https://github.com/bevry/meta/issues/15#issuecomment-5529327...

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(Just found this thread; sorry for the late reply!)

if we postulate that moving all of bevry's projects to gitlab creates a snowball of other projects and communities doing the same
I disagree. When a field is as dominated by one player as OSS development is dominated by GitHub, it is extremely hard to break that hold.

For example: Facebook dominates social media. Within Facebook, there are several organizations, many of which are reasonably sized, and which do good work. Now…suppose one of those organizations left Facebook for a more benevolent social network. Or even two or three of them. Do you really believe this would create a “snowball effect”, resulting in a mass exodus from Facebook to the more-benevolent social network?

Of course not. Everybody knows that Facebook is quite possibly the sleaziest, least trustworthy company on the Web. (If you disagree, I’d feel confident that you’d concede that it is in the top five such companies, at the very least.) And, in fact, people have tried to create trustworthy, privacy-respecting alternatives to Facebook (like Diaspora, Friendica, and Tent).

Diaspora launched in 2010. Although its decentralized nature makes it harder to get concrete numbers for its user base, the best I could find puts the number around 380K. After four years.

Four.

Why? Well, it’s not because people prefer to have their privacy invaded, and it’s not because people like one central company to amass dangerous amounts of personal information to sell to advertisers (and god knows who else!). It’s because people are on Facebook. It has all the social capital, and—from the standpoint of where people choose to put their time in—that is more important than ideology, decentralization, technological advantage, and privacy.

I dislike this intensely, but it’s true.

For a while, people were pretty angry at Twitter (even though it is a more ethical company than Facebook, by orders of magnitude). So, some people tried to get a “snowball effect” rolling for their alternative, Identica.

At 1.5 million users, it’s been a more successful “benevolent alternative” to Twitter than Diaspora was to Facebook. But that’s still less than 1% of Twitters 241 million users (source).

GitLab may have more merit going for it than GitHub, but that’s not enough. Moving everything to GitLab will:

Cost a lot of time and effort to migrate the codebase
Cost a lot of time and effort for existing developers to readjust their workflows and learn the differences of GitLab
Most important of all, it will reduce the visibility of every last project to a small percentage of the current size.
And don’t think that linking to the new location will help. The alternative social networking sites I mentioned above had massive campaigns, many of which were prominently featured in tech magazines and blogs with millions of viewers. Linking from a popular old location to an unpopular new location does not work like forwarding e-mail; traffic won’t simply follow the link and continue the same behavior at GitLib like nothing’s changed. Perhaps a few individuals might…but you’ll still lose far, far more contributors in the end.

And what happens to open source projects that cease to be developed? They die. And the communities that once breathed life into them die, as well.

I cannot protest this idea strongly enough. If you move to GitLab, perhaps you can keep the company’s core developers active enough to keep the projects alive. Perhaps you might even find some short-term success in convincing a few contributors to keep working on your projects.

And if you move to GitLab…I really, really hope that they do. But I think that moving to GitLab will do as much good for your repositories as moving them to a private server for bevry employees only. Slightly better than that, perhaps…but not by much.

I would love to be proven wrong about what I’ve written here. But I don’t think that I am.

Please: reconsider this. Not just for the company, and not just for the good of your software, but for your extended community.

I believe that what is good for your extended community is also good for your software, and your company, too.

Please reconsider.