Why would you have to “review a pr or issue”?

You can choose to

Or you can choose to ignore them

All of them?

Why are you on a platform open to accepting them in the first place?

Are we talking about the same thing?

Yes, all of them if you want to. It's 100% up to you whether and how you deal with other people and their contributions, and it's completely orthogonal to being FLOSS or using a git hosting.

The central freedom provided by opensource software maintainers is the fork button. Not the “merge pull request” button.

Git hosting provides discoverability and the ability to fork repositories. Everything else is an optional feature.

Then the thread feels a little tangential,

because you don’t have to “drive a hard line”, to do that,

you just draw it once (publish a no PR policy, don’t host on GH, etc),

and you shouldn’t be hearing from users.

That's just one way to do it. Even if you let them send you PRs or whatever, you can still act on them or not depending on how they behave, your available resources, health, mood or just whim. You don't owe anyone anything and "creating a community around a project" is not a goal you have to be striving for regardless of whether you take contributions or provide some user support or not.

> depending on how they behave

So, reviewing them.

Which takes time/focus.

So don't do it when you don't want to.

I found some prs in one of my GitHub projects which were over 12 months old. I just hadn’t noticed.

For a lot of projects, that interval is probably fine!

(I still get bug tracker emails for the kernel from before 2010!)