It's kind of weird that we've collectively decided on a distributed version control system, while centralizing where we keep the repositories and metadata.

I think it's just a simple reality that most projects don't actually need or want a decentralized development process. In my experience, most projects are looking for a single, high-reliability canonical source that is in control of project leadership. Most projects are only developed by a small group, maybe even only one person.

Yeah, I think what people really liked about git (vs many other VCSs at the time) was cheap and easy local branching, not the distributed nature.

I think the distributed support is pretty nice for easy-ish mirroring. Even to a relatively bare git+ssh target on a self-hosted server. No specialized services required. I mean, just for VCS.

Local and distributed is the same difference to me compared to subversion.

^ Comment on the Nth 100+ GitHub Down thread (every thread is like that).

Maybe everyone here is just using it as an excuse to chatter about forges or GitHub being down too much etc. and it has no impact. But if it does and people are honestly fretting they can mirror their repos. Then no one needs to worry that much (except for their cursed CI setups) the next time it happens.

And that’s a benefit of peer-to-peer repos right there.

github is more than just the repo, though. Issue tracking, releases, doc hosting, CI, pull reviews, and so on.

You claimed that most projects don’t want/need decentralized development and I gave you an example of how mirroring can make a project more robust. You’re welcome.

This is because the dream of true P2P decentralization died with NAT and IPv4 exhaustion.

I think that the answer here is eventual widespread use of many smaller options, from FSF's Savannah to self-hosted gitea/forejo/gitlab.

Git is in a good position to support this.

not gonna happen. society loves monopolies because they're convenient

We're starting to see the pain of such monopolies. Note that I included a hosted option (Savannah) in my list. It doesn't take everyone leaving github to break the monopoly, just enough to make it not a monopoly.