The thing that GitHub has right now is the userbase - the network effect keeps people interested in their service. The technical value they provide is pretty trivially replicable (see: GitLab, BitBucket), but you can't code up a (real) community.

It's worth noting that 10 years ago, this same statement was true of Sourceforge.

gitlab and bitbucket aren't as good, I've tried them and more.

GitHub isn't a commodity that excels only because of it happening to be popular. People choose GitHub because it's both popular and good. It has competition, some of which are better for specific circumstances, but as a whole they don't execute as well.

Let me contrast with Facebook – it was only good, in my opinion, for a brief period starting in 2005 which happened to coincide with my freshman year of university. As it grew and changed, I found myself and very many of my peers hating each significant change. The only reason I've kept an account is because it's popular – it stores some weak social connections which would be otherwise lost.

Horses for courses. Plenty of people prefer those other providers, just like plenty of people prefer one brand of toothpaste over another. Toothpaste is still a commodity product.

I've never used gitlab, but I find bitbucket to be identical to github in every way that matters.

And bitbucket has unlimited private repos for free compared to github's limited number for a fee. I moved my lab repos to bitbucket when we outgrew 10 private repos. It was going to be quite expensive to add more at GitHub.

(Most of out repos are public but some things you want to keep private at first.)

Bitbucket is not as good? Feature-wise they're almost identical.... I use github for my FOSS projects and bitbucket for stuff that shouldn't be public, like for-profit soft and side-projects. If you don't see added value in free unlimited private repos that's not the case for many of us.

I like Github best, but will readily admit it's mostly just because I'm most used to it. Like you I use both, with Bitbucket for my private stuff and Github for the public stuff. The latter mostly because that's where people are.

I gladly pay for the Medium plan just for my own personal private usage. It's a wonder these services last as long as they do, when you guys don't want to support them.

The point is the nature of git means I don't really need any of them. They're convenient as a public dumping ground (Github) or "backup" (Bitbucket) with a decent web ui, but if they disappeared it'd make very little practical difference for me (other than recruiters having to find me via another site).

What didn't you like about GitLab and when did you last try it?

GitHub's enterprise grade services and their integration with 3rd party and on-site solutions is currently above what anyone else provides.

It's way above being a simple repository storage which isn't a trivial think to setup to begin with just watch the various talks from BitBucket's core team.

As long as everyone else has to play catch up they will be fine. And i don't see sourceforge as being comparable unless you just look at a project hosting in it's most basic form in which Google Drive or Dropbox can also fit in that category.

>in which Google Drive or Dropbox can also fit in that category

Sourceforge offered shell access for SVN; Google drive and dropbox wouldn't support branching, merging etc. To say sourceforge is in a category closer to them than to github is ridiculous.

You could implement an app that follows the git protocol on top of Google drive or Dropbox 'filesystem'. In fact, that would be a pretty neat project.

I wonder what the sourceforge guys are making of this right now.

Both of them are probably pretty upset.

...all of which are provided by all of the other git hosting providers. Again: these are commodity features.

a diff I see missing from bitbucket is the visualization - heat graphs/maps of my activity on a project or across projects. I know it wasn't there early on, but I've known more than a few people that keep committing to a project on a daily basis because they can keep their streak going on the visual chart (on github).

It's not really one particular feature, but a whole mess of little things that, collectively, will keep github 'default choice' for a lot of folks for a long time coming - it's inherently a bit more 'social'.

That said, I'm in agreement with your view that most other services have most of the main same features anyway - I prefer bitbucket for my projects, but... I'm in a minority. This sort of feels like MS Office vs OpenOffice 15 years ago. Yeah, technically there's a lot of the same stuff, but there's enough 'missing' features from multiple users' perspectives that the larger player still 'wins'.