GitHub has monopolized open source development. The likelihood of your software being discovered, used or contributed to goes to zero as soon as you host it anywhere but GitHub.
Finding some random github repo is almost worse than nothing to me. without some third party indicator as to quality, it's not worth my time, because I don't have time to review and assess everything I come across, only the items that I have some indication actually do what I need and do it sufficiently.
How exactly has GitHub done that? What actions has GitHub taken, other than providing a useful service?
Open source developers have chosen to make GitHub a near monopoly.
Companies love GitHub because they think it provides metrics. Mediocre developers (the kind that gets influence in OSS projects) love GitHub because they appear productive.
I'm not blaming Github for this, I'm just pointing out that this is a serious problem. Even if you're a 100% benevolent company today, there's no telling what will happen in the arbitrary future.
Language package repositories (npmjs.com, crates.io, etc.) or documentation hosting sites (docs.rs) tend to rank pretty well on Google, generally about the same as GitHub. For me personally a lot of project discovery also happens via either Reddit or HN.
It's still a pretty big barrier for contributions, but at least discovery seems to be decently decentralized.
I have no idea why would I search on Github exclusively. That's sounds too limiting.
Github has done nothing of the sort - they're popular, but being popular is not the same as having a monopoly.
> The likelihood of your software being discovered, used or contributed to goes to zero as soon as you host it anywhere but GitHub.
Untrue. It's less likely, because again Github is more popular, but not zero, because popularity isn't monopoly. Active projects do exist elsewhere, people still use projects hosted on Sourceforge FFS.
Unless Github can forcibly prevent competitors from arising by leveraging their control over resources or a legal advantage granted them by the government, they don't have a monopoly.
User visibility is a resource. While overwhelming popularity is not the same as a Monopoly (since they are from 2 different perspectives, they can't be equated), the effect is often the same.
OP could have spent their blog post informing users that the project would be hosted elsewhere, rather than going on a rant comparing Github to the Nazis, and that precious user visibility wouldn't have kept their userbase from moving elsewhere.
Oh wait, they did, at the end of their post. So... why are we even here then?
But if you want to talk to your grandparents, you need to use Facebook.
Or skype, or email, or text or call them or maybe just visit once it a while.
Facebook doesn't have nearly the degree of monopoly on general human communication or mass communication that HN argues it does, neither does Twitter. If Trump weren't addicted to posting there, no one would care about Twitter.
There is hope with Federated Code Hosting being developed.
Having discovered it account creation DOES present a barrier to entry for those that want to contribute but nowadays many such services allow one to sign in with a social service. For example Gitlab.com allows one to sign on with google, twitter, salesforce, github, or bitbucket. Likely reducing the barrier to account creation to 30 seconds via oauth or 1 minute to create a new account via email.
I don't find it credible that people who want to contribute hours to hundreds of hours of work will be liable to be put off by the need to do half a minute of work.
I'm often pissed some obscure piece of software doesn't seem to exist, contemplate writing it myself, decide to append github to the search query and find someone who already wrote it.
Litterally a day ago that's how I found https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice
or apt, or cpan, or ctan, or cran, or PyPi, or ...
Oh wait.