Software is a collaborative effort, and the easier you make it to collaborate and share information with others, the better. Imagine @ing a GNOME dev in a different instance to comment on a bug report in KDE, or seeing an newsfeed update that your favorite framework is making a breaking change in the next release, or opening a PR/MR in another project without having to create _yet another_ account.
You don't need to use any of those, but I think that the large community is partly what makes GitHub such a valuable tool.
> Imagine @ing a GNOME dev in a different instance to comment on a bug report in KDE
How do you see this being different from providing that dev with a hyperlink to the bug report? In either case, the developer is made aware of the issue, no?
> or seeing an newsfeed update that your favorite framework is making a breaking change in the next release
I don't actually know if changelists have RSS feeds, but supposing they did, couldn't you subscribe your reader to those feeds to achieve this result?
> or opening a PR/MR in another project without having to create _yet another_ account.
Yeah, you got me here. Though I'm leaning towards "build a physical key that automates account creation everywhere" so you still have a zillion accounts under the hood, but that's mostly transparent to the user. Sort of like Facebook/Google SSO, but instead of storing data in one data-hungry corp's DB, you're generating essentially random data in one place (your physical key) and distributing it across zillions of little DBs, thus reducing the incentive for hackers to try to obtain any of them.
This is a good answer, but the feature you mention sounds to me like it is useful because it is a productivity feature (avoiding time creating accounts and switching tabs in a browser), not really used for socialization.
Like when telephone lines were introduced, they were a massive boost to productivity. Even if they could be used as a social feature within companies, it was not why they were useful there.
Not really. What you're talking about is OpenId/some sort of OAuth. The parent comment is talking about mixing the activity from a bunch of projects into one.
Of course gitlab projects do have RSS feeds, so you could use that I guess.
You don't need to use any of those, but I think that the large community is partly what makes GitHub such a valuable tool.