Personally I never engaged in the community aspect of GitHub.

In my eyes it would be a ginormous gain to our colective mental health to not have the expectation to contribute to open source projects for free, or to have "green squares" every day on a public GitHub profile.

I just use GitHub for the basics: repo hosting, reviews and actions - what are the "social media psyop manipulations"? I've never really paid much attention to the other features.

Could be argued to be both a gain and a loss...

If there are no subscription services, what will fund the free open source repositories?

This is why I'm so interested in https://tangled.org/

Even if the platform itself doesn't take off, the protocol and the data ownwership (you host your repo artifacts, issues, prs, etc on your ATproto server) mean that a competitor could come in easily if you were no longer satisfied with performance, reliability, or monetization.

"Protocols" now that everything has been moved to a master-slave protocol (HTTP), we are all slaves of the masters.

There are plenty of alternatives for git hosting. The last thing which needs to be migrated before we get an exodus off this vibe coded monstrosity is reputation (i.e. github stars) which are inherently sticky.

I like Fossil, but there are good reasons to use git too.

There are many git hosting options, including some for self hosting. its a lot easier to switch to a different version control host than to a different version control system.

> Luckily we already have a distributed version control system that can take over github

Surprised that this wasn't just a link to Git. The biggest benefit of Git over predecessors was that it enabled decentralization. Github re-centralized the common case for the sake of convenience.

Just in the US. I have ONE European client... ONE of dozens who use GitHub.

EVERY other client I've ever worked with used their own gitforge or at least bitbucket...

Do you have any more insight into its progress?

Seems like it's far from production-ready and there hasn't been much activity this year?

Do you have numbers to back that statement up? I don't necessarily doubt it, but I haven't seen anything to support it.

Note that raw user numbers won't really cut it; if 1 million people left Twitter, it's possible that 500 000 of those people joined and 500 000 new people joined; the user numbers would look like everyone returned, but really only 50% did in this hypothetical.

Twitter is a shadow of what it once was. The design of the site has shifted very very hard in favour of being an algorithmic content soup rather than a social network in the traditional sense. This has juiced the engagement numbers but there's a lot less meaning to them now. (I can say all this because I am a bitter holdout who still tries to use the site to have conversations with people and form personal connections. Tragically it still offers something that Bluesky and the Fediverse do not, even if that thing is slowly but surely being smothered out.)

I'd say about a third of software engineers whose blogs I stumble upon and end up liking aren't active on twitter. Their accounts typically have nothing posted for 3-4 years, but they're active on bluesky or mastodon.

Was this reported and quantified somewhere, or does 95% reflect your experience? My experience was the opposite -- everybody I cared to follow left and never went back -- but I'd be willing to believe I'm in the 5%.

There was nothing wrong with twitter, it was a social fad to performatively leave.

Github is actually down and I can't push code right now, it's blocking my business which is unacceptable. It's a broken tool.

Both are not comparable as the stickiness dynamics are completely different.

On Twitter, it's mostly the networking effect, you want to be where peoples are, and unless a large chunk move at once, you are stuck there.

On Github, it's the technical cost of migrating, the git part is trivial, but tickets, PR history and CI/Integration are another can of worms.

Projects which moved away, moved away for good, at most only leaving a synchronized mirror.

That was a political decision, this is an operational one. A lot of companies have become dependent on a working github and effectively have to down tools when it is down.

> how 95% of the people that left Twitter eventually returned

and this assertion is based on ... ?

this varies by field, most scientists have left twitter for good

Are you potentially in the US? I think the experience is very different globally.

Ever since the Twitter -> X rebranding, every time I open Twitter links, I have a very high chance of hitting a "Something went wrong" type page, with a retry button that just does nothing. It's been like this for ages. I barely open Twitter links anymore as a result.

I think they may mean Twitter's 'Fail Whale' era – late 2000s/early 2010s, when it regularly fell over under load.

~2007-12?!