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Yes it’s nice, and there are dozens of products that allow you to do that. My point is that this is not the main value-add of GitHub, and discussions of “replacing GitHub” that center around re-implementing these features are missing the point. The value-add of GitHub is its community and years of developer mindshare. There is no simple technical solution to replacing that.

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You seem to focus on step 2, e.g. having community and mindshare, while completely ignoring why all the people got there in there in the first place and why it gained such momentum, the step 1.

Step 1 for a category defining product will never be the same as step 1 for a future competitor to that product. What worked for GitHub as step 1 will never work as step 1 for any service that replaces GitHub, because GitHub’s very existence changes the environment that allowed their step 1 to enable step 2.

This is the luxury of first-mover advantage. GitHub only had to implement “good enough” features to attract a community. Any competitor that usurps GitHub will not only need to implement the right features, but also figure out how to move the community from GitHub to the new platform.

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