I can understand why it excites you. But I’m old enough to recognize that if you cede control of your offline tools like IDE to them, they will eventually exploit it to make money by ruining your day. I’m perfectly happy sacrificing a bit of convenience to protect myself against rent seeking in the future.

Honestly in this day and age where everything runs inside containers, you should be able to do that in your home server. Distrobox proves it. Even a good alternative to vscode exists - theia by eclipse - that’s designed to do exactly this.

I don’t know what’s happening at github, but even the tree page rendering is annoyingly slow now. I wish they stopped ruining a working product by bloating it up with unnecessary ‘features’.

The same thing happens at Amazon. First they screwed up the product search by treating the user’s query as a suggestion rather than as a requirement. Now reports are coming out saying that the search bar has been replaced by an AI prompt with very badly summarized and often wrong results.

I don’t even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks.

I agree with this part.

GitHub bringing everything into one platform is atypical and obviously done for the goal of centralization.

Perhaps this is part of the answer to why people like github. Unlike you, most people love all-in-one tools. I once suggested a bunch of offline tools to use with git, with much better user experience than github. The other person was like, “Yeah, no! I don’t want to learn that many tools”.

Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools.

The advantage of a centralized app is that all the services you mentioned are integrated well with each other. The distinct and often offline tools often have poor integration with each other. This is harder to achieve in such tools, compared to centralized hosts. The minimum you need to start with is a bunch of standards for all these tools to follow, so that interoperability is possible later.

Can you imagine the amount of corruptive influences and persuasions he is resisting?

This is just the first step at making protests illegal.