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Comment by IAmEveryone | Hacker News Reader

..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.

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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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