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Comment by BHSPitMonkey | Hacker News Reader

What exactly is the risk? That they'll stop providing the services they sell today? The design of git makes switching to another primary remote very easy (granted, most users probably don't have good habits around backing up data from Issues/Wiki/Releases and risk losing that data if it's taken away suddenly -- but the repo itself is durable and portable on a whim.

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You have slightly illustrated it yourself in a roundabout way, but let's be clear with wording here:

> The design of git makes switching to another primary remote very easy

It is never as easy as just switching to another primary remote.

It's not just Issues/Wikis/Releases, but the build/CI process(es) that are rampant on GitHub now, the community you've built potentially coming up on GitHub and not really getting that there's anything else out there, etc.

This is all time consuming hard work. People will often just not do it, and this is why we have lock in everywhere. Stop calling it easy.

The centralization of the internet around a few specific services - like GitHub, Cloudflare, and so on - is an increasingly problematic thing to contend with.

Edit: "as a easy" -> "as easy"

Quick data point: while not exactly trivial, my team has migrated completely from github to our own hosted gitea. Including CI, releases, issues, read-only mirror back to GitHub, PRs etc. The only thing we don't have that would be nice is the ability to take a PR directly from a fork of a repo in someone else's Gitea deployment (or GitHub for that matter). To take an external PR we either need to recreate it manually in our Gitea under a team member's account, or give the external contributor an account on our Gitea.

> (granted, most users probably don't have good habits around backing up data from Issues/Wiki/Releases and risk losing that data if it's taken away suddenly

so it's actually very hard to switch

Given how common defaulting on issues is, many maintainers might view this as a feature?

Only slightly kidding.

At one of my jobs, they used Asana when I started. It was too full of backlogged issues, so we moved over to Jira. Then Jira got too full. A month before I was laid off, one of my coworkers said, "Maybe we should try out Asana."

I think the risk is the extensions that github adds to git like CI/CD and issue tracking features.

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