Call it the network effect, or the momentum of becoming a staple in the tech community, or whatever; GitHub is here to stay for a while, and the leaders in charge of it are well aware of this.
GitHub has gained enough attention that it is almost impossible to ignore. Projects on GitHub tend to attract a level of engagement (code contributions, issue reports, and feedback) that other code forges do not enjoy.
One unfortunate consequence of this, which I have experienced recently, is when recruiters ask for links to my past work or open-source contributions but refuse to accept links to relevant repositories on GitLab. The number of companies where this occurred was significant enough for me to set up mirror repositories on GitHub.
Another frustrating but silly consequence was when I was questioned during one of the interviews why my activity graph on GitHub was empty: I had simply not enabled it.
The problem is the inter-connection to see everything a single person does and their stats. There should be the possibility for a new (decentralized) system in which you can authenticate all your known repositories, no matter whether they're on GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, self-hosted Gitea or something entirely different. And there you could have links to all your activity and a graph without being bound to any single service.
That may be a good idea. However, people have had around 25 years of familiarity with all things centralised on the internet and the conveniences associated with it. If anything, we are doubling down on the centralised nature of the internet.
It will take a great amount of time and effort to build a equivalently convenient decentralised alternatives, and to overcome the inertia to migrate to it.
The latter I believe is only possible when something enormously drastic happens. We had a good number of drastic events happen in the last decade (Twitter poisoning, Meta privacy breaches, Reddit shenanigans), but none enough to convince people to move to alternatives.
Another possibility is for regulations and/or governments to support the alternatives, but that may have unintended side effects of its own.
There are some good examples for decentralization. E-Mail is the most obvious and biggest one. And Git itself is also one, because independent projects can be anywhere. But I genuinely understand why people want a centralized place, because it allows to easily search for things, make stats, have an overview on your stuff, etc. I feel like the only true possibility of an alternative is like such a place, a single project that is consistent everywhere and lets people have their entire work, so that it looks centralized, even if it's not.
I feel like the only true possibility of an alternative is like such a place, a single project that is consistent everywhere and lets people have their entire work, so that it looks centralized, even if it's not.
I agree. Version control might be the ideal domain to pull this off in, or at least it has the most potential.
Call it the network effect, or the momentum of becoming a staple in the tech community, or whatever; GitHub is here to stay for a while, and the leaders in charge of it are well aware of this.
GitHub has gained enough attention that it is almost impossible to ignore. Projects on GitHub tend to attract a level of engagement (code contributions, issue reports, and feedback) that other code forges do not enjoy.
One unfortunate consequence of this, which I have experienced recently, is when recruiters ask for links to my past work or open-source contributions but refuse to accept links to relevant repositories on GitLab. The number of companies where this occurred was significant enough for me to set up mirror repositories on GitHub.
Another frustrating but silly consequence was when I was questioned during one of the interviews why my activity graph on GitHub was empty: I had simply not enabled it.
The problem is the inter-connection to see everything a single person does and their stats. There should be the possibility for a new (decentralized) system in which you can authenticate all your known repositories, no matter whether they're on GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, self-hosted Gitea or something entirely different. And there you could have links to all your activity and a graph without being bound to any single service.
That may be a good idea. However, people have had around 25 years of familiarity with all things centralised on the internet and the conveniences associated with it. If anything, we are doubling down on the centralised nature of the internet.
It will take a great amount of time and effort to build a equivalently convenient decentralised alternatives, and to overcome the inertia to migrate to it.
The latter I believe is only possible when something enormously drastic happens. We had a good number of drastic events happen in the last decade (Twitter poisoning, Meta privacy breaches, Reddit shenanigans), but none enough to convince people to move to alternatives.
Another possibility is for regulations and/or governments to support the alternatives, but that may have unintended side effects of its own.
There are some good examples for decentralization. E-Mail is the most obvious and biggest one. And Git itself is also one, because independent projects can be anywhere. But I genuinely understand why people want a centralized place, because it allows to easily search for things, make stats, have an overview on your stuff, etc. I feel like the only true possibility of an alternative is like such a place, a single project that is consistent everywhere and lets people have their entire work, so that it looks centralized, even if it's not.
I agree. Version control might be the ideal domain to pull this off in, or at least it has the most potential.