Comment by znpy
2 months ago
> but places like GitHub have sold people on centralisation. We need to get back to decentralised dev.
I don’t think that’s the case. It’s more of a marketing/market incentive. It’s great pr to be associated with the most famous project, way less so to be associated with a fork, at least until the fork becomes widespread and well recognised.
GitHub does make it fairly easy to fork a project, I wouldn’t blame the situation on github.
Just look at how much of the drama is caused by who "owns" the repository. In a decentralised model, which git perfectly supports, everybody owns their own branch(es). But all the issues etc. are stuck on the GitHub project.
> In a decentralised model, which git perfectly supports, everybody owns their own branch(es). But all the issues etc. are stuck on the GitHub project.
yeah i'm gonna call BS on this. this kind of drama already existed when communities were "decentralised" and each one had its own forum, mailing list or whatever.
the core of the issue here is about wanting to be the owner of a repository.
so people should just not bother with being owner of a specific repository, but just fork it and move on. and github supports forking sufficiently well for this purpose.
There are two main problems with "just fork" on GitHub and other forges:
1. Issues, PRs, discussions etc don't move over,
2. Discovery. When GitHub was in its infancy they made a big deal out of the "network" feature. Almost 20 years later it has languished, virtually unchanged in that entire time. When I think of decentralisation I think Bitcoin. We need a better way to "discover" the consensus fork. I feel like GitHub could do a lot to help, but they don't care.