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Comment by frevib | Hacker News Reader

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frevib·

> It's not "enshittify or lose"

I think it’s “find natural monopoly and reduce costs (aka enshittify)”.

Github is a natural monopoly and users cannot go anywhere. Unless you’re famous like Mitchell Hashimoto.

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Depends on how strong a moat really is, but it can be "enshittify and lose", too. Enlightened (as opposed to short-term) self-interest may pay off after two years or twenty, depending, and in the latter case, it may as well not pay off at all as far as a public company are concerned.

I think Microsoft’s home game is “monopolize and enshittify”. They are the masters and know the exactly what amount of enshittification is too much. E.g. Hashimoto quitting GH is probably totally worth the 10 SREs they fired. Us plebs cannot go anywhere.

But you totally can go somewhere else? E.g GitLab (which is, unfortunately, about as slow as GitHub, but with a better license and owner) or sr.ht.

If you think you need those sweet GitHub stars, I can't help you.

I mean the stars, social features and branding of Github make it more or less a lock-in. You can go somewhere else, but it’s not the same experience.

> If you think you need those sweet GitHub stars, I can't help you.

The majority of users need it.

Why not use GH just as a front page you mirror code. You keep your stars but develop elsewhere, on a server you control.

https://lists.sr.ht/~machocam/public-inbox/%3C46e343ec-c932-...

GitLab is definitely not as slow as GitHub, and it doesn’t matter because if you want to you can self host it, where it performs absolutely fine too

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