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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

That's one of the definitions of critical mass. Reputation is built up over time and usage. Gitlab's uptime reliability isn't particularly known or unknown, mostly because, compared to Github, it's not used enough for those issues to come up.

Try talking to a dev, ask them why they use Github instead of Gitlab. Are they going to tell you "Oh I absolutely would use Gitlab but their uptime is such a problem"? Or are they going to tell you their stuff's already on Github? Their friends/coworkers are on Github? Their employers look for their Github profile?

As a sidenote I would totally use MySpace instead of Facebook if not for their notable history of extended downtime...

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I partly agree, but those that have done the research or already use Gitlab know that Gitlab's uptime has been problematic compared to Github's, which is a bigger issue for most companies than the community. As sytse correctly notes below, it's a lot better than it was a few months ago - but the pessimistic/risk-averse way to say that is "as recently as two months ago they were having major uptime issues". I have high hopes for Gitlab and I think they're doing great things, it's always great to see new competition in the space. And I applaud their transparency, it's refreshing! But it'll require some more "burn in" time before I consider it a reliable Github replacement, all questions of critical mass aside.

On the plus side, if the manage to fix their problems at some point people will start trusting them to be up. It is not set in stone that they have worse uptime.

Absolutely, and I do think most of their problems have been fixed. So it's just a matter of time - the longer they are stable, the better their reputation will become.

> Try talking to a dev, ask them why they use Github instead of Gitlab. Are they going to tell you "Oh I absolutely would use Gitlab but their uptime is such a problem"? Or are they going to tell you their stuff's already on Github? Their friends/coworkers are on Github? Their employers look for their Github profile?

Just as an alternative point of view, a shop I knew used self-hosted gitlab in preference to github, because they were in China. That was actually how I learned about gitlab.

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