Now i have 5+ accounts, 5+ places where the forks are kept, 2-3 different protocols, just to submit a patch.
GitHub was one app, one protocol, one account, one index.
> create new account
I don't think "need to create an account to figure out that you can't contribute with a given forge" is a real problem. They're just as publicly browsable sans-login as GitHub, for the same reasons: people want to share their stuff. And when you do need to make an account, most software forges have SSO with the big/common providers.
> find it archived, google for new repo, find that one archived, go to new repo
You needed to RTFM and do a bit of research to figure out where/how to contribute for GitHub projects too. They got archived/moved around/invisibly-forked just as often as people move forges today. How many times have you seen. "FizzBuzz is archived and no longer accepting contributions; an actively maintained rebuild of this project is at https://github.com/somebody/FizzBuzz-ng"?
> find they now take patches via email instead of PRs
Plenty of GitHub repos either don't accept contributions via GitHub PR (Linux) or require lots of nonstandard hoop-jumping to get a contribution approved (Python).
> 2-3 different protocols
Git is the protocol. I don't think the move away from GitHub is making anyone move away from Git. hg/jj/svn are still minority tools for the same reasons they always were.
> one index
It's Git. The index is folders on your hard drive. List their origins if you forget the URLs of their forges. Make a browser bookmark if you don't want to keep the checkout around.
Under the most charitable interpretation of your complaints that I can come up with, contributing in a not-universally-GitHub world is like ... 1% harder per repo contributed to. At most. To the tune of, at the very absolute worst, like 2 minutes of extra work when making your very first contribution to a project. I don't think it's that hard to stop googling "ProjectName github" and start googling "ProjectName git source" or "ProjectName contribute code".
git is one of the protocols that github extended to build a complete product. So moving to 5 forges means 5 protocols (some email based)
github offers more than git. it has a search index, code search, PRs, a community, developer following , a feed and more.
> one index ; It's Git
github isn't git. it's index is a full text index of all the repos, developers, artifacts, repositories and more. having this indexed in one place has tremendous value.
For someone so smug, you're incredibly myopic.
which FM? now there are 5 copies around the internet.
We're clearly arguing over aesthetics. but generally everyone praised Github for standardizing contributions from the earlier state of 20+ forges / mailing list protocols, diff workflows etc.
And now we're heading backward.