I strongly disagree with the assumption that GitHub's alternative is another centralized forge. Git itself is perfectly decentralized, as was the original Linux kernel development process. How people managed to put all their eggs in one intermittently available service is beyond me. Moving the eggs into another bucket is not a solution (like Microsoft is short of servers). The SPoF is the problem. There are plumbing, porcelain and "github" layers. The "github" part has to be decentralized as well. Then, using a particular forge will be a choice of convenience, not necessity. https://replicated.live/blog/crdt
Oh, it’s really simple why this happened:
1. People do not like email-based patch processes.
2. GitHub made everything dead simple, and free. Lots of Open Source projects have flourished because GitHub is both easy to use and makes collaboration across repository painless.
3. Very few people actually care about decentralization. As long as you have a full copy of your repo on your own machines as well as GH, it’s hard to argue you’re gaining anything with decentralization.
4. Most people also don’t want to self host a git server.
Why use e-mail? That was 20 years ago. I developed my own local setup that is like GitHub for me and agents, see the link. Everything is a repo, may pull and push tickets, docs, everything. That was not a major effort, unless you count 20 years of experience.
https://replicated.live/blog/crdt
https://replicated.live/blog/link
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> How people managed to put all their eggs in one intermittently available service is beyond me.
It's beyond me how people on HN can be ignorant to why GitHub gained so much market share. It's because for most dev teams, the things they add to the easily decentralized git core is *very valuable.* Arguing it's not valuable or ignoring that value doesn't help anyone.
If decentralized is really going to win, then you have to have the features and DevX to match the basics GitHub provides. Because that's what people need/want. And not just the candy-ass-not-as-good-as-the-kernel-devs devs. Lots of very talented people and very well engineered projects use GitHub because it's better for what they need. Even with all the outages, people are still there. If it was so easy to move away, people would. The fact that they aren't says something important. Please consider not ignoring it.