What is GH's remaining long-term moat right now, anyway? Microsoft bundling? Name recognition? That it's still the goto place for open source? Existing corpo contracts?

- githubs' ci/cd has been pretty crap for me personally (ok there's worse out there but it's definitely not a joyful thing)

- The user interface I hate more and more each year.

- The availability, well... there's still two nines in there lol

- the CLI is not bad, i don't hate that

> What is GH's remaining long-term moat right now

180,000,000 monthly active users

> still two nines

Unfortunately, as a codeberg user, codeberg doesn't have 2 9s...

Community; network effects.

Also, observe that the competitors all copied it's UI. And on a case-by-case basis, they have drawbacks of their own.

i wonder if it's just an unappealing business to compete with. it's like walmart: no one likes walmart, but it's unappealing to compete with them in small-town america.

plus, it's a huge headache to run and not very profitable. github mostly makes money on ci/cd, but a github alternative wouldn't benefit from that: anyone migrating would inherently evaluate other ci/cd vendors. plus, github eats a ton of network egress, which is very expensive. the only people who could eat the cost are the other clouds: gcp, aws, cloudflare, etc. but it feels dubiously beneficial for them.

Probably network effects, integration, just about everyone knows how to use it, high switching cost, the fact that it’s mostly good enough, etc.

Even if you switch away from GitHub, you’re probably going to use it for something else anyway. There will be some dependency or something that’s still on there or you might use it for discovery. Then you have to spend time and money migrating to something else for what? Comparable features and interface? Maybe avoid a few minutes of downtime every month? Migrating a team might cost the equivalent of years of downtime. Or host it yourself to spend more of your own time and maybe get a worse result?

Really, what does downtime cost anyway when you are using a distributed version control system? It’s not like you don’t have access to the code. You might not have access to issues or CI for a few minutes. So what? It’s annoying, but is switching really worth it?

And what else is out there? Gitlab? Gitea? BTW, that’s the dumbest name ever for a product. I wouldn’t use it just so I don’t have to say that word. Are either of those enough of an improvement to justify the time? Or host Forgejo? Now you’re in the hosting business and only have yourself to blame when it inevitably goes down.

It’s easier to just use GitHub even if GitHub isn’t great.

* Free private repos

* Free CI, especially Mac & Windows.

Find my a competitor that offers that. Until then I think their uptime is going to have to get a lot worse before the majority care.