[jrochkind1]

The federation thing isn't just github of course.

I think the general answer is that it would take real development effort to make federation work, and having to have compatibilty with other installations slows down your own pace of possible features -- I think these things are undeniable. Arguably worth it for society/the community (I wish we had more open standard federation and less centralization), but from the point of view of the company will it actually lead to increased profits sufficient to justify? In fact, it may do the opposite, if you are one of the largest, then lock-in is better for your profitability. Compatibility with other services is only important for the small upstarts trying to get customers from the largest.

I don't like it, but I think we will get proprietary centralization as long as we have capitalism of the sort we have.

[IanCal]

I get what you mean, I think what I'm pretty stuck on is what is the centralisation solving? Federated messages dealing with lots of things flowing back and forth and live updates, etc is one thing - but what is it about GH that makes much of a difference when things are in one place or many? Much of the work is done in very isolated sections.

Imagine each organisation/user was run with completely isolated data, and you used something like google sign in for auth (so one global sign in, then oauth).

What wouldn't work? Global search, that I get. I struggle to think of other things though. Maybe whether links between issues across orgs updates? Every commit, diff, code browser, permissions for writing, reading, org level search, stars, would work with zero federated sort of search-y things. Package management, issue tracking, all that would be the same.

Forks followed by PRs? Not sure that would be much different - maybe you'd have to raise an issue on the original project with a link to your new repo & branch.

[jrochkind1]

Hm, thinking about it.

Some of my attraction to github is just that I am used to and like the UI, and I get annoyed on another platform where I don't understand the UI and don't know where to find things or how to do things (like set up free CI for open source project, or debug existing CI for a PR).

Other than that... auto-linking to issues, prs, and code (with auto-expansion of excerpt in issue) cross-project is nice?

But you are right, git is theoretically something where separate projects are fairly isolated, which does make it more mysterious that competitors are having trouble and it seems like github has some kind of network effect lock-in anyway. It's a good question.