Humans* aren't built for decentralization. We can only keep so many unique names in our head a time, only so many connections. I don't have any papers to link to on this, but I think it's safe to say that's how things are - if not we wouldn't have created cities, national identities, and of course, newsgroups, message boards, centralized package managers and distributions, and yes, source code repositories.
There is something nice about knowing, with a high degree of certainty, that any given open source project (or any thing) is in one of a few places, and if I don't know where that is I can ask for help to find those places by their names.
That's mixing up a whole lot of concepts. Centralization is about power.
Cities generally have very little centralization. Almost no interactions in a city go through a central entity, similarly for countries. Concentration is something different than centralization.
Newsgroups have very little centralization. Everyone reads and writes through different servers, and you can trivially switch servers without any impact on who you can communicate with. Agreeing on names and federation is something different than centralization.
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There is absolutely no need to have software development happen on one proprietary platform in order to be able to search for software project in one centralized location. What you need for that is a search engine. Or even multiple competing search engines that can all index the same set of software projects.
Just because cities, countries, and newsgroups allow lots of different entities to participate doesn't mean they aren't centralizing. The strong incentives to place like with like result in forums with topics, subforums with subtopics. Districts become heterogeneous and we get things like Chinatown or the Castro District.
And these agglomerations of like with like occur spontaneously at pretty much every scale. You're quite literally missing the forest for the trees.
Yes, like likes to be around like, and systems that allow people to find people who are like them or who meet some of their needs are really useful, and you can call that phenomenon of "bringing people who want to interact together" "centralization". But noone ever argued aganst that.
When people talk about "centralization" in this context, they speak about power structures. A centralized power structure is when power is concentrated in the hands of a few. The fact that there are other forms of "centralization" is completely besides the point. If anything, the point is that you can often have those other forms of (useful) centralization without the centralization of power. Newsgroups, for example, obviously centralize discussion, in that they bring people who share an interest together in one (virtual) place. But they don't centralize power, because the technical implementation makes it so that no one party can easily control the communication on all of usenet.
Noone argues that we shouldn't have systems that allow us to interface with the world in a central location. This is all about avoiding concentration of power.
Your original argument is like saying that we should put all websites on the platform of a new company, say WebHub, because you want to have one place to search for websites. It's ultimately a non-sequitur: Millions of companies independently host websites on this planet, but obviously you don't visit millions of websites and ask the search function on each one of them your question of the day. You simply use one of a number of search engines, whichever one you prefer for your own needs, and no matter which search engine you choose to use, you will be searching pretty much the exact same set of websites. There is simply no need to centralize the power to control what can be published on the web or how the web works with one hosting company in order to have one central location that you can use to navtigate it all.
You don't need centralization of power in order to have centralization of access.
> You don't need centralization of power in order to have centralization of access.
It isn't necessary, but it is sufficient and that seems to be enough for a lot of folks. You seem to be arguing that I'm saying this is ideal. It's not, but it does seem to be the structure most people arrive at naturally.
> It isn't necessary, but it is sufficient and that seems to be enough for a lot of folks. You seem to be arguing that I'm saying this is ideal. It's not,
In other words: It could be even worse? Your point being?
Monarchy isn't necessary to govern a country, but it is sufficient and that seems to be enough for a lot of folks.
Does that make monarchy a good idea? Does that make democracy a bad idea? Does that mean that people have considered the advantages of democracy? Does that mean people are even aware of democracy? Does that mean anything?
> but it does seem to be the structure most people arrive at naturally.
Centralization of power? Well, if you mean by that that people who want to have power often are good at finding ways to dupe people into various forms of dependency, then I guess so? Again, your point being?
Many humans are apparently not, but I had a much easier time navigating (and contributing to!) projects when each of them had their own website with integrated scm links etc.
GitHub is a grey mass, project branding is lost, the tracker is chaotic for large projects.
It's just Sourceforge, better executed but with the same disadvantages.
There is something nice about knowing, with a high degree of certainty, that any given open source project (or any thing) is in one of a few places, and if I don't know where that is I can ask for help to find those places by their names.