operations work, so this update is light on new features - but we’re turning our attention back to feature development in the coming weeks.

Sourcehut Q4 2019 Financial report

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In summary, Sourcehut is financially healthy. We have a reduced services profit from Q3 - we are currently breaking even - but this is due to a planned increase in expenses and is offset by revenue from our new consultancy. Growth has continued at a similar pace to Q3. Through the recent formalization of the SourceHut free software consultancy, we have also raised a significant amount of capital, which increases our runway substantially, and allows us to consider more hires, new hardware provisioning, and so on. 2019 was a great year for SourceHut, and I summarized our accomplishments and goals in this earlier article.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? December 2019

Sun, 15 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is our last “what’s cooking” of 2019! We’re seeing out the year with 11,927 registered users, 563 stronger than November. Please give our new members a warm welcome! We have some cool progress on many fronts this month.

General News

First of all, we finally got single-sign-on sorted out this month. Now, logging in once will log you in everywhere. Many other problems which stemmed from this have also been fixed - long time users will no doubt have seen the “log out and back in to enable builds.sr.ht integration” message on a git push, but thankfully that annoyance will be unknown to new users going forward. This was also a pre-requisite for dealing with user groups, which will be the next main focus of account management work.

What happens when you push to git.sr.ht, and why was it so slow?

Fri, 22 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most persistent, frustrating, and entirely valid, criticisms of Sourcehut that I’ve heard has been that git operations over SSH are too slow. The reason this is a frustrating complaint to hear is that the git.sr.ht SSH pipeline is a complicated set of many moving parts, and fixing the problem involved changes at every level. However, as many of you will (hopefully) have noticed by now, pushing to and pulling from git.sr.ht is quite snappy now! So after a huge amount of work overhauling everything to get us here, I thought it would be nice to reflect on what caused these issues, how this system is structured, and how the problem was eventually solved.

Sourcehut's year in alpha

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of the commencement of Sourcehut’s public alpha, after 2 years in private development. I’m immensely thankful for your support during the alpha. It’s mostly been a one-man operation here, but thanks in large part to the financial support of the alpha users, I’ve been able to work on Sourcehut and free software in general full-time for a full year as of this February. With this first year of the alpha behind us, what have we accomplished, and what do we have planned for 2020?

Our model is customers first, investors never

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

SourceHut was built by veterans of the Internet, who have watched the turbulent lifecycle of Internet-based businesses coming into popularity and fading into obscurity time and again. Most large online businesses these days are for-profit companies funded with venture capital, and that leads to a certain set of incentives. It was no surprise to us, accordingly, to receive this email from GitLab today:

We have launched important updates to our Terms of Service surrounding our use of telemetry services. Starting with GitLab 12.4, existing customers who use our proprietary products (that is, GitLab.com and the Enterprise Edition of our self-managed offerings) may notice additional Javascript snippets that will interact with GitLab and/or third-party SaaS telemetry service (such as Pendo).

Sourcehut Q3 2019 Financial report

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In summary, Sourcehut is financially healthy, with an operating monthly profit of about $1,038. Slowed growth in Q2 picked back up in Q3, to levels similar to Q1. Though perpetual growth is not a goal of Sourcehut, growth does help us accomplish our goals. One of these goals is to sponsor members of the open-source community to work on self-directed projects - a goal which was met for Q4, when Simon Ser will be joining us. My goals for future growth are:

What's cooking on Sourcehut? October 2019

Tue, 15 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m more excited to give today’s status update than any other so far. To get the necssary bits out of the way: this month, 368 users have joined the community, bringing our total to 10,539¹. Welcome!

General news: Simon Ser joins us

I’m very excited to announce that Simon Ser will be joining Sourcehut. His role will be interesting, and representative of my vision for Sourcehut in the long-term. Simon’s responsibilities are to simply continue working on self-directed free software projects. I chose to work with him because he’s already a talented generalist and motivated member of the free software community. He’s written more about his specific plans in his own blog post, but with our support he’ll be working on projects like mrsh, Wayland, and the maintenance of large swaths of Golang’s email landscape.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? September 2019

Sun, 15 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Another month of progress in the Sourcehut alpha! This month, we reached the big 10,000 user mark, and kept going: at the time of writing, there are 10,649 users. To the 938 of you who’ve joined us since the August update, welcome! I’m sure many of you have joined us after abandoning the sinking Bitbucket ship, and if so I hope you’ve found Sourcehut to your liking. If you have any questions or feedback, I can be reached at sir@cmpwn.com. And a special thanks to the 1,093 users who have paid for their alpha accounts, which for the first time represents more than 10% of all registered users.

Sourcehut makes BSD software better

Wed, 11 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Every day, Sourcehut runs continuous integration for FreeBSD and OpenBSD for dozens of projects, and believe it or not, some of them don’t even use Sourcehut for distribution! Improving the BSD software ecosystem is important to us, and as such our platform is designed to embrace the environment around it, rather than building a new walled garden. This makes it easy for existing software projects to plug into our CI infastructure, and many BSD projects take advantage of this to improve their software.

Sourcehut welcomes Bitbucket refugees

Wed, 21 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Atlassian announced on Wednesday that Bitbucket is shuttering its Mercurial offering.

For those looking for a new host, Sourcehut may be a good choice for you. Unlike its closed-source competitors, Sourcehut is 100% open source software, and thanks to the Mercurial community (especially Ludovic Chabant), Hg support on Sourcehut is strong and will remain so for as long as the Hg community is committed to it.

Bitbucket users may find our workflow different from what they’re used to, but it’s different for good reasons. Give it an shot and ask for help if you need it. We’ve prepared a migration tool which will import your Bitbucket repos and issues.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? August 2019

Thu, 15 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Thank you for continuing to support Sourcehut during the alpha period! I have loads of exiting developments to share with you today. Let’s welcome our newest 369 users to the platform, which now totals 9,711 in number.

builds.sr.ht

I’m happy to announce lots of cool features for builds.sr.ht this month. First, the VMs for failed builds are now being kept alive for 10 minutes after the completion of your build, and you can SSH into them to examine the failure more closely (if you do so, the 10 minute deadline is extended to the original time limit for your build).

What's cooking on Sourcehut? July 2019

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Hello again, and thank you for your support during SourceHut’s alpha! This month, our ranks have grown by 352 users, bringing our total company to 9,342 users. The big 10K looms over the horizon! I have some very cool developments to share with you this month.

git.sr.ht

The first and perhaps most exciting development is the availability of code annotations on git.sr.ht. This feature allows you to upload a list of annotations to your repo, which can link from function references to their definition (and vice versa), or link to ticket IDs referenced in comments, or anything else you can dream up. The system is quite flexible and should grow easily to support any number of cool use-cases you can dream up.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? June 2019

Sat, 15 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks again for following SourceHut during the alpha! I hope you’re all enjoying the service. Remember to send me your feedback, good or bad! Another month passes and another 430 users join our ranks, bringing our total to 8,990 - just shy of 9,000 strong. To our new members: welcome! And to the 874 users who’ve chosen to pay for their account despite the alpha level of quality the service presents today, a special thanks: your support is the reason I’m able to work so hard on the service and free software in general.

What's cooking on Sourcehut? May 2019

Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Another month of Sourcehut development passes! I’ve got some really cool news to share today. And a big welcome to our 240 new users, who bring our total up to 8,560. Thanks again to everyone for supporting Sourcehut during the alpha! I’d like to briefly remind you that Sourcehut depends on your financial support to thrive - please consider purchasing a subscription if you haven’t yet. We just released our Q1 financial report, which breaks down our income today and explains where your subscription fee ends up:

Hire talented free software developers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sourcehut is the home to some of the most talented software engineers in the world. Free and open-source software is eating the world, and we have front-line engineers with knowledge and connections to the free software community. We offer our services as consultants focusing exclusively on free software projects.

Why should you hire our engineers?

We live and breathe free and open-source software like no one else does.
We have an intimate and practical understanding of the free software ecosystem. Our engineers publish and contribute to open-source code every day.
We solve hard problems first.
We are good at quickly identifying the hard parts of a problem, and tackle these first. Our services don’t come cheap, so we spend our time where it matters most.
We pull solutions from across domains.
By encouraging them to work on any projects they like, our engineers have a very broad skillset, from low-level graphics drivers to high-level ops & monitoring work.
We are used to hitting the ground running.
Our engineers are constantly introducing ourselves to new projects. We’re not afraid to dive into any level of our stack and start writing patches.
We elevate the rest of your team.
In our role as free software maintainers, mentorship and onboarding is a critical part of our work. We can efficiently coordinate teams of mixed experience.

Whether you have a greenfield project to develop or need someone to lead the charge upstream for changes you need to a free software project, we’re the experts you need.

Logo & Media resources

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The SourceHut logo is a circle. Logos are generally a bit faffy so we just hand-wrote an SVG to make something marginally interesting to sit in the corner of the page. Nevertheless, if you need our logo for something, you may have it.

Black

White

Black with text

White with text

A circle is not copyrightable. But, if you insist, you may consider these CC-0.

Reaching the Sourcehut community

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Keeping up with the community of hackers working on and with Sourcehut.

Mailing lists

The sr.ht-discuss mailing list is used for general Sourcehut-related questions and discussions, sharing your projects, and so on. The sr.ht-dev list is used for discussing the development of Sourcehut itself.

Real time chat

We use IRC for chat. You can join us on Libera.Chat with your favorite IRC client at #sr.ht. There’s not always someone online, so be prepared to send a follow-up email if necessary.

sourcehut pricing - the hacker's forge

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

All users who host projects on SourceHut are expected to pay according to their means. choose the subscription plan most appropriate to your means — there is no difference between the subscriptions besides price.

Products & prices

Service tier	Monthly price
Amateur hackers	€4/mo^†	$4/mo
Typical hackers	€8/mo^†	$8/mo
Professional hackers	€12/mo^†	$12/mo
All service tiers include full access to all services.	Euro	US dollar

^† VAT not included. Applicable taxes are calculated based on your billing address during checkout.

SourceHut's contributions to free software

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

SourceHut employs a staff with an extensive background in free software philosophy and practice, and we routinely contribute to thousands of free software projects around the ecosystem. We write exclusively free software at SourceHut. This page summarizes some of our work in the broader ecosystem.

SourceHut is free software

The SourceHut platform is itself free software. You can browse the source code here, or check out some specific projects from this list:

What's the scope of Sourcehut's alpha?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sourcehut’s public alpha

We aim for a higher standard of quality than most software & services working in this domain. What we consider an alpha passes for a production-ready system to some. Today, SourceHut is relied upon by thousands of projects as a robust, secure, and reliable service. We have better uptime than GitHub or GitLab.

Alpha guarantees

We provide the following guarantees regarding the production quality of the SourceHut hosted services:

Your account data is safe and secure

We take frequent backups and use highly redundant systems to store your data. We utilize extensive active monitoring and frequent testing to ensure the reliability of our backup systems. Each development change which requires changes to our storage systems is carefully planned for to ensure your account data is carried over intact. There will be no “clean slate” event as we progress from the alpha to the beta to production.