Good points. I guess I keep just wanting 'you are the product' / enshitification / free tier capture to not be the dominant business model of our time. You're right that a YC VC would likely not funds this. There are many alternative business models though. (edit: https://sourcehut.org seems promising if very barebones and oldschool)
> The best parts of Github that make it worth using in the first place all come down to the size of the network
Not intrinsically, only as a side-effect of economies of scale. At least for me. The 'social' features make it more compelling and explain its widespread adoption and thus economies of scale, but not what made github worth using for me at least. It Just Worked (TM) to unite all the work we used to do in the good ol' days via repos, patches, tickets, mailing lists, IRC, build servers, and host servers.
I don't need my own VPS running 24/7, I said maybe 100 mins of CI a month, even if I'm pushing and building while others are commenting and PRing multiple times a day, it's going to still take a fraction of that VPS capacity.
Same. Currently, I'm spending $10/mo on a VPS from OVH to host Forgejo. I have hourly backups to an rsync.net account I was already paying for. It's not the most efficient way to do things, but Forgejo is actually pretty nice and I have data sovereignty.
> The best parts of Github that make it worth using in the first place all come down to the size of the network
Not intrinsically, only as a side-effect of economies of scale. At least for me. The 'social' features make it more compelling and explain its widespread adoption and thus economies of scale, but not what made github worth using for me at least. It Just Worked (TM) to unite all the work we used to do in the good ol' days via repos, patches, tickets, mailing lists, IRC, build servers, and host servers.
I don't need my own VPS running 24/7, I said maybe 100 mins of CI a month, even if I'm pushing and building while others are commenting and PRing multiple times a day, it's going to still take a fraction of that VPS capacity.