"Why X are doing Y" articles like these pretend that the premise of "X are doing Y" is true, conveniently skipping to the "Why" before proving that the premise is even accurate in any meaningful way.
This is why I never buy headlines that start out with "Why".
> developers are ditching
Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos against the hundreds of thousands on there
The trend is what's interesting here. Github has never been threatened by anyone, because their service was too good to bother for everyone but the most ideologically motivated.
Now their service has become so bad there's a github joke at work every time something is down or slower than it should.
Reputation is a very valuable thing, and Github has destroyed a stellar one in a few month, this is newsworthy.
And Telegram is a lot more developed and has a much larger percentage of the global instant messenger marketshare, compared to Github vs CodeBerg.
Still, doesn't come close to popularity of GitHub itself today (https://trends.google.com/explore?q=codeberg%2Cforgejo%2Cgit...), but I think the trend of moving away from GitHub is clear both in data and sentiment, both qualitative and quantitative.
Also Google search trends are no evidence of adoption or migration. High chance of correlation, sure.
It is not clear to me that Github's service has degraded due to incompetence, it also seems possible that they are just struggling to meet demand as the source code backbone of an internet in a critical moment of evolution. I'm not sure any single provider would fare any better.
Oracle had record revenue in its most recent fiscal year, with record user engagement. So whatever connection you're trying to establish between its fate and that of SO or myspace is off-target, both in terms of popularity and revenue.
Developer A makes a move, perceives some benefit, tells developer B, who does the same thing and then tells developer C.
Some of the people consider the move, weigh costs, and make an intelligent decision. Many just think "smart people are doing this, I'll do it too". I really doubt this behavior is unique to developers.
Statistically I would assume that if you select a bunch of people on a certain criterium, you're going to see similarities related to that criterium among that group.
Hat tip to Microsoft.
If there's a trend to leave a platform it won't start with the most entrenched users (largest repos).
They acknowledge your concern in the article and their analysis does apply to those few who are leaving. But to be fair the title can be interpreted either way and the most reasonable read for anyone is "some of them are leaving". I'd find it clickbaity if they said "why developers are leaving en-masse" and then point out to the regular turnover. There's clearly a trend, what's not clear is if it gains momentum.
That's the point being made. Is there a trend? How do we know?
There's always some repos moving between hosting providers for all kinds of reasons. The burden of proof is on the author here to show there's been an increase and they don't do that.
And not provide any other meaningful data
The key problem is not losing the cars but losing the road builders who are now no longer building roads that lead to you, but rather roads that lead away
I would also be one of them, but I'm not actually off Github yet. That's because I haven't quiite finished building the thing I'm going to move to.
I'm saying that Ghostty, which is ~5 years old, cannot be called an early adopter of GitHub, which is 18 years old.
As someone mentioned it's about the trend.
I have heard from people at multiple major open source projects that what is keeping them at Github at this point are free GH Action credits that they get and they couldn't really afford CI/CD if they left. Meaning numbers would be bigger if GH wasn't "paying" projects to stay.
I am exhausted with having to figure out whether someone wrote something or let AI generate it for them.
Reading articles like this has become less pleasurable since the advent of generative AI. There’s no feeling or heart in the article, and it’s one of those cases where I can read the headline, read the article, and wonder why I spent my time reading it.
> Why some Americans are switching to soy
Would be more accurate than
> Why Americans are switching to soy
But wouldn't garner nearly the same amount of clicks.
There is conscious exaggeration in omitting 'some' - a fluff-blog click-farm trope I don't enjoy seeing in the developer space.
> why Americans switch to soy
And
> why developers switch to codeberg
But the cynic in me thinks that the form of the headline that drastically overstates the the phenomenon in question by implication is something that has been workshopped and is commonly used because it turns something kind of boring into a spectacle.
I'm pretty sure, shortly after the motorized vehicle was made commercialy available, there were only a "handful of remotely meaningful" people and companies who stopped using horses.
Do tell: How many horses are around on todays streets?
But my point was that it’s a bad analogy. People are opting out of GitHub despite the alternatives having fewer features. You can read that as an ideological choice or as a YAGNI one. If it’s ideological, then there’s no competitive or feature angle at all; people are doing it because it seems right to them.
(To be clear, I have no problem with this. I think GitHub only gets better after public pressure, as we’ve seen with the last N cycles of product atrophy.)
Turns out, sometimes shedding "functionality" is really shedding cruft that holds the core functionality back.
Is this the case for Codeberg vs. Github? I don't know, and I'm not gonna base my argument on unverfieable predictions of the future.
So we'll have to wait and see. But it sure looks to me like many of the prime arguments for github boil down to "well, it's big and has lots of stuff".
I’m not.
Are you perhaps talking about "Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands" then that was also on the HN frontpage just days ago?
There been so many articles, surveys and papers about how scientists and researchers are leaving the US for the last 1-2 years, that it's hard to keep track. Still, I'm curious to understand what you actually read.
Individual reports of scientists leaving are meaningless without overall statistics. If there is a net outflow of scientists from the US, I’m not aware of it, and I certainly haven’t seen any actual statistical evidence for it.