> Could be. But 99% of the repos are static garbage with no PR nor actions.

But the 1% of repos that do have PRs and actions are likely going to be seeing enormous increases in volumes

I have been a part of two very large companies with self hosted gits and I've seen enough to be confident that this is an incredibly hard thing to manage

At that point, make it lazy indexing? Who cares that I can't find a repo that was made 10 seconds ago, or even 15 minutes ago? No seriously, who cares? Search to that level of nuance is not mission critical, I don't care what anyone says, you'll live if you wait another 15 minutes or even an hour. Their search has been terrible since their last major set of search changes where they overhauled it completely either way.

Serious question, have you been part of an org that had to scale orders of magnitude very quickly?

Anyone who has been part of that journey knows how painful it really is. A lot of times the systems to fail at all levels, and you have to redesign it from the first principles.

The problem is that they are charging per seat and need to start charging for usage.

I mean, what will happen here is people will go to other services and they'll get overloaded too.

Self hosted is probably the way to go, but hardware prices are insane currently.

I didn't challenge them on this but it's because of Claude integrations with github. I'm not sure what that gives them over just running it against the codebase, but I didn't want to lose the opportunity to finally move them from that EoL server

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you

To maintain a fair comparison, GitHub has supported self-hosted runners for several years (maybe that doesn’t work for your specific usage, for whatever reason).

> We were on self-hosted Gitlab but after a merger were forced to Github. Navigation feels painful in comparison and basic features such as commit graph are now behind more expensive tiers.

Same experience here. Add to that that even on Enterprise tier:

- 1 Enterprise : 1 namespace - although you can segment it with Orgs, we were advised not to do it because we're too small (~2k people) (GL: groups, subgroups, sub-subgroups, ...)

- SSH deploy keys are singletons across the entire instance and repo-bound (and Weblate for instance can only use its own key), so you need a service account for that (GL: instance-wide SSH deploy keys that you can activate in specific repos)

- GHCR only really supports classic PATs for authentication ( https://docs.github.com/en/packages/working-with-a-github-pa... - GL: proper deploy keys properly inherited throughout the hierarchy)

So all in all the experience so far is a huge step-down. I really liked pinning commonly accessed pages in the sidebar.

Interesting! I worked with Gitlab and I also thought it was quite clunky. If it was not for the stability issues GitHub is fine. Any other alternatives to GH or GL?

I think you’ve got it backwards. GitHub is by far the market leader for hosted repositories and maybe for CI too. This is like asking “Why are companies interested in using AWS?”

When one firm is so dominant for so long, the question is more like “Why shouldn’t we just use GitHub like 80% of software companies do?”

The issues they’ve had are almost all very recent. Very few companies have reevaluated that decision, because moving a big and well-integrated part of infrastructure is a huge project that delivers no value to the business. Speculating that you’ll have fewer development-slowing outages is not the most convincing when asking for the budget to do this. Plus, self-hosted isn’t necessarily going to have better uptime - mistakes happen.

I think before Actions, it would have been a lot easier to migrate off GH though. You’d just need to change a lot of repo URLs and find a way to set up webhooks from the new place to poke CI. Now with Actions, a lot lives in GH and in a proprietary flavor that doesn’t just ‘lift and shift.’

Most developers have experience using GitHub. The UI and concepts are familiar. The friction for adopting features like Actions is relatively low.

> Honest question, why are companies interested in hosting on github?

Mostly boils down to marketing and easier to establish a community. Almost every developer has an account there, leading to network effects being much larger, so if you're a new FOSS project, finding contributors and getting your project in front of other's eyes is much easier when you're on GitHub compared to your own Forgejo instance.

With that said, I'd question if chasing "most external one-time contributors" or GitHub stars is the right way to actually run a FOSS project, personally I'd avoid thinking about those vanity-numbers as much as possible and focus on the project, code and contributors themselves.

But, I've literally heard those two arguments for "why GitHub" countless of times over the years.

I don’t know why you would even really need hosted git or why you’d be affected by its downtime. Git is decentralized by design. One node going down should not stop development. You don’t need a “central hub” to keep working.

I guess it’s all the other non-git stuff like issue tracking and other (unfortunately) centralized products on GitHub that causes disruption when they go down.

Weird how GitHub built itself around a distributed VC system and then made all its other services centralized.

Onboarding construct workers is super easy.