GitHub promotes a walled-garden approach to development. People who use it will want you to have an account on it, and some people such as myself cannot or will

GitHub promotes a walled-garden approach to development. People who use it will want you to have an account on it, and some people such as myself cannot or will not use GitHub at any cost. I have my own cgit instance I host my own code on, and I contribute to anyone else's projects through mailing lists or other open forms of contact. It doesn't require a sign-up; it requires something that everyone on the Internet already has: an E-mail address. Git is a decentralised protocol that goes hand-in-hand very well with the federated nature of E-mail. GitHub destroys that, and just because it has a shiny web interface and has encouraged "social coding", people forget how Git really is and refuse to take an old-fashioned PR patchset because they want it done through the GitHub interface, or they refuse a bug ticket because it isn't in the issues list that requires you to log in. (My concern with bug trackers requiring registration extends past GitHub; I would rather every tracker simply require a valid E-mail address to send in a new ticket.) All of this simply helps to fragment the OSS community and its collaboration even more than it already is. So yeah, some people prefer E-mail for the utility rather than for the "hackerman aesthetic" as you assume it to be. It's nothing about nostalgia; I'm a pretty young developer who hasn't had a chance to grow up in the dialup days and I still see the benefits of using mail as a primary form of development communication. Don't fix what isn't broken.