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Comment by karolist | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feeling about github's dominance. They have created facebook for devs and uplifted collaboration of software to a high level, but I can't help but feel like I'm renting storage space in someone else's private shop when I use them. Yes you get engagement, yes you get one link to share your dev profile and timeline grid in CV, but it's a for profit business that is run by MS.

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“but I can't help but feel like I'm renting storage space in someone else's private shop when I use them”

I’ve been looking for the words to put to that feeling myself but was unable to pinpoint it so well.

I loved GitHub at first. “Look at all the cool stuff I made” was kinda a way of showing my capabilities (and is still a great way today!) but somewhere along the way it became a platform for egos and star stroking and blind following into the nights. They improved their search but it could be so much better. Not everyone has a graphic designer on staff to make pretty README.md’s

I'm much less concerned with this because github seems to have to lowest vendor lock-in of any platform. If you want to switch platforms, it should be as easy as changing your upstream and push. Switching from MySpace to Facebook never looked like that.

Sure you can switch, will others too? That's the problem, when something gets dominating critical mass individual actions stop to matter. You can replace Google with another search engine as easily as opening a new tab, does the dominance make it any less scary?

>>I have mixed feeling about github's dominance.

Yep - I remember what happened with Source Forge/VA Linux. I actually paid for github when it first came out, just to fund it.

Still makes me nervous tbh

Good old times, freshmeat.net also ;)

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