Announcing unlimited free private repos

Not directly related, but this made me think of how different a "social network" built on version control is from a typical social network.

Github users are interested more in code than in people. Sure, you can use it to follow your favorite coders and technology people that you respect and look up to, but I have a feeling most people aren't doing that too much.

Like most developers, I use Github extensively to obtain open-source code that I use in projects. Sometimes, I explore Github to look for new things, or see what kind of projects are popular since I've last checked (maybe once or twice a year). Usually, it is the canonical source of information for large open-source projects; the code lives there and issues / bug reports live there. While using it in this manner, I don't look so much at who is posting comments / commits, as I do at the content of the commit or comments on issues, and whether the information is relevant to me.

Anecdote: I used both GitLab and a paid GitHub personal account.

I didn't opt to pay for GitHub until I needed to host some private config files in Git, and at the time (maybe a year, year and a half ago?) GitLab wasn't in as great of shape as it tends to be now: for me, it was slow, unreliable, and sometimes just felt "off" in ways I can't really quantify. I already used Github for open-source work and at my day job (and had been using it at work for years), so I paid up (given the alternative, with GitLab not being what I was looking for, was to pay up and host a Gitea instance, or use BitBucket, which was a complete non-option for me).

These days GitLab seems to be a lot more stable and able to handle day-to-day workflows, but GitHub still has the community factor, so all my public repos and forks live there. It made sense to continue to keep my private repos next to my public ones, so when my annual subscription renewed, I was cool with it.

Migrating fully over to GitLab/Gitea/flavour-du-jour is something that's perpetually on my "TODO: investigate" list, and never actually gets done, because despite any minor gripes I may have with it, GitHub tended to "just work", and it "just worked" ~$80/yr worth.

I've found usefull code snippets on github via google in the past.

I totally agree with you. And to add to your point, the impact of having a dominance in the market of "personal project repos" extends far beyond individual developers paying money on their personal accounts and/or becoming paying customers when they start their own companies.

If you think about mid-sized software companies (~10-100 devs), if 80% of your developers have a strong preference for Github over Gitlab or Bitbucket, then that company is likely going to stick with Github or decide to move to Github eventually. I think this is where Github captures much more than that 12% revenue that they are giving up right now.

Nope.

Github was always the go-to option and there was no reason to really even consider alternatives at first. People said "Bitbucket has free private repos!" for years and that was interesting but not compelling. Few users left Github because their competitors had free private repos.

Github got acquired, and that acquisition basically erased any and all user trust in Github as a company because they no longer control their own destiny. Instead we have to trust Microsoft. And that was a big enough shock for people to actually consider all of the competitors instead of just defaulting to Github like they did before.

To some extent, I suspect people paid for private repos from Github because they believed in supporting Github as a company and $7/mo isn't that much. Nobody believes in supporting Microsoft as a company. Microsoft charging for private repos is like Disney having a Patreon account.