Maybe "secret sauce" is the wrong term. People ended up choosing GitHub purely because of network effects, I think. But those features are the "lock-in" preventing individual projects from easily migrating away.

If Git repos just "had" wikis, issues, etc. inside them, the lock-in wouldn't be there, so people would be switching between Git hosts all the time—and there wouldn't really be much value in a "git host" at all, beyond what just having a Git dir on your own server, plus a native-GUI Git client supporting the wiki/issues/etc. features, would get you.

> If Git repos just "had" wikis, issues, etc. inside them, the lock-in wouldn't be there

People clearly never cared about that, since Fossil ( https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wi... ) has these things and it never caught on

Maybe it didn't catch on because of other reasons.

This. Git is not a best in class solution, and the community that has coalesced around it has predictably not chosen best in class tooling.

This is okay. It's just source control at the end of the day.

Yeah good point. That’s definitely true.

I think though that 99%+ repos or there have zero issues, pull requests etc.

Maybe there’s no secret sauce of any value and it’s just pointless github is closed source, like a form of DRM just being used against us cause we’re silly and let it be so even as we aspire to see open source flourish...