This is not an effective argument, given that these smaller services are uniformly retrograde in functionality.

Agreed, if there was something actually better to switch to then I'd be interested. But seems unlikely for that to happen now - it's easier than ever to build a new github, at least the app itself but i doubt someone's gonna bother with the business effort needed to actually build it up as a reliable, trustworthy option that you know will be around for a while, which is a process that takes years when you know you're going to get disrupted. It would probably have to be open source to get early adopters to use it but somehow be nicer to use than GitHub, and there's basically no money to be made

If only Github was reliable and trustworthy, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

When cars started replacing horses, they didn’t have more features. They just didn’t get sick or temperamental, and they didn’t shit all over the streets.

Going more than 20 miles an hour and not dying of heat exhaustion (or because your oats are too dry) are pretty big features.

But my point was that it’s a bad analogy. People are opting out of GitHub despite the alternatives having fewer features. You can read that as an ideological choice or as a YAGNI one. If it’s ideological, then there’s no competitive or feature angle at all; people are doing it because it seems right to them.

(To be clear, I have no problem with this. I think GitHub only gets better after public pressure, as we’ve seen with the last N cycles of product atrophy.)