> Also from my experience of trying to leave GitHub, you just end up having a couple of projects on your alternative platform, and everything else on GitHub.
> And if you want to build a community, you will quickly find out that the majority want to stick to GitHub, and leaving it can kill your projects chances of getting contributions.
That's a defeatist attitude and a self-fulfilling prophecy at the same time. As more and more people leave GitHub (hopefully not to go to the same alternative), it becomes less and less of a must-have. The reason these things are somewhat true today is because of the network effect, and it's precisely that effect which we must actively attempt to squash by leaving.
Parent is talking about a fundamental feature of networks. A denser and larger network has much more useful network-related features, and if one company has a significant majority of the total addressable market for a network, it's a massive ask for people to extricate themselves and rebuild a network somewhere else.
It's why Facebook is still on top even though everyone hated it for a while; YouTube is the *only video platform, etc.
> And if you want to build a community, you will quickly find out that the majority want to stick to GitHub, and leaving it can kill your projects chances of getting contributions.
That's a defeatist attitude and a self-fulfilling prophecy at the same time. As more and more people leave GitHub (hopefully not to go to the same alternative), it becomes less and less of a must-have. The reason these things are somewhat true today is because of the network effect, and it's precisely that effect which we must actively attempt to squash by leaving.