in the current world, you host your code on github and you can only submit prs to github with a github account. anyone without a github account cannot submit a pr. github hosts all the code.
in a federated world, while github may still host all the code, you could potentially submit prs with and have metadata about a repository, such as issues, spread across multiple different providers. Instead of needing a github account to contribute, you just need an account that github could federate with.
This would mean that if Github did start doing something you didn't like, you would be able to change code host without losing the metadata.
Potentially, anyway.
Federation doesn't prevent centralisation if the service is good enough; it just makes it less painful to decentralise if better competition exists. It also diversifies ownership of data, which is in general a good thing for consumers - and a bad thing for big tech companies that wish to make money off of analytics, which is why we will never see current social media platforms allow federation with other social networks, even if would be better for the world and consumers.
I've raised a PR to rename decode() to unsafeDecode() (removing it from the public API might be a hard sell). I really have no idea why this is part of the public API.
in a federated world, while github may still host all the code, you could potentially submit prs with and have metadata about a repository, such as issues, spread across multiple different providers. Instead of needing a github account to contribute, you just need an account that github could federate with.
This would mean that if Github did start doing something you didn't like, you would be able to change code host without losing the metadata.
Potentially, anyway.
Federation doesn't prevent centralisation if the service is good enough; it just makes it less painful to decentralise if better competition exists. It also diversifies ownership of data, which is in general a good thing for consumers - and a bad thing for big tech companies that wish to make money off of analytics, which is why we will never see current social media platforms allow federation with other social networks, even if would be better for the world and consumers.