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Your first concern is not the reliability of GitHub (lost $$$) or any dark patterns they push, or their security, but the network effect?

Source repository should be its own thing.

Artifacts repository arguably should be its own thing.

PRs, own thing.

CI, own thing.

The Balkanization has always existed. Lot of stuff that isn't on GitHub.

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That's the chief differentiator you're giving up when you give up on github vs a self-hosted forge. And the network effect of the CI pipelines should not be discounted since it means actions published anywhere on GH are automatically available for use without any import or install step.

Yes, you could feasibly split off the CI from the git+PR service, but you'd still want it to be federated.

Pipelines are not magic. You want a couple of primitives in there, variable substitution, maybe lite secret management. Depending on the type and languages you work across they could also be 100% unique to each company, language, project, and industry. LLMs have also further made pipeline creation pretty trivial.

If you can use or make a GitHub action you will be just fine in GitLab, CircleCI, Jenkins, or a couple of shell scripts hacked out over pizza and beer on a weekend.

There's no pipeline moat, to put it another way.

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