I think the social effects of GitHub are very strong. It&#x27;s the de facto arena for open source collaboration. By using it, a project signals that they choose the most widely used community, and thus encourage participation. It&#x27;s familiar. Everybody has an account. There&#x27;s built in GitHub support in package managers, even, so the namespace of &quot;githubuser&#x2F;project&quot; is valuable.<p>Personally I&#x27;m not interested in another clone of GitHub.com. Let&#x27;s try another model entirely. Something more distributed and federated. That way lies diversity and immunity to lock-in. Let&#x27;s collaborate in an open fashion using open protocols and decentralized hosting.