this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Why is your open source project still hosted on GitHub? (unixdigest.com)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/opensource
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[–] FizzyOrange 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)
  • Free CI
  • Everyone else also uses GitHub

Wake me up when there's a competitor that can match that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah well, as long as everybody wants to be on the platform that everybody else is on, by definition there can't be a competitor. That's kind of the point here.

[–] FizzyOrange 3 points 1 day ago

Even when there are huge network effects like this you do occasionally see big shifts, usually when the incumbent screws up, or there's a competitor that is so much better that people want to switch anyway. For example SMS->BBM->WhatsApp, MySpace->Facebook->WhatsApp, Digg->Reddit, and of course Sourceforge->GitHub.

So I guess the deeper question is "why does everybody else still use GitHub?" and the answer is:

  1. Microsoft haven't screwed GitHub up in any significant way (like e.g. Digg did).
  2. There aren't any competitors that are so obviously better than people want to use it despite the network effects.