Is Mastodon successful?

Git is meant to be a dvcs (distributed version control system) and I remember doing this in the early days of Git to point to any remote when the central repository or provider was down.

Is it possible to create mirrors of every repo with no Microsoft dependency or until someone else acquires GitHub from Microsoft and makes it more reliable (maybe Elon Musk like he did with Twitter)? This can solve for commit/push/pull when GitHub is down, but not for Pull requests and reviews.

> 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.

Feels a bit like the eletricity outage in spain where people had a brief moment where they actually got off the internet phone and enjoyed real-life.

This is only a problem if you have agents working from public comments and issues.

Why would you do such a thing?

> Get rid of some of the baked in Co-Pilot integrations that might be compounding the extra workloads.

Yes, I’m curious just how much of the scaling issues might be self-inflicted.

Also I’d like to see the distribution of usage. I’m guessing a relatively small portion of accounts are responsible for the majority of load.

For portfolio and service only, virtually any GH alternative discussed here will do it. Even a self-hosted cgit or static page git browser will do it for read-only.