> I am not that excited about that last part, but federating pull requests sounds like a killer feature
Git already has a pull request feature [1] that's as federated as it can get. The 'request-pull' command can be used to request pull on upstream repositories hosted anywhere (or not at all). The only requirement is that the downstream clone must be online. I know that HN isn't particularly found of email-based workflows for git. But requesting a pull is as simple as copying the output and mailing it (or via any text messaging service) to the maintainer. And doing a pull as a maintainer is actually easier than doing local PR merges using Github.