People should use something that keeps a local copy of their code and just copies it to Github and to other contributors with a sync process to push and pull changes. Some sort of 'distributed source control system' maybe. Then people would only need a 'hub' to connect to people, and it'd be easier to move somewhere else.
I'm looking at setting up rngit mirrors of all my repos on our boat NAS. Conceivably it also allows issue tracking and collaboration without centralized infra
What you just described is Fossil. It has an auto-sync feature that makes everything feel distributed.
Just set up a Kubernetes deployment and you’re set.
But as others mention, GitHub’s primary strength is collaboration. If you want decentralized, solve this by creating a decentralized collaboration tool on top of fossil and/or git.
For example, how to do pull requests and code reviews?
This gets tiresome. Github is a lot more than a host for Git repositories. If you want to suggest that people use something else, you need to suggest a replacement that has the features people use Github for.
yeah, #1, it is free private file storage, and #2, it's a download portal for free as in beer software replacing paid offerings. that's what it is for 99.99% of people.
being a host for git repositories has never been its core competency. neither has its groupware offering.
does it even serve OSS well? a very interesting criteria is, "Have mature or adopted end-user-facing OSS recently merged a large PR from an unallied contributor?" The answer is overwhelming no. This is why there is so much innovation in this space.
I think you missed the joke, which is that the parent poster you're replying to is suggesting a 'solution' to the problem which evolved in complexity until he was just describing Github again.