And this is the core problem with the modern platform internet. One victor (or a handful) take the lead in a given niche, and it becomes impossible to get away from them without great personal cost, literal, moral, or labor, and usually a combo of all three. And then that company has absolutely no motivation at all to prioritize the quality of the product, merely to extract all the value from the user-base as possible.

Facebook has been on that path for well over a decade, and it shows. The service itself is absolute garbage. Users stay because everyone they know is already there and the groups they love are there, and they just tolerate being force-fed AI slop and being monitored. But Facebook is not GROWING as a result, it's slowly dying, much like it's aging userbase. But Facebook doesn't care because no one in charge of any company these days can see further than next quarter's earnings call.

This is a socio-economic problem, it can happen with non internet platforms too. Its why people end up living in cities for example. Any system that has addresses, accounts or any form of identity has the potential for strong network effects.

I am surprised by the comments about GH CI. I first started using CI on GL, then moved to GH and found GH's to let me get things done more easily.

It's been years through and the ease of doing simple things is not always indicative of difficult things. Often quite the contrary...

Easy and good are radically different things.

From what I gather it's that GH Actions is good for easy scenarios: single line building, unit tests, etc. When your CI pipeline starts getting complicated or has a bunch of moving parts, not only do you need to rearchitect parts of it, but you lose a lot of stability.

Bingo. GH Actions is great if you're deploying vanilla web stuff to a vanilla web server. I write firmware. GH Actions is hell.