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People keep bringing that up, but that's missing the bigger picture: GitHub is more than just a git host, it's also a "social hub" where people can fork repos and offer changes back (pull requests), a passable bugtracker (issues), even wiki, and even web host (github.io).

Many people have warned that using these added-value features makes you dependent on GitHub (Linus Torvalds has a kernel mirror on GitHub, but for this reason refuses to use its other features). Migrating all that metadata is hard (is it even possible?).



Joey Hess' github-backup backs up everything github knows about a repository (including branches, tags, other forks, issues, comments, wikis, milestones, pull requests, watchers, and stars) to the repository.

I'm sure most of these could be re-imported into an alternative service through its API, even if with some loss of fidelity.

https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup


That's awesome. I need to send JoeyH more money.

(for others: he's also the creator of git-annex, an out-of-band file storage extension to git, and for a long time was the maintainer of critical parts of Debian's ecosystem. He likes to live in a yurt: http://joeyh.name/yurt/)



The other problem is that "cloud services" have taught people not to back up their data.


The problem is social hubs add very little real value and are easily replaceable, especially among technically astute people.


I think Github is a prime example of how much a "social hub" can add. In the 6 years or so before GH, do you think I ever send a patch upstream? Now, collaborating is almost easier than not doing it, and it's an awesome community.


Oh, but they do add a lot of real value. In fact, they're extremely efficient at making this value - so efficient that they don't get to monetize anything but a small fraction of it.


There are plenty of replacements. Bitbucket, gitlab, etc.


I actually prefer bitbucket because I don't have to pay for private repos.


You can have private repos for free on GitLab.com too.

Disclaimer: I work at GitLab.


I was completely unaware of that. Thanks for the heads up. I use gitlab at work, and now I might try it for my personal projects.




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