[mi100hael]

I agree 100%. GitHub muddles the contribution process and support process. Couple that with the irony of developing free software using a bunch of proprietary, commercial tools, and I much prefer the tried & true IRC/mailing list approach to the trendy Slack/GitHub stack.

I think a large part of the problem is that the current generation of new developers is completely conditioned by Facebook, Google, Dropbox, etc to relinquish control of their data rather than deal with the slightest inconvenience of configuring an IRC client or whatever else it may be.

[matt4077]

I'm sorry, but having lived in the times where sourceforge was the old github, this strikes me as quire absurd.

Firstly: sourceforge was widely used and was also hosted – the architecture didn't really change.

Secondly: Github is simply the best thing that ever happened to OSS. It's a fantastic interface that allows you to:

- Immediately get a sense of the project: You know where to look and can quickly scan Stars, Issues, Checkins etc.

- Makes contributing a no-brainer: I never ever sent anyone a patch by email. With GH, it's basically more difficult NOT to contribute back.

- Makes forking easy: OSS projects often stagnate. Now, someone can fork the project, maybe update the dependencies and get it running again in half an hour or so. There's a graph right there showing you all the forks, so it's easy to figure out which one you want to trust.

- Makes discovery easy. I check the trending repositories every few days, and there's no better way to learn than to get lost reading other peoples' code.

- The whole industry of CI platforms etc. being given out for free to OSS projects was created around Github.

So I'm quite happy people are happy to "relinquish control of their data", considering I don't even know what that's supposed to mean in the context of OSS.

[petetnt]

Creating barriers or deliberately keeping them up is never the solution. Every time you create more obstacles, you'll end up losing a future contributor or two. Contributors that might end up solving larger future problems or ones that end up owning the whole project after you have moved on. It's not about the slightest inconvenience and obviously you might get slightly larger signal-to-noise ratio but when was the last time keeping into your own small bubble paid off? Most likely never.

At the Brackets project (https://github.com/adobe/brackets) we have seen lots of new active contributors that started from none to giving steady stream of PRs and the effort needed for that was just a slight push to the right direction.