Gitdot – a better GitHub. Open-source, written in Rust

Paul and Mikkel looked at GitHub—yes, THE GitHub with 100+ million developers—and said "we can do this better." In Rust. That's either genius or hubris, and honestly the line between those two has always been blurry.

Gitdot is a open-source GitHub alternative built from the ground up in Rust. It does the basics right now: user signups, org creations, private and public repos, and you can import your GitHub repos either as read-only mirrors or full migrations. You can create, push and pull. What it doesn't have yet: issues, PRs, CI. So yeah, it's early. But here's the thing that makes people actually care—the website doesn't look like a web app. It looks like a CLI. Inspired by fzf, broot, and vim. No mouse required. Keyboard-driven navigation with a 100ms First Contentful Paint goal. That's not a typo. One hundred milliseconds.

They dropped on Hacker News and got 234 points with 200 comments in 12 hours. For a barebones git hosting platform with no issues or PRs yet. That kind of attention doesn't happen by accident—people are hungry for something that feels different. GitHub has been the same since 2008. It's bloated, slow, and loaded with features most people never use. Gitdot is betting that minimal is the new maximal.

It's open source, it's written in Rust, and it's probably two years away from being a real replacement. But sometimes the early bets are the only bets that matter. Paul and Mikkel are building something for people who actually like git—not the UI around it.