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Comment by rapnie | Hacker News Reader

While you are right, there is more than just the code. In general one should be wary for lock-in when sculpting their development processes around the features that GH offers, i.e. the Issue tracker, Projects & Teams, Discussions and not to forget GH Actions. And besides that there is FOMO for many projects to leave GH due to its popularity. Does your contributor base move with you to another platform? Is it as easy to find new contributors, or even to find the project itself?

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..which is why I am somewhat convinced that Github single-handedly increased participation in OSS by orders of magnitude.

I never figured out the processes to submit patches in the dark time of sourceforge and mailing lists. Since Github standardized this, I frequently contribute.

I agree with that and I have the same experience however it's important to also recognize the dangerous of the centralization and vendor lock-in not only the convenience.

Hence why running own infrastructure and mirror to Github makes a lot of sense for bigger open-source projects.

Yes, I agree. But I think the GH dominance can become something of a problem, similar to other big tech near-monopolies.

I hope for more decentralization of forges in the future in a more open market, and I have my eye on ForgeFed as means to achieve that.

https://forgefed.peers.community

For the record, I have the complete opposite experience. It used to be possible to just e-mail someone a description of your code fix, with a diff output inlined or attached. Nowadays, when I try that, people ignore the code you wrote and say “No, please patch is a git patch” (actual quote), or they require a pull request on GitHub. (I don’t have an account on GitHub, and I seriously doubt that I’ll ever get one.)

My experience is that they want even more, an actual pull request. And when you do submit it as a PR, they want you to go back and "rebase" over latest again. For someone thats not so familiar with the process it's intimidating.

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