| For some reason centralization is such a loaded term these days, and I wonder why. There are things that centralization deals with that decentralized, open solutions seem to neglect. For example, pushing GitHub to become an all-in-one platform reduces fatigue of having to learn multiple, independent third-party apps/platforms. Not everyone wants nor knows how to write glue/infra code, time is essential and there are other problems to solve. I may be ignorant, but is this related to why AWS took off the way it did? Add to this the potential combinations of integrations that you need to learn. An internet resource may teach you how to do x+y+z, but if you happen to want to use x+r+z then you're out of luck, will probably take you a lot of time to sort that out. For some amount of time, I don't remember anything similar like GitHub back then when it launched. Correct me if I'm wrong. I think we can't discount the insight Github has opened us up to, leading to other providers like Gitlab and such. I'm not afraid of homogenization and lock-in, I'm afraid of people getting tired of too many things to learn to be productive these days. There's got to be a point where you stop decentralizing, because where does it end? > all the built-in tools will have an inherent advantage over third party solutions If the built-in tools are superior and more effective than third-party solutions, is that a bad thing? If not, then we should do our part and advocate/support the better third-party ones than bring ourselves down against e.g. Github just because things have been getting better and we can't let go of our prejudices. I'm not a GitHub fanboy nor do I abhor decentralization. I just think it always warrants a case-to-case examination, deep thought. When you start making comments such as "_superficially_ very nice and convenient" when e.g. Sponsors is objectively good for the OSS maintainers and bad for absolutely no one, then you've got to be skeptical of how skeptical you are about things. |