The funny part is that we decentralized version control with git and then centralized software development in GitHub

We like creating decentralised technologies to then graviate around centralised services built on top. The Internet was meant to be decentralised (it still is in terms of the protocols that make it work), but then we ended up consuming very much centralised services. Bitcoin's decentralised in terms of technology, but then we are centralising in terms of exchanges, wallets etc.

I guess the decentralisation aspects of a given technology just means it's a resilient building block. And since the only way we make sense of things nowadays is through markets, it's inevitable we starting building and consuming centralised services.

I'm not saying centralisation is good or bad btw, but I do share the irony in your reply, mostly because I find it funny when a new tech is being sold as new way of doing something in a decentralised way.

Decentralization mainly grants flexibility/customization/freedom, but generally you don’t really care about this — freedom only really matters when you can’t do the thing you’re trying to do.

If everything is already covered without such freedom, or you don’t care about what’s not covered (or failed to conceive it), then you don’t really mind having the freedom or not. It doesn’t change much.

Gmail is a good email client — email being decentralized is only relevant to me if I wanted to get off gmail to go to say fastmail. But if I didn’t, what do I care whether the underlying protocol is centralized or not?

> freedom only really matters when you can’t do the thing you’re trying to do.

Disagree, or at least think there’s a need to clarify. This makes it look like a freedom is only occasionally relevant.

This kind of freedom derived from decentralization also exists as a persistent threat against bad behavior. If users can leave and bring their stuff with them, that constrains the choices that the platform can even consider.

Attempts to centralize should be seen as strategic attempts to change the landscape in a way that makes it easier to exploit users.

People don't care about whether their tools are decentralized or centralized (apart from a few principled individuals). They care about the UX of the tool, and so far centralised options have won on UX. I'm not sure how much of that is due to being centralised, rather than being due to companies investing in UX to gain market share preferring a centralised model.

Ofc centralised/decentralised is also part of the UX (what happens when the centralised service goes down), but so far it's not been a net win for decentralised.

We did the same thing with the Web but we prefer Google and Facebook.

We did the same thing with email but we prefer Gmail.

We did the same thing with Usenet but we prefer Reddit.

We did the same thing with IRC but we prefer Slack.

We did it with shitcoins but we prefer Coinbase.

Turns out people really don't care much for pure decentralization. There's money to be made recentralizing decentralized whatever.

It is way more difficult to exploit users of a decentralized service, because they can just go to another host.

Not that funny when “we” means a different thing in each of its uses.

That's the way you see GitHub? for me it's a repo hosting platform, the UI is just a pleasantly

I don’t use the site much at all, but it isn’t really a matter of how I see the site—they clearly added features like issue tracking, commenting, and CI, and people use those features.

The point is that Github is not just a web-based graphical client for Git.