this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
91 points (96.9% liked)
Programming
24415 readers
324 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
PSA: GitHub does not have a monopoly, you are free to host your stuff elsewhere (or yourself)
Google "network effect"
Relatively minor for source code forges.
The reasons everyone uses GitHub:
If anyone can ever compete with that then I doubt network effects will keep people there.
Codeberg has free CI if your project has a FOSS license and a readme: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-e.V./requests#woodpecker-ci
They're clearly not going to be able to afford $100m/year in free CI.
Which is one of the reasons behind github's network effect.
That's not a network effect.
I said its one of the reasons behind the network effect, not the network effect itself. github can offer more freebies, which attracts more users, which makes it more attractive to other users and for existing users to stick around.
Yes, and for most of us it's easy to do so, but I'm not going to explain a noob how to add new repositories. I mean, I did, and I will do in the future, but it's not my favorite task to do.
I realized my comment was a bit ambiguous. I meant repositories like for Maven, NPM, or package managers. Having stuff on GitHub makes it a lot easier.