What is particularly weird about this is that the "fork" (god I hate that word in the general case) mechanism should really be inferred, not explicit: the entire point of a distributed revision control system is that you are able to willy-nilly push and pull from random compatible commit graphs, a feature people who really "work with git" use constantly (like, that isn't somehow esoteric: this is how it is used by the Linux kernel people) in order to quickly merge work from various parties... what does it even mean to claim you are a fork of one, specific other prior repository?

> distributed revision control system

I suspect Github doesn't want it to be that way?

GitHub can, and will, change forks for you if send a request through the support form. It is not exposed in the user interface, but the functionality is there.

Does that make it better?

Yes? If something is possible but inconvenient, that's clearly better than it being completely impossible.

It technically exists in a form where almost nobody will ever realize it exists, let alone be able to use it.

I think they say to contact them in the help. I found out about somehow without anyone telling me.

Support forum said that unforking is impossible

You also can’t fork within the same organization. (For example with a public and private version of the same repo).

Also search doesn't work for forked repos, last time I checked anyway.

That's still the case.