Phorge is here – Phabricator’s successor is live – Notes on Niche Software

It took a little while, but it eventually got ready: Phorge¹, the rebranded successor of Phabricator was officially released. I mentioned already in my profession of faith and my notes on emulating the arcanist CLI behavior that I’ve long been a fan.

Here are a few unstructured thoughts about the release.

May 2024 Edit: if you’re working with GitHub and are missing arcanist, check out SPR and why I love it.

Open Niches

The software universe keeps expanding, and despite the existence of mega-players such as github or gitlab making it tough for anything else to survive, there seem to be niches were alternatives may strive.

One reason for this might be related to open source purists: the EFF (or it might be others, not sure to remember correclty) regularly point out that github, while presenting itself as the best steward of open source projects, is not itself open source.²

Add to it the fact that they mine their hosted code for projects such as co-pilot, and you have a sufficiently strong reason for at least a few open alternatives to exist.

Weird Indie Quality

How the project fares further away from Evan’s capacity of staying laser focused on what he sees as providing the greatest benefit in the most simple way remains to be seen: one of Phorge’s goals is to make it easier to develop community plugins, and generally lower the friction for external contributors. How it impacts the project will be very interesting to observe.

In any case, phabricator-now-phorge remains my favourite example of what a small team can achieve with passion and focus, and Evan Priestley’s style will long remain among my favorites.

As a commenter had put it when Evan announced he would slowly stop maintaining Phabricator:

Thanks for all the fish

Alternatives Ain’t there yet

What I (still) prefer with Phorge is the code review UI, which has not been matched with anything I’ve seen in terms of functionality: bitbucket, gitlab, github, … they are all lacking, in my opinion, when it comes to iteratively improving on a changeset together with the reviewers. Yes, sure, you can do reviews, strictly speaking, but things like easily seeing what changed during two review rounds to follow up efficiently are still lacking.

So much that there’s at least one startup tackling the review process specifically³: it seems that software craftmanship can still express itself differently from more industrial approaches.

So, Phabricator is dead and Phorge is born:

long liphe to great tools!