You're replying to a sarcastic comment which is actually intended to praise Sourcehut's good frontend, hope that helps.
Further, it's a completely open source product which strongly encourages self-hosting; the main reason to subscribe to the hosted instance is to give money to the dev.
For #1, yes it's decentralized but when running a team of people having a central clone is ideal. Yea I get it you can push and pull all day long but in reality people want to have a centralized location.
The big appeal for moving to mercurial for us was better merging than svn. Our team worked a certain way already, the tool handle this workflow and that's one of the reasons we chose mercurial. Decentralized was just nice for full backups in a lot of ways.
Refugees... from a third party service... because things changed since they began there
Some other third party service welcomes them, but has bad front end...
SOLUTION:
1. Mercurial and Git are decentralized! They have been designed to be so. Make your back end decentralized also. Why rely on a centralized site?
2. We used to run front-end programs on our computers! What a concept. We thought desktop computers were far better than mainframes and “fat” clients were far better than “thin” ones. Now we are all back to mainframes.
3. End to end encryption! I mean wow half of all humanity has their accounts in an epic database of 3-4 billion people from many breaches. All their private information is now out there. And you trust GitHub, Facebook or whoever to host your group’s private data?
MaidSAFE, MetaMask and other projects do 1,2,3. You should be in control of your keychains. We have plenty of desktop apps for managing eg git. Why let GitHub do it?
At the very least, run GitLab on your own in-house servers. But there are other alternatives.
And frankly, think about the speed and environmental impact of shipping all those bits to Google where you are “renting” Google Docs / Drive software to collaborate on something. You can have a lightning fast network in the Brazilian Favelas or a village in Namibia. Dating sites, ZocDoc, OpenTable, GrubHub can all be local open source apps running on local mesh networks. But nooo, we need project loon to send our signal to california in order to talk to our neighbor or coordinate dinner plans. And in Kashmir, etc. the government can simply turn off our internet and suddenly BAM — can’t even stock drugs locally for people??
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/technology/india-kashmir-...