I'm not sure how to make it clearer. I do not understand what the "social" component of github is that people are using so heavily that it's a big thing to break from and requires huge centralisation, that it is the "most important aspect of the platform". I said that I assume I am missing something because I don't see much that really ties all these things together, and nothing like the network effects of, say, X or facebook.

All you've pointed to is devs working together and people filing bugs. All that requires is auth, no? Is that it? Is an SSO button really this enormous hurdle?

> It's just the same thing,

Saying dropbox is irrelevant because all end users could just "build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." is not the same as saying "what is the social aspect of github?".

Closer is what I've argued elsewhere, which is that multiple different hosts running (something like) gitea selling cloud based storage as a service would be extremely close to github for end users. And it would be identical for what you've talked about wouldn't it?

> you both are ignoring how important convenience is.

The convenience of what, specifically? Not having to click an SSO button on a new website?