- Sourceforge had become terrible in multiple ways. They weren’t actually a competitor anymore with any competently-run hosting site.
- lightweight site, no ads
- either had tons of features sourceforge didn’t or sourceforge’s site was bad enough I never noticed the features
- gave me, and companies, a reason to create an account and actually engage with it—I think maybe sourceforge was one of those sites that required login for larger downloads (hazy recollection, may be wrong) but I certainly never used it for anything else, if I had an account. GitHub? Issue tracker on repos for software you use, free hosting even just for unimportant junk repos (all I’ve ever had, myself), maybe sending the odd PR, having an account is nice and they didn’t even need to break out the stick to make it nice (though now they have, because normal and non-aggressive use of their site will get you rate-limited very fast without an account—jerks, forcing me to log in even if I’m just searching for something real quick and don’t need any logged-in features)
Yeah, IMO, sourceforge and github never competed. Sourceforge was a place to host installers for windows shareware. Github basically created its own market. It was really competing with the millions of private SVN servers. When git became the new hotness, anyone who researched it realized they could just use github instead of having to stand up their own git server. It was a zero cost trial of git, and basically everyone chose git over svn and just stuck with github.
- lightweight site, no ads
- either had tons of features sourceforge didn’t or sourceforge’s site was bad enough I never noticed the features
- gave me, and companies, a reason to create an account and actually engage with it—I think maybe sourceforge was one of those sites that required login for larger downloads (hazy recollection, may be wrong) but I certainly never used it for anything else, if I had an account. GitHub? Issue tracker on repos for software you use, free hosting even just for unimportant junk repos (all I’ve ever had, myself), maybe sending the odd PR, having an account is nice and they didn’t even need to break out the stick to make it nice (though now they have, because normal and non-aggressive use of their site will get you rate-limited very fast without an account—jerks, forcing me to log in even if I’m just searching for something real quick and don’t need any logged-in features)