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.

The reality doesn't matter at this point just what people think.

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.

Can you just host a git server yourself? Not trying to be snarky but seems doable.

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.

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.

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.