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Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by jameslk on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:10PM (#17258521)
> That said, the GitHub team reports that the set of users who have migrated or closed their accounts is extremely small, and this is more than made up for by the surge of new signups and new interest in GitHub this week.

It's interesting to hear this. If you were on HN the past week, it might have seemed from all the front page articles that GitHub was about to implode due to an an exodus to GitLab.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by notatoad on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:53PM (#17258957)
My sense is that any projects willing to move from GitHub to gitlab on a Sunday evening because of a rumour that GitHub was going to be sold were not really serious projects and losing them isn't a big loss for GitHub.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by Sir_Cmpwn on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:39PM (#17259472)
This is exactly right. However, just because some projects can't up and move on a moment's notice doesn't mean the ball isn't rolling.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by greenhatman on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:28PM (#17260436)
Yea, my projects are still on there. But it's not going to stay there. It's just there because I've been too busy to investigate alternatives and move. But I will in a week or three.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by rafaelvasco on Thursday June 07, 2018 @06:56PM (#17261108)
Why move though ? Just curious.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by peterburkimsher on Thursday June 07, 2018 @09:28PM (#17261853)
I don't know if I'll move yet. Since 2006 or so, I've maintained a personal website for code/résumé, etc.

At first it was hosted on http://peterburk.free.fr, my parents' ISP. That was fine until I no longer lived with them, and I can't trust that it'll always be available. Also, I wanted a .com subdomain instead of a .fr domain.

So in 2011, I moved to http://peterburk.appspot.com on Google App Engine. No problem, until I moved to China in 2013. All Google services are blocked there, including my page. So I migrated to http://peter-burk.rhcloud.com (Red Hat OpenShift). I didn't like the mandatory dash in the subdomain, so I also set up http://peterburk.tumblr.com to redirect. RHCloud supported PHP, so I could finally run WordPress.

Then RHCloud changed to being paid-only, so in 2015 I moved to https://peterburk.github.com and couldn't use PHP again. Now I code everything in client-side JavaScript and static HTML. More recently, Github removed the .com subdomain service, so my Chinese-learning side project is https://pingtype.github.io and that confuses some users. If something happens to Github, I might try to hop to heroku, but http://peterburk.herokuapp.com is pretty long to type.

What do other people do for ad-free hosting? I think most sites pay for AWS, but I can't have a credit card because I'm a foreigner. The design of my site is very basic, because I've had to re-write it 4 times already, typically every 2 years. I choose technologies based on the platform features, so I did know all about GAE, but now I'm more familiar with Git. My loyalty isn't to the code management tool (this is for side projects, not a business that would need collaboration with colleagues), I just move to wherever is free/not blocked by China/has an easy-to-remember domain name.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by foo101 on Thursday June 07, 2018 @11:20PM (#17262336)
> What do other people do for ad-free hosting?

By your own domain a $5/month VPS and host your apps just the way you like it.

Just 10 years ago, geeks like us used to take pride in buying domain and creating a personal presence with one's domain name. Don't people do that anymore?

I find this trend of looking for free hosting services a bit disturbing. Because you know the cliche that when you are not paying for a service, you are the product.

Even if you do not want to buy a $5/month VPS, please buy the domain. Costs less than $1/month (more like $10/year) and point the domain to your favorite free hosting service with CNAME entries. GitHub and Heroku support such custom domains with CNAME entries.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by marketgod on Thursday June 07, 2018 @09:38PM (#17261885)
Buy your own domain. It's worth the investment in your brand.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by diroussel on Friday June 08, 2018 @02:34AM (#17263104)
I've started using React-static on netlify. Works well, and will auto deploy on commit to GitHub.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by nickthemagicman on Thursday June 07, 2018 @08:26PM (#17261565)
This is my question. There's been no changes. It's still a great platform. Is it that guaranteed that Microsoft is going to mess it up?
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by dingo_bat on Thursday June 07, 2018 @09:10PM (#17261778)
Software developers are human too. Every decision need not be rational.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by LanceH on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:50PM (#17260133)
But are they serious developers? The impact might not be felt for years.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by Pywarrior on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:59PM (#17260208)
This is an important question, microsoft controlling the servers that host most open source code is not great but what they really bought was the community. If those developers move a small project no big deal, but, those same developers will never start another project on github and will of course stop recommending github to corporate clients. Github will become VSS.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by overcast on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:30PM (#17259959)
I'd consider Gnome a pretty serious product.

https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/gnome-moves-to-gitlab-2/

ok. so they weren't on github. GOSH!

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by glandium on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:34PM (#17260010)
Gnome didn't move to gitlab because Microsoft is buying it. They weren't even on github. IIRC, they were self-hosting. And they still are.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by gowld on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:41PM (#17260056)
FYI, Nat Friedman, co-founder of GNOME, is now the Microsoft employee who is the CEO of GitHub.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by spondyl on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:06PM (#17260271)
Well, not quite. Nat cofounded a company (Helix Code, later Ximian) with Miguel de Icaza (cofounder) which then developed GNOME apps and infra.[0]

Nat was a cofounder in the same way that Jeb Bush was a US president. Connected to one perhaps but not one himself.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME#History

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by pera on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:59PM (#17260212)
I believe you are mistaking Miguel de Icaza with Nat Friedman (probably because of Ximian).
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by vkbandi on Friday June 08, 2018 @07:02AM (#17264214)
Isn't Miguel de Icaza also with Microsoft now ?
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by Fnoord on Saturday June 09, 2018 @06:01AM (#17272289)
Yes.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by walki on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:35PM (#17260016)
Gnome has never been hosted on GitHub!
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by sdesol on Thursday June 07, 2018 @09:58PM (#17261965)
They aren't hosting on gitlab.com and github.com because both are not open source. Gitlab.com is open core which us why they host on their own gitlab ce version.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by alxlaz on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:13PM (#17259791)
It's not unexpected. Serious projects need more than a few days to move off Github; and there's some overlap between HN users and users who would move their tiny projects off Github on a Sunday afternoon.

That being said, it's way too early to tell how this will evolve trust-wise. Microsoft has a tremendous deficit of trust in the open source community. Younger folks probably don't realize how deep it runs; most of my friends and colleagues who were involved in FOSS in the late 1990s and early 00s wouldn't touch anything with Microsoft on it with a ten-foot pole -- not just because of prejudice, but because fool me once etc etc.. And I wasn't thrilled about hosting code on someone else's computer before, either, but now I'm even less thrilled about hosting it on Microsoft's computer.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by macintux on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:57PM (#17260197)
Yep, those scars are very, very deep. The thought that Microsoft seemed a lock to rule the computing world made me a very miserable IT person for many years.

Now I don't think about them much at all. I'm not thrilled that they now own a vital part of the OSS world, but I'm optimistic their overall irrelevance to my life will persist.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by jsgo on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:33PM (#17259990)
Has Gitlab finished their hosted migration from Azure to Google's cloud yet? They announced they were starting in April, but those things take time.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by dcolebatch on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:46PM (#17260102)
Not from what I can tell: https://imgur.com/r1d3sj9
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by hari_seldon_ on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:14PM (#17258572)
This is the standard HN effect. I also love when I think some startups are killing it based on what I read here; but then they end up shutting down soon after due to a lack of any real revenue model.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by craftyguy on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:30PM (#17258726)
Given how 1) he's provided no evidence to support his claim, 2) he would never publicly say "a significant number of users have moved", and 3) gitlab has a public tracker showing thousands of projects being imported, I'd take his comment with a large grain of salt.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by gaius on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:25PM (#17259305)
Github has 28 million users with 85 million repos. Thousands is a very small proportion.

Also: Gitlab also has to exit one day. The only question is who buys them.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by hultner on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:07PM (#17259729)
Do they? Are they backed by capital pushing for an “Exit”, and even if so, couldn’t an IPO be a viable option?
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by irq11 on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:16PM (#17259830)
They’ve taken a big pile of VC funding, so the answer to your first question is yes.

Meanwhile, the biggest player (by far) in the market just abandoned dreams of an IPO. Gitlab is a distant third place in that market, and has a revenue model that is best described as “like Github, but cheaper.”

IPOs are only viable if you have a business capable of supporting them.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by gaius on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:43PM (#17260078)
There are only two possibilities I see: acquired by Atlassian and merged with Bitbucket, or by a low-tier cloud player with deep pockets such as Aliyun or Oracle. The IPO market just isn’t that buoyant at the moment.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by inks on Friday June 08, 2018 @08:42AM (#17264713)
Oracle has been looking at GitLab since the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by skinnymuch on Thursday June 07, 2018 @07:34PM (#17261313)
Is Gitlab a distant third? I didn’t know if they are in second place or not. But distant seems too much. Is Bitbucket in second place? Any numbers or references you have?
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by Jedd on Thursday June 07, 2018 @06:14PM (#17260794)
> ... that is best described as “like Github, but cheaper.”

Aha, I thought I may find you on this thread, once again pushing the same line.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by n42 on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:43PM (#17259514)
how active are those users and repositories? both of these statistics are meaningless without additional context
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by Semaphor on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:02PM (#17259677)
FWIW, Gitlab would prefer an IPO and they say they are on track for it.

Source: Gitlab guy in one of the many, many, many Gitlab or Github threads recently.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by fipple on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:09PM (#17259743)
Everyone says they’d prefer an IPO but a lot of them change their minds when a man puts a $7.5 billion check on the table.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by skinnymuch on Thursday June 07, 2018 @07:31PM (#17261301)
Gitlab isn’t going to say no to $7.5B or any number close to that. They are also more venture backed compared to GitHub.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by pera on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:29PM (#17258719)
The announcement happened just 3 days ago, so it's still too early to draw any conclusions.

I personally decided to move my stuff out of GitHub, but it will take me a week or so to know where exactly as I'm still analyzing various options. And after migrating, I don't think I will close my account (even when I really distrust Microsoft) simply because too many libre software projects are currently using GitHub.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by djsumdog on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:10PM (#17259753)
Exactly. How can they measure this stuff. You can add a new remote and push your code somewhere else, update the readme file to point to the new location, and that's a migration. That's not an easy thing for Github to track. So this statement doesn't even make a lot of sense. They simply cannot really know -- they can only measure the people who explicitly close projects and accounts.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by trisimix on Thursday June 07, 2018 @08:18PM (#17261538)
The reality doesn't matter at this point just what people think.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by Zamicol on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:46PM (#17259536)
Same.

It's going to take a while for me to move out of Github.

I have a lot there over years and scripts that use Github.

Also Gitlab's import is failing on some repos.

It's also suddenly pushed me in a place where I have to suddenly find an alternative.

It's going to take some time.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by ProAm on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:04PM (#17259701)
Can you just host a git server yourself? Not trying to be snarky but seems doable.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by TheOtherHobbes on Thursday June 07, 2018 @06:25PM (#17260877)
You can. It's very doable. Plenty of people do it.

But the real value of GH was "social coding" - open public access to open public projects.

That's going to fragment, even if GL takes over. And that will be a loss.

The real problem is the lack of open public server infrastructure. In the same way that everyone has access to a browser, everyone should have access to a private server, which is secure-by-default, controllably networked, super easy to set up with a selection of server apps that include social, commerce, payments, and public/private sharing of various kinds, and cheap to run.

The centralised consumer internet - where servers are far beyond the skill level of most users and can be a nightmare to set up and administer, even for professionals - is one of the reasons we have giant predators like MS and Facebook.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by HelloNurse on Friday June 08, 2018 @03:55AM (#17263468)
What you call "social coding" is simply the convenience of contributing to a huge number of projects without needing a separate account or quasi-account (joining a mailing list, using OAuth/OpenID, etc.) for each. It is not necessary, it predates and doesn't need GitHub (as Sourceforge demonstrated 20 years ago), and it will simply move to other project hosting communities, with a modest decrease of convenience in the transition between one account and a few accounts.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by boojums on Thursday June 07, 2018 @06:21PM (#17260848)
I have a self-hosted git instance on a VPS. It's trivial to set up for doing personal projects, but it would take quite a bit more work to properly set it up so other people could clone repos or contribute. Depending on what GitHub features Zamicol is using, it could be a pretty large project to self-host.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by marricks on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:16PM (#17258590)
I’m more willing to believe the openly viewable GitLab migration tracker, which shows several thousand projects migrated. Just another way Gitlab is nice is the openly viewable statistics versus a generalization.

https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/03/movingtogitlab/

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by beberlei on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:33PM (#17258746)
a few hundred thousand repositories of the 85 million reported Github repositories is really not much, see https://github.com/ten at the bottom for the number.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by dawnerd on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:42PM (#17258847)
of those 85 million how many are actually active and not just placeholder empty repos or automated mirrors for wordpress/jquery plugins? Not on anyones side here but if the top 250k repos switched, that would be really bad news. I think it's more important to compare size and popularity of the repos than just what the % is.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by beberlei on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:50PM (#17258933)
i assumed that only small repositories that nobody except the author is using can be moved in such a small timespan of a few hours. Heavily used open source projects have issues indexed in Google with permalinks, their users probably hardcoding git urls, connections to package managers, heavily customized Travis CI integrations and the like.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by jhall1468 on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:08PM (#17259118)
Of those that switched, how many were backup mirrors vs actually switching to the Gitlab platform?

We can only guesstimate with the data we have.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by skinnymuch on Thursday June 07, 2018 @07:35PM (#17261321)
Yeah. That has to go both ways too. If it’s only tiny repos moving over and not top repos.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by NicoJuicy on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:09PM (#17259133)
One statement doesn't exclude the other
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by kevin_thibedeau on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:25PM (#17259296)
14 cross-site scripts... I'll pass.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by austenallred on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:33PM (#17259988)
Using HackerNews reaction as a main source of information will almost always drastically skew reality. It reminds me of people shorting Facebook because of the #deletefacebook campaign, when in reality getting a few thousand people to delete Facebook in protest is offset in a few minutes by growth.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by greenhatman on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:30PM (#17260457)
I can tell you that my Facebook feed is dead. Very few post anymore. I don't really post anymore either. I just have it for events.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by nodesocket on Thursday June 07, 2018 @06:12PM (#17260775)
March 27th hight of delete facebook "movement" FB stock reaches low of $152.22. Since then, it has rocked up to new highs. Moral of the story as this keeps on happening over and over again (United Airlines, Tesla, Apple, Wells Fargo), do the opposite of media/HN outrage and buy emotional outrage dips... Profit.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by trendia on Thursday June 07, 2018 @06:54PM (#17261093)
Facebook's earnings are driven by their ad network, not user interaction.

That is, as long as Facebook is able to identify and track an individual, they can make money even if the user never spends much time on Facebook.

So, stock price is not an indicator of Facebook usage.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by parthdesai on Thursday June 07, 2018 @06:56PM (#17261107)
i found it very funny when i saw some people be a part '#deletefacebook' movement and go on to post on Instagram.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by jbob2000 on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:24PM (#17258661)
It's not about the number of the accounts that move, but the importance of the accounts. A couple of personal projects move? Whoop-di-doo. A huge, popular open source app moves? Or a GitHub rockstar leaves? That's big news.

So I don't care really care how many leave, in fact that's a clever distraction. I care about who is leaving.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by skinnymuch on Thursday June 07, 2018 @07:28PM (#17261293)
Looking at HN or certain subreddits would similarly have you believe FB is quickly dying and no young person uses it. Or that a ton of people deleted their accounts as a result of the recent scandals. Yes, I’m exaggerating of course.

The number of repos that were imported to Gitlab via their GitHub importer had crosses 100K on Tuesday if my memory serves me right. GitHub has 75M repos, I believe. For now, the migration has been potentially significant, but too early to tell.

Overall, I’m sure there’s something to glean from places like HN and some parts of Reddit, and other similar places. What exactly you can take away, I’m not sure about yet.

There was a front-page article of some survey that was saying something like 40% of people were going to or already did delete Facebook. Not a correct number of course.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by the-dude on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:15PM (#17258579)
I think most people mirrored instead of closing. Spin.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by ggregoire on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:46PM (#17260101)
I think most people don’t give a fuck and will continue using GitHub.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by EpicEng on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:22PM (#17258646)
>I think most people

Based on... what exactly? That's a big claim to make without any data.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by vokep on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:30PM (#17258725)
its a reasonable expectation. You don't need any data to understand that most people will care about certain things in a given situation. (and actually, in making such a generalization, data is being used to make that, its a bit difficult to present that data since its more of a soft 'life experience and understanding of what positions others might be in and choices they might make in such positions' kind of data.)
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by EpicEng on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:02PM (#17259057)
>its a reasonable expectation. You don't need any data to understand that most people will care about certain things in a given situation.

I don't even know what that means; it's so vague and lacking in detail as to be useless. Of course "people care about things in situations". but we're talking about _what_ they care about, and that depends on the situation. For example: "are Nazi's bad?". I don't need to see hard numbers to believe that the answer from most people will be "yes". "Is MS buying GitHub bad"? That's a whole other story. The vocal minority often doesn't represent the majority in things like this.

I think it's pretty clear that most people in fact _don't_ care about the things the-dude cares about. Privacy, lock in, using services provided by "evil" companies... these are things a tiny fraction of people care about. You know how I know that? All of these companies you don't like are _insanely_ successful.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by NullPrefix on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:39PM (#17258834)
Key word being "think". OP is saying his personal biased opinion.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by EpicEng on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:02PM (#17259067)
Well, yeah, and I'm questioning why OP would "think" that. Just because you have an opinion doesn't make it reasonable.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by detaro on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:05PM (#17259091)
So you think it's more reasonable to assume most of the migrating projects didn't mirror, but deleted themselves from Github with only a few days warning? That (IMHO) would point even more to it mainly being small, mostly 1-person projects where there's no community to consider.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by EpicEng on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:24PM (#17259285)
No, what I think is that you just added some context to another person's comment. The top level comment is:

>It's interesting to hear this. If you were on HN the past week, it might have seemed from all the front page articles that GitHub was about to implode due to an an exodus to Gitlab.

and the-dude said:

>I think most people mirrored instead of closing. Spin.

You changed that to

>I think most people (who migrated away from GitHub) mirrored instead of closing. Spin.

Maybe that's what the-dude meant, I don't know. The implication is also that a significant number of users migrated and mirrored, and we have no idea if that's the case. That is my point. You can assume that many who migrated would have mirrored, that's reasonable, but it's not reasonable to assume that a significant number of people are migrating away from GH due to the acquisition, which is absolutely what the-dude was implying.

I can see the source of confusion though; I did quote the "most people" bit and didn't touch specifically on the above until just now.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by detaro on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:12PM (#17259775)
yes, then we did read the-dude's comment differently, I took him as only talking about the moving repositories, as e.g. reported by gitlab's importer numbers.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by geezerjay on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:25PM (#17258674)
Speaking on behalf of myself and myself alone, I have published stuff that links to my personal github repos. So although I've already migrated those projects to Gitlab, like the OP said Github is still used as a mirror.

I imagine how hard it must be for organizations to do the same.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by craftyguy on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:32PM (#17258736)
I moved 2 dozen personal repos out of github, and I plan to move the repos associated with my work too. I'm definitely not alone.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by YorickPeterse on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:44PM (#17260084)
Out of the 250 000-ish projects that migrated to GitLab.com, only about 3000 are mirrors (= using GitLab's mirroring feature).

Source: I work for GitLab.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by the-dude on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:50PM (#17260136)
But did they close their Github account?
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by YorickPeterse on Friday June 08, 2018 @05:03PM (#17269660)
That's something we don't have any data on.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by mike-cardwell on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:58PM (#17260657)
When I moved to gitlab a couple of years ago, I created a commit in each repo which deleted all files and replaced with a single README file pointing to the new URL, pushed those up to github, and then locally undid the commit.

I guess they count as mirrored.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by tinus_hn on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:07AM (#17263517)
It’s the vocal minority. The people who don’t care and aren’t going to move don’t write angry pieces on social media.

Also remember that many of these writers are the same people who claim they are boycotting the latest company that slighted them as a way to make a statement.

Like the people who are so vocally not buying a phone without their beloved jack plug. Surprisingly the manufacturers aren’t really feeling their sting.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by Deadron on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:19PM (#17259229)
Github is only a high profile Git peer. If it explodes someone just pushes up to a different repo hosting site or goes back to trading chagesets some other way.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by k_sh on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:22PM (#17259264)
It also has project management features that tightly integrate with Git repositories, which are not stored within the repository itself.

Most (semi-)serious projects make use of this, which makes migration harder.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by Tloewald on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:25PM (#17259303)
It would be pretty cool if someone devised a core set of meta-services (e.g. the feature branch / pull-request / review / commit that lived entirely on top of git and some simple command lines so that you could basically not care where your cloud repo was.

(I'm expecting that this has been done and I'll be deluged with links...)

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by everdev on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:12PM (#17260321)
No numbers have been provided, so it just sounds like spin.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by grakker on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:15PM (#17259181)
People will always put their own comfort in front of any real ideals or morals. That is, people talk the talk but don't walk the walk. You see it with all the idiots still using Facebook.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by bena on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:24PM (#17259291)
And funnily enough Facebook encourages this sort of behavior. So many ways to indicate your "support" for something without having to actually do anything. I've seen so many reposts of the whole "If you're my friend and gay, you're family" image.

And yeah, that's a nice sentiment. But it doesn't require anything of you. What happens when that person _needs_ something. A house, a loan, a ride, etc. "Being there" is well and good. But it's the secular version of "thoughts and prayers".

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by superflyguy on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:36PM (#17258787)
Interesting, and also...a lie? Or he thinks the 250,000 projects migrated to gitlab within 24 hours of the news that Microsoft was going anywhere near GitHub is a small number.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by bovermyer on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:48PM (#17258914)
That IS a small number. Consider the context.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by sdesol on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:03PM (#17259068)
Yeah I really think people are trying to read way too much into things. The only true bellwether in my opinion, are influential open source projects leaving GitHub for something else, like self hosting with GitLab/Bitbucket/etc.

If nodejs, google, and other big names/organizations decides to leave, then I think it is time for Microsoft to worry.

Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by superflyguy on Friday June 08, 2018 @03:45AM (#17263433)
Gnome, Debian and gimp have all left.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by sdesol on Friday June 08, 2018 @11:40AM (#17266515)
Were they ever hosted on GitHub?
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by mythrwy on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:06PM (#17259100)
Not for 24 hours it isn't.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by penagwin on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:12PM (#17259149)
Right, but I doubt it'll continue at such a rate. This kind of stuff happens a lot (netflix making it harder to use VPNs, the recent facebook stuff, etc), "mass of people leave" but in reality it's a very small group, who are rather loud. Plus, mirroring isn't the same as leaving (IMO). To me it's more of a precaution.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by superflyguy on Thursday June 07, 2018 @07:14PM (#17261212)
Right, I mean it can't continue at that rate forever - the numbers don't support that hypothesis.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by crtasm on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:11PM (#17259148)
I wonder how many people/organisations own those 250k projects, I assume it is far less than 250k.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by skinnymuch on Thursday June 07, 2018 @07:56PM (#17261425)
Yeah. For example, I just put up and am putting up a few more repos of old code I had lying around. With those I have over 15 repos on GitHub. Unfortunately, but also not uncommon at all, the most stars any repo has is 5 with most having none. So, no repos that are material to GitHub.
Re:I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA by skinnymuch on Thursday June 07, 2018 @07:53PM (#17261404)
Is the number 250k projects (are projects repos?) in first 24 hours? I thought it was topping 100K repos imported to Gitlab at some point on Tuesday. This is from Gitlab giving those numbers themselves in a post that was linked from here.

The first hint of Microsoft and GitHub was around 6 pm EDT/11 pm UTC on Sunday.

And like others are saying. Even if that is the case, it isn’t a huge number with context of Github’s size.