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> That said, the GitHub team reports that the set of users who have migrated or closed their accounts is extremely small, and this is more than made up for by t

> That said, the GitHub team reports that the set of users who have migrated or closed their accounts is extremely small, and this is more than made up for by the surge of new signups and new interest in GitHub this week. It's interesting to hear this. If you were on HN the past week, it might have seemed from all the front page articles that GitHub was about to implode due to an an exodus to GitLab.

hari_seldon_ 8y ago
This is the standard HN effect. I also love when I think some startups are killing it based on what I read here; but then they end up shutting down soon after due to a lack of any real revenue model.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  Given how 1) he's provided no evidence to support his claim, 2) he would never publicly say "a significant number of users have moved", and 3) gitlab has a public tracker showing thousands of projects being imported, I'd take his comment with a large grain of salt.
  - gaius 8y ago
    Github has 28 million users with 85 million repos. Thousands is a very small proportion. Also: Gitlab also has to exit one day. The only question is who buys them.
    - n42 8y ago
      how active are those users and repositories? both of these statistics are meaningless without additional context
    - Semaphor 8y ago
      FWIW, Gitlab would prefer an IPO and they say they are on track for it. Source: Gitlab guy in one of the many, many, many Gitlab or Github threads recently.
      - fipple 8y ago
        Everyone says they’d prefer an IPO but a lot of them change their minds when a man puts a $7.5 billion check on the table.
      - skinnymuch 8y ago
        Gitlab isn’t going to say no to $7.5B or any number close to that. They are also more venture backed compared to GitHub.
    - hultner 8y ago
      Do they? Are they backed by capital pushing for an “Exit”, and even if so, couldn’t an IPO be a viable option?
      - irq11 8y ago
        They’ve taken a big pile of VC funding, so the answer to your first question is yes. Meanwhile, the biggest player (by far) in the market just abandoned dreams of an IPO. Gitlab is a distant third place in that market, and has a revenue model that is best described as “like Github, but cheaper.” IPOs are only viable if you have a business capable of supporting them.
        gaius 8y ago
        There are only two possibilities I see: acquired by Atlassian and merged with Bitbucket, or by a low-tier cloud player with deep pockets such as Aliyun or Oracle. The IPO market just isn’t that buoyant at the moment.
        inks 8y ago
        Oracle has been looking at GitLab since the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub.
        Jedd 8y ago
        > ... that is best described as “like Github, but cheaper.” Aha, I thought I may find you on this thread, once again pushing the same line.
        skinnymuch 8y ago
        Is Gitlab a distant third? I didn’t know if they are in second place or not. But distant seems too much. Is Bitbucket in second place? Any numbers or references you have?
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
the-dude 8y ago
I think most people mirrored instead of closing. Spin.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  >I think most people Based on... what exactly? That's a big claim to make without any data.
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    Speaking on behalf of myself and myself alone, I have published stuff that links to my personal github repos. So although I've already migrated those projects to Gitlab, like the OP said Github is still used as a mirror. I imagine how hard it must be for organizations to do the same.
  - vokep 8y ago
    its a reasonable expectation. You don't need any data to understand that most people will care about certain things in a given situation. (and actually, in making such a generalization, data is being used to make that, its a bit difficult to present that data since its more of a soft 'life experience and understanding of what positions others might be in and choices they might make in such positions' kind of data.)
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      >its a reasonable expectation. You don't need any data to understand that most people will care about certain things in a given situation. I don't even know what that means; it's so vague and lacking in detail as to be useless. Of course "people care about things in situations". but we're talking about _what_ they care about, and that depends on the situation. For example: "are Nazi's bad?". I don't need to see hard numbers to believe that the answer from most people will be "yes". "Is MS buying GitHub bad"? That's a whole other story. The vocal minority often doesn't represent the majority in things like this. I think it's pretty clear that most people in fact _don't_ care about the things the-dude cares about. Privacy, lock in, using services provided by "evil" companies... these are things a tiny fraction of people care about. You know how I know that? All of these companies you don't like are _insanely_ successful.
marricks 8y ago
I’m more willing to believe the openly viewable GitLab migration tracker, which shows several thousand projects migrated. Just another way Gitlab is nice is the openly viewable statistics versus a generalization. https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/03/movingtogitlab/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/03/movingtogitlab/
- beberlei 8y ago
  a few hundred thousand repositories of the 85 million reported Github repositories is really not much, see https://github.com/ten https://github.com/ten at the bottom for the number.
  - dawnerd 8y ago
    of those 85 million how many are actually active and not just placeholder empty repos or automated mirrors for wordpress/jquery plugins? Not on anyones side here but if the top 250k repos switched, that would be really bad news. I think it's more important to compare size and popularity of the repos than just what the % is.
    - beberlei 8y ago
      i assumed that only small repositories that nobody except the author is using can be moved in such a small timespan of a few hours. Heavily used open source projects have issues indexed in Google with permalinks, their users probably hardcoding git urls, connections to package managers, heavily customized Travis CI integrations and the like.
    - jhall1468 8y ago
      Of those that switched, how many were backup mirrors vs actually switching to the Gitlab platform? We can only guesstimate with the data we have.
    - skinnymuch 8y ago
      Yeah. That has to go both ways too. If it’s only tiny repos moving over and not top repos.
jbob2000 8y ago
It's not about the number of the accounts that move, but the importance of the accounts. A couple of personal projects move? Whoop-di-doo. A huge, popular open source app moves? Or a GitHub rockstar leaves? That's big news. So I don't care really care how many leave, in fact that's a clever distraction. I care about who is leaving.
pera 8y ago
The announcement happened just 3 days ago, so it's still too early to draw any conclusions. I personally decided to move my stuff out of GitHub, but it will take me a week or so to know where exactly as I'm still analyzing various options. And after migrating, I don't think I will close my account (even when I really distrust Microsoft) simply because too many libre software projects are currently using GitHub.
- Zamicol 8y ago
  Same. It's going to take a while for me to move out of Github. I have a lot there over years and scripts that use Github. Also Gitlab's import is failing on some repos. It's also suddenly pushed me in a place where I have to suddenly find an alternative. It's going to take some time.
  - ProAm 8y ago
    Can you just host a git server yourself? Not trying to be snarky but seems doable.
    - boojums 8y ago
      I have a self-hosted git instance on a VPS. It's trivial to set up for doing personal projects, but it would take quite a bit more work to properly set it up so other people could clone repos or contribute. Depending on what GitHub features Zamicol is using, it could be a pretty large project to self-host.
    - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
      You can. It's very doable. Plenty of people do it. But the real value of GH was "social coding" - open public access to open public projects. That's going to fragment, even if GL takes over. And that will be a loss. The real problem is the lack of open public server infrastructure. In the same way that everyone has access to a browser, everyone should have access to a private server, which is secure-by-default, controllably networked, super easy to set up with a selection of server apps that include social, commerce, payments, and public/private sharing of various kinds, and cheap to run. The centralised consumer internet - where servers are far beyond the skill level of most users and can be a nightmare to set up and administer, even for professionals - is one of the reasons we have giant predators like MS and Facebook.
superflyguy 8y ago
Interesting, and also...a lie? Or he thinks the 250,000 projects migrated to gitlab within 24 hours of the news that Microsoft was going anywhere near GitHub is a small number.
- bovermyer 8y ago
  That IS a small number. Consider the context.
  - sdesol 8y ago
    Yeah I really think people are trying to read way too much into things. The only true bellwether in my opinion, are influential open source projects leaving GitHub for something else, like self hosting with GitLab/Bitbucket/etc. If nodejs, google, and other big names/organizations decides to leave, then I think it is time for Microsoft to worry.
    - superflyguy 8y ago
      Gnome, Debian and gimp have all left.
      - sdesol 8y ago
        Were they ever hosted on GitHub?
  - mythrwy 8y ago
    Not for 24 hours it isn't.
    - penagwin 8y ago
      Right, but I doubt it'll continue at such a rate. This kind of stuff happens a lot (netflix making it harder to use VPNs, the recent facebook stuff, etc), "mass of people leave" but in reality it's a very small group, who are rather loud. Plus, mirroring isn't the same as leaving (IMO). To me it's more of a precaution.
notatoad 8y ago
My sense is that any projects willing to move from GitHub to gitlab on a Sunday evening because of a rumour that GitHub was going to be sold were not really serious projects and losing them isn't a big loss for GitHub.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  This is exactly right. However, just because some projects can't up and move on a moment's notice doesn't mean the ball isn't rolling.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - greenhatman 8y ago
    Yea, my projects are still on there. But it's not going to stay there. It's just there because I've been too busy to investigate alternatives and move. But I will in a week or three.
    - rafaelvasco 8y ago
      Why move though ? Just curious.
      - nickthemagicman 8y ago
        This is my question. There's been no changes. It's still a great platform. Is it that guaranteed that Microsoft is going to mess it up?
        dingo_bat 8y ago
        Software developers are human too. Every decision need not be rational.
      - peterburkimsher 8y ago
        I don't know if I'll move yet. Since 2006 or so, I've maintained a personal website for code/résumé, etc. At first it was hosted on http://peterburk.free.fr http://peterburk.free.fr, my parents' ISP. That was fine until I no longer lived with them, and I can't trust that it'll always be available. Also, I wanted a .com subdomain instead of a .fr domain. So in 2011, I moved to http://peterburk.appspot.com http://peterburk.appspot.com on Google App Engine. No problem, until I moved to China in 2013. All Google services are blocked there, including my page. So I migrated to http://peter-burk.rhcloud.com http://peter-burk.rhcloud.com (Red Hat OpenShift). I didn't like the mandatory dash in the subdomain, so I also set up http://peterburk.tumblr.com http://peterburk.tumblr.com to redirect. RHCloud supported PHP, so I could finally run WordPress. Then RHCloud changed to being paid-only, so in 2015 I moved to https://peterburk.github.com https://peterburk.github.com and couldn't use PHP again. Now I code everything in client-side JavaScript and static HTML. More recently, Github removed the .com subdomain service, so my Chinese-learning side project is https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io and that confuses some users. If something happens to Github, I might try to hop to heroku, but http://peterburk.herokuapp.com http://peterburk.herokuapp.com is pretty long to type. What do other people do for ad-free hosting? I think most sites pay for AWS, but I can't have a credit card because I'm a foreigner. The design of my site is very basic, because I've had to re-write it 4 times already, typically every 2 years. I choose technologies based on the platform features, so I did know all about GAE, but now I'm more familiar with Git. My loyalty isn't to the code management tool (this is for side projects, not a business that would need collaboration with colleagues), I just move to wherever is free/not blocked by China/has an easy-to-remember domain name.
grakker 8y ago
People will always put their own comfort in front of any real ideals or morals. That is, people talk the talk but don't walk the walk. You see it with all the idiots still using Facebook.
- bena 8y ago
  And funnily enough Facebook encourages this sort of behavior. So many ways to indicate your "support" for something without having to actually do anything. I've seen so many reposts of the whole "If you're my friend and gay, you're family" image. And yeah, that's a nice sentiment. But it doesn't require anything of you. What happens when that person _needs_ something. A house, a loan, a ride, etc. "Being there" is well and good. But it's the secular version of "thoughts and prayers".
Deadron 8y ago
Github is only a high profile Git peer. If it explodes someone just pushes up to a different repo hosting site or goes back to trading chagesets some other way.
- k_sh 8y ago
  It also has project management features that tightly integrate with Git repositories, which are not stored within the repository itself. Most (semi-)serious projects make use of this, which makes migration harder.
  - Tloewald 8y ago
    It would be pretty cool if someone devised a core set of meta-services (e.g. the feature branch / pull-request / review / commit that lived entirely on top of git and some simple command lines so that you could basically not care where your cloud repo was. (I'm expecting that this has been done and I'll be deluged with links...)
alxlaz 8y ago
It's not unexpected. Serious projects need more than a few days to move off Github; and there's some overlap between HN users and users who would move their tiny projects off Github on a Sunday afternoon. That being said, it's way too early to tell how this will evolve trust-wise. Microsoft has a tremendous deficit of trust in the open source community. Younger folks probably don't realize how deep it runs; most of my friends and colleagues who were involved in FOSS in the late 1990s and early 00s wouldn't touch anything with Microsoft on it with a ten-foot pole -- not just because of prejudice, but because fool me once etc etc.. And I wasn't thrilled about hosting code on someone else's computer before, either, but now I'm even less thrilled about hosting it on Microsoft's computer.
- jsgo 8y ago
  Has Gitlab finished their hosted migration from Azure to Google's cloud yet? They announced they were starting in April, but those things take time.
  - dcolebatch 8y ago
    Not from what I can tell: https://imgur.com/r1d3sj9 https://imgur.com/r1d3sj9
- macintux 8y ago
  Yep, those scars are very, very deep. The thought that Microsoft seemed a lock to rule the computing world made me a very miserable IT person for many years. Now I don't think about them much at all. I'm not thrilled that they now own a vital part of the OSS world, but I'm optimistic their overall irrelevance to my life will persist.
austenallred 8y ago
Using HackerNews reaction as a main source of information will almost always drastically skew reality. It reminds me of people shorting Facebook because of the #deletefacebook campaign, when in reality getting a few thousand people to delete Facebook in protest is offset in a few minutes by growth.
- greenhatman 8y ago
  I can tell you that my Facebook feed is dead. Very few post anymore. I don't really post anymore either. I just have it for events.
  - nodesocket 8y ago
    March 27th hight of delete facebook "movement" FB stock reaches low of $152.22. Since then, it has rocked up to new highs. Moral of the story as this keeps on happening over and over again (United Airlines, Tesla, Apple, Wells Fargo), do the opposite of media/HN outrage and buy emotional outrage dips... Profit.
    - trendia 8y ago
      Facebook's earnings are driven by their ad network, not user interaction. That is, as long as Facebook is able to identify and track an individual, they can make money even if the user never spends much time on Facebook. So, stock price is not an indicator of Facebook usage.
    - parthdesai 8y ago
      i found it very funny when i saw some people be a part '#deletefacebook' movement and go on to post on Instagram.
everdev 8y ago
No numbers have been provided, so it just sounds like spin.
skinnymuch 8y ago
Looking at HN or certain subreddits would similarly have you believe FB is quickly dying and no young person uses it. Or that a ton of people deleted their accounts as a result of the recent scandals. Yes, I’m exaggerating of course. The number of repos that were imported to Gitlab via their GitHub importer had crosses 100K on Tuesday if my memory serves me right. GitHub has 75M repos, I believe. For now, the migration has been potentially significant, but too early to tell. Overall, I’m sure there’s something to glean from places like HN and some parts of Reddit, and other similar places. What exactly you can take away, I’m not sure about yet. There was a front-page article of some survey that was saying something like 40% of people were going to or already did delete Facebook. Not a correct number of course.
tinus_hn 8y ago
It’s the vocal minority. The people who don’t care and aren’t going to move don’t write angry pieces on social media. Also remember that many of these writers are the same people who claim they are boycotting the latest company that slighted them as a way to make a statement. Like the people who are so vocally not buying a phone without their beloved jack plug. Surprisingly the manufacturers aren’t really feeling their sting.

hari_seldon_ 8y ago

This is the standard HN effect. I also love when I think some startups are killing it based on what I read here; but then they end up shutting down soon after due to a lack of any real revenue model.

craftyguy 8y ago
Given how 1) he's provided no evidence to support his claim, 2) he would never publicly say "a significant number of users have moved", and 3) gitlab has a public tracker showing thousands of projects being imported, I'd take his comment with a large grain of salt.
- gaius 8y ago
  Github has 28 million users with 85 million repos. Thousands is a very small proportion. Also: Gitlab also has to exit one day. The only question is who buys them.
  - n42 8y ago
    how active are those users and repositories? both of these statistics are meaningless without additional context
  - Semaphor 8y ago
    FWIW, Gitlab would prefer an IPO and they say they are on track for it. Source: Gitlab guy in one of the many, many, many Gitlab or Github threads recently.
    - fipple 8y ago
      Everyone says they’d prefer an IPO but a lot of them change their minds when a man puts a $7.5 billion check on the table.
    - skinnymuch 8y ago
      Gitlab isn’t going to say no to $7.5B or any number close to that. They are also more venture backed compared to GitHub.
  - hultner 8y ago
    Do they? Are they backed by capital pushing for an “Exit”, and even if so, couldn’t an IPO be a viable option?
    - irq11 8y ago
      They’ve taken a big pile of VC funding, so the answer to your first question is yes. Meanwhile, the biggest player (by far) in the market just abandoned dreams of an IPO. Gitlab is a distant third place in that market, and has a revenue model that is best described as “like Github, but cheaper.” IPOs are only viable if you have a business capable of supporting them.
      - gaius 8y ago
        There are only two possibilities I see: acquired by Atlassian and merged with Bitbucket, or by a low-tier cloud player with deep pockets such as Aliyun or Oracle. The IPO market just isn’t that buoyant at the moment.
        inks 8y ago
        Oracle has been looking at GitLab since the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub.
      - Jedd 8y ago
        > ... that is best described as “like Github, but cheaper.” Aha, I thought I may find you on this thread, once again pushing the same line.
      - skinnymuch 8y ago
        Is Gitlab a distant third? I didn’t know if they are in second place or not. But distant seems too much. Is Bitbucket in second place? Any numbers or references you have?
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]

the-dude 8y ago

I think most people mirrored instead of closing. Spin.

EpicEng 8y ago
>I think most people Based on... what exactly? That's a big claim to make without any data.
- geezerjay 8y ago
  Speaking on behalf of myself and myself alone, I have published stuff that links to my personal github repos. So although I've already migrated those projects to Gitlab, like the OP said Github is still used as a mirror. I imagine how hard it must be for organizations to do the same.
- vokep 8y ago
  its a reasonable expectation. You don't need any data to understand that most people will care about certain things in a given situation. (and actually, in making such a generalization, data is being used to make that, its a bit difficult to present that data since its more of a soft 'life experience and understanding of what positions others might be in and choices they might make in such positions' kind of data.)
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    >its a reasonable expectation. You don't need any data to understand that most people will care about certain things in a given situation. I don't even know what that means; it's so vague and lacking in detail as to be useless. Of course "people care about things in situations". but we're talking about _what_ they care about, and that depends on the situation. For example: "are Nazi's bad?". I don't need to see hard numbers to believe that the answer from most people will be "yes". "Is MS buying GitHub bad"? That's a whole other story. The vocal minority often doesn't represent the majority in things like this. I think it's pretty clear that most people in fact _don't_ care about the things the-dude cares about. Privacy, lock in, using services provided by "evil" companies... these are things a tiny fraction of people care about. You know how I know that? All of these companies you don't like are _insanely_ successful.

marricks 8y ago

I’m more willing to believe the openly viewable GitLab migration tracker, which shows several thousand projects migrated. Just another way Gitlab is nice is the openly viewable statistics versus a generalization. https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/03/movingtogitlab/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/03/movingtogitlab/

beberlei 8y ago
a few hundred thousand repositories of the 85 million reported Github repositories is really not much, see https://github.com/ten https://github.com/ten at the bottom for the number.
- dawnerd 8y ago
  of those 85 million how many are actually active and not just placeholder empty repos or automated mirrors for wordpress/jquery plugins? Not on anyones side here but if the top 250k repos switched, that would be really bad news. I think it's more important to compare size and popularity of the repos than just what the % is.
  - beberlei 8y ago
    i assumed that only small repositories that nobody except the author is using can be moved in such a small timespan of a few hours. Heavily used open source projects have issues indexed in Google with permalinks, their users probably hardcoding git urls, connections to package managers, heavily customized Travis CI integrations and the like.
  - jhall1468 8y ago
    Of those that switched, how many were backup mirrors vs actually switching to the Gitlab platform? We can only guesstimate with the data we have.
  - skinnymuch 8y ago
    Yeah. That has to go both ways too. If it’s only tiny repos moving over and not top repos.

jbob2000 8y ago

It's not about the number of the accounts that move, but the importance of the accounts. A couple of personal projects move? Whoop-di-doo. A huge, popular open source app moves? Or a GitHub rockstar leaves? That's big news. So I don't care really care how many leave, in fact that's a clever distraction. I care about who is leaving.

pera 8y ago

The announcement happened just 3 days ago, so it's still too early to draw any conclusions. I personally decided to move my stuff out of GitHub, but it will take me a week or so to know where exactly as I'm still analyzing various options. And after migrating, I don't think I will close my account (even when I really distrust Microsoft) simply because too many libre software projects are currently using GitHub.

Zamicol 8y ago
Same. It's going to take a while for me to move out of Github. I have a lot there over years and scripts that use Github. Also Gitlab's import is failing on some repos. It's also suddenly pushed me in a place where I have to suddenly find an alternative. It's going to take some time.
- ProAm 8y ago
  Can you just host a git server yourself? Not trying to be snarky but seems doable.
  - boojums 8y ago
    I have a self-hosted git instance on a VPS. It's trivial to set up for doing personal projects, but it would take quite a bit more work to properly set it up so other people could clone repos or contribute. Depending on what GitHub features Zamicol is using, it could be a pretty large project to self-host.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    You can. It's very doable. Plenty of people do it. But the real value of GH was "social coding" - open public access to open public projects. That's going to fragment, even if GL takes over. And that will be a loss. The real problem is the lack of open public server infrastructure. In the same way that everyone has access to a browser, everyone should have access to a private server, which is secure-by-default, controllably networked, super easy to set up with a selection of server apps that include social, commerce, payments, and public/private sharing of various kinds, and cheap to run. The centralised consumer internet - where servers are far beyond the skill level of most users and can be a nightmare to set up and administer, even for professionals - is one of the reasons we have giant predators like MS and Facebook.

superflyguy 8y ago

Interesting, and also...a lie? Or he thinks the 250,000 projects migrated to gitlab within 24 hours of the news that Microsoft was going anywhere near GitHub is a small number.

bovermyer 8y ago
That IS a small number. Consider the context.
- sdesol 8y ago
  Yeah I really think people are trying to read way too much into things. The only true bellwether in my opinion, are influential open source projects leaving GitHub for something else, like self hosting with GitLab/Bitbucket/etc. If nodejs, google, and other big names/organizations decides to leave, then I think it is time for Microsoft to worry.
  - superflyguy 8y ago
    Gnome, Debian and gimp have all left.
    - sdesol 8y ago
      Were they ever hosted on GitHub?
- mythrwy 8y ago
  Not for 24 hours it isn't.
  - penagwin 8y ago
    Right, but I doubt it'll continue at such a rate. This kind of stuff happens a lot (netflix making it harder to use VPNs, the recent facebook stuff, etc), "mass of people leave" but in reality it's a very small group, who are rather loud. Plus, mirroring isn't the same as leaving (IMO). To me it's more of a precaution.

notatoad 8y ago

My sense is that any projects willing to move from GitHub to gitlab on a Sunday evening because of a rumour that GitHub was going to be sold were not really serious projects and losing them isn't a big loss for GitHub.

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
This is exactly right. However, just because some projects can't up and move on a moment's notice doesn't mean the ball isn't rolling.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- greenhatman 8y ago
  Yea, my projects are still on there. But it's not going to stay there. It's just there because I've been too busy to investigate alternatives and move. But I will in a week or three.
  - rafaelvasco 8y ago
    Why move though ? Just curious.
    - nickthemagicman 8y ago
      This is my question. There's been no changes. It's still a great platform. Is it that guaranteed that Microsoft is going to mess it up?
      - dingo_bat 8y ago
        Software developers are human too. Every decision need not be rational.
    - peterburkimsher 8y ago
      I don't know if I'll move yet. Since 2006 or so, I've maintained a personal website for code/résumé, etc. At first it was hosted on http://peterburk.free.fr http://peterburk.free.fr, my parents' ISP. That was fine until I no longer lived with them, and I can't trust that it'll always be available. Also, I wanted a .com subdomain instead of a .fr domain. So in 2011, I moved to http://peterburk.appspot.com http://peterburk.appspot.com on Google App Engine. No problem, until I moved to China in 2013. All Google services are blocked there, including my page. So I migrated to http://peter-burk.rhcloud.com http://peter-burk.rhcloud.com (Red Hat OpenShift). I didn't like the mandatory dash in the subdomain, so I also set up http://peterburk.tumblr.com http://peterburk.tumblr.com to redirect. RHCloud supported PHP, so I could finally run WordPress. Then RHCloud changed to being paid-only, so in 2015 I moved to https://peterburk.github.com https://peterburk.github.com and couldn't use PHP again. Now I code everything in client-side JavaScript and static HTML. More recently, Github removed the .com subdomain service, so my Chinese-learning side project is https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io and that confuses some users. If something happens to Github, I might try to hop to heroku, but http://peterburk.herokuapp.com http://peterburk.herokuapp.com is pretty long to type. What do other people do for ad-free hosting? I think most sites pay for AWS, but I can't have a credit card because I'm a foreigner. The design of my site is very basic, because I've had to re-write it 4 times already, typically every 2 years. I choose technologies based on the platform features, so I did know all about GAE, but now I'm more familiar with Git. My loyalty isn't to the code management tool (this is for side projects, not a business that would need collaboration with colleagues), I just move to wherever is free/not blocked by China/has an easy-to-remember domain name.

grakker 8y ago

People will always put their own comfort in front of any real ideals or morals. That is, people talk the talk but don't walk the walk. You see it with all the idiots still using Facebook.

bena 8y ago
And funnily enough Facebook encourages this sort of behavior. So many ways to indicate your "support" for something without having to actually do anything. I've seen so many reposts of the whole "If you're my friend and gay, you're family" image. And yeah, that's a nice sentiment. But it doesn't require anything of you. What happens when that person _needs_ something. A house, a loan, a ride, etc. "Being there" is well and good. But it's the secular version of "thoughts and prayers".

Deadron 8y ago

Github is only a high profile Git peer. If it explodes someone just pushes up to a different repo hosting site or goes back to trading chagesets some other way.

k_sh 8y ago
It also has project management features that tightly integrate with Git repositories, which are not stored within the repository itself. Most (semi-)serious projects make use of this, which makes migration harder.
- Tloewald 8y ago
  It would be pretty cool if someone devised a core set of meta-services (e.g. the feature branch / pull-request / review / commit that lived entirely on top of git and some simple command lines so that you could basically not care where your cloud repo was. (I'm expecting that this has been done and I'll be deluged with links...)

alxlaz 8y ago

It's not unexpected. Serious projects need more than a few days to move off Github; and there's some overlap between HN users and users who would move their tiny projects off Github on a Sunday afternoon. That being said, it's way too early to tell how this will evolve trust-wise. Microsoft has a tremendous deficit of trust in the open source community. Younger folks probably don't realize how deep it runs; most of my friends and colleagues who were involved in FOSS in the late 1990s and early 00s wouldn't touch anything with Microsoft on it with a ten-foot pole -- not just because of prejudice, but because fool me once etc etc.. And I wasn't thrilled about hosting code on someone else's computer before, either, but now I'm even less thrilled about hosting it on Microsoft's computer.

jsgo 8y ago
Has Gitlab finished their hosted migration from Azure to Google's cloud yet? They announced they were starting in April, but those things take time.
- dcolebatch 8y ago
  Not from what I can tell: https://imgur.com/r1d3sj9 https://imgur.com/r1d3sj9
macintux 8y ago
Yep, those scars are very, very deep. The thought that Microsoft seemed a lock to rule the computing world made me a very miserable IT person for many years. Now I don't think about them much at all. I'm not thrilled that they now own a vital part of the OSS world, but I'm optimistic their overall irrelevance to my life will persist.

austenallred 8y ago

Using HackerNews reaction as a main source of information will almost always drastically skew reality. It reminds me of people shorting Facebook because of the #deletefacebook campaign, when in reality getting a few thousand people to delete Facebook in protest is offset in a few minutes by growth.

greenhatman 8y ago
I can tell you that my Facebook feed is dead. Very few post anymore. I don't really post anymore either. I just have it for events.
- nodesocket 8y ago
  March 27th hight of delete facebook "movement" FB stock reaches low of $152.22. Since then, it has rocked up to new highs. Moral of the story as this keeps on happening over and over again (United Airlines, Tesla, Apple, Wells Fargo), do the opposite of media/HN outrage and buy emotional outrage dips... Profit.
  - trendia 8y ago
    Facebook's earnings are driven by their ad network, not user interaction. That is, as long as Facebook is able to identify and track an individual, they can make money even if the user never spends much time on Facebook. So, stock price is not an indicator of Facebook usage.
  - parthdesai 8y ago
    i found it very funny when i saw some people be a part '#deletefacebook' movement and go on to post on Instagram.

everdev 8y ago

No numbers have been provided, so it just sounds like spin.

skinnymuch 8y ago

Looking at HN or certain subreddits would similarly have you believe FB is quickly dying and no young person uses it. Or that a ton of people deleted their accounts as a result of the recent scandals. Yes, I’m exaggerating of course. The number of repos that were imported to Gitlab via their GitHub importer had crosses 100K on Tuesday if my memory serves me right. GitHub has 75M repos, I believe. For now, the migration has been potentially significant, but too early to tell. Overall, I’m sure there’s something to glean from places like HN and some parts of Reddit, and other similar places. What exactly you can take away, I’m not sure about yet. There was a front-page article of some survey that was saying something like 40% of people were going to or already did delete Facebook. Not a correct number of course.

tinus_hn 8y ago

It’s the vocal minority. The people who don’t care and aren’t going to move don’t write angry pieces on social media. Also remember that many of these writers are the same people who claim they are boycotting the latest company that slighted them as a way to make a statement. Like the people who are so vocally not buying a phone without their beloved jack plug. Surprisingly the manufacturers aren’t really feeling their sting.