The implication that these services are an "alternative" to GitHub is only coming from the blog post, none of them try to directly compete with GitHub as a plat

The implication that these services are an "alternative" to GitHub is only coming from the blog post, none of them try to directly compete with GitHub as a platform and service. Instead they provide software mostly for self-hosting a GitHub-like service. There's no point in running the service on your own, instead you need to go where the people/developers are and where you can be easily discovered.