Docker also had DockerHub, but it wasn’t as necessary as GitHub and didn’t catch on as well.

I think HF is more like docker than GitHub. GitHub had the wide scope to be huge. Docker was too niche (in comparison) and didn’t catch on so much to be necessary for every single project like Git did.

Similarly, HF is also niche in the sense that docker is. There’s no need to host your model on HF, it’s just a convenience for some projects. It’s effectively a package manager for ML models.

It seems that if there’s a way to make models more easily runnable, HF would not be necessary at all. They have a community there, but it’s not something that can be monetized well.