Their brain is certainly smoother to do this. Motivation I mostly hear has to do with network effect, user base. I disagree with this tho since the only way you move that network is to start hosting elsewhere & getting folks used to it (aka be the change you want to see); ‘early adopting’ & momentum in this direction is what drives a new audience to try, collaborate, contribute to these platform some otherwise wouldn’t have tried. You might lose some commits, but others (those banned from the service for US sanctions or philosophically refuse to have an account) now do get access. That might be the smaller pool, but this audience is rarely considered or catered to.

Even if you want “visibility” or some other marketing term, a compromise would be to have a read-only mirror. But a mirror like this would contain the entire history that would be used to train their AI that they sell back to us.

One of many reason tho, I have been using Darcs or Pijul over Git in recent times to create yet another barrier to not having code hosted on the Microsoft platform. If Pijul’s Nest supported tarball archives it would be ‘good enough’… & it only supports converting from, not to Git 🤣