Yes, and not exactly.

Git is federated, as in Jabber. A branch has a place where it lives. If you do something with a particular branch, you need access to the place where it lives but not to anywhere else.

Monotone is distributed, as in Usenet. A branch may only exist on certain servers, but it is not logically tied to any one server (or set of servers). There is a global namespace for branches.

I think other systems (hg) tend to be more like the Git model, because permissions handling is far simpler.

yup i kindof had this same realization as well once cuz i didn't want to sign up for private repos after i'd left the company that paid github subscription...

hard to recreate the logic tho O.o but it was something in the vein of "if i learn to set up git correctly, i shouldnt need a unique root, so what is it then.... a backup with vizualization? I dont need that for a private repo i can use offline tools"

If you value your time, you'll realize github is very cheap. I also particularly like how everyone knows it so adding new contributors is painless.

yea no argument there i just only have 1 or 2 clients a year who do closed-source git so $100 seems like a lot given that i am usually the sole dev

The problem is that github itself agregates value. Issues, Gist, not to mention that various package management systems use github as the repository.