Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

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toomanybeersies

I think the big problem is not so much centralisation as it is that people are locked into platforms.

There's nothing wrong with using Gmail for email hosting if you have your own domain name, it's easy to then switch over. But if you use an @gmail.com email address and Google decides to ban you, you're screwed.

Same story with Facebook, there are quite a few people that I would possibly never be able to contact again if Facebook banned me or them. This isn't a new problem caused by Facebook though, in previous years there was the same problem with email, and before that, if someone changed their address or phone number you'd lose contact. There are actually people who I lost contact with who I regained contact through Facebook.

Anyway, my point is that centralisation isn't bad if it's painless to decentralise again. Git and Github are fine, at work we could switch to a self hosted solution or Bitbucket in a fairly trivial amount of time. Same for our work emails, we could switch form Gmail to another host with fairly minimal disruption. Centralisation with locked ecosystems, like Facebook, are not good.

Yeah, I wanted to say exactly this. There's a different between specialisation in a market that still provides competition and consumer liquidity, and monopolistic centralisation (even when the monopolist is effectively benign).

It's like there's a middle-ground between everyone building their own automobile, and there being only a single car manufacturer on the planet. So long as have you have a few players who are genuinely competing, and you have the option to switch between them without paying an excessive penalty, then it's a good thing that a certain subset of people are working hard on building better cars than you ever could tinkering away in your garage (although you should still be allowed to do that, if you so desire).

What this requires is for governments to provide a framework of standardisation, access-to-data, data-transferability, and antitrust enforcement that allows a healthy competitive environment to emerge and persist, without either allowing a monopoly (or a cartel) to evolve, or overburdening everyone with regulation.

It's a difficult balancing act, even in more traditional industries, and anyone who presents a too simplistic "more regulation!" or "less regulation!" answer to it isn't being honest. Tech presents additional challenges because it's newer, and because it's evolving rapidly. I think it will take many more decades for the necessary level of technical understanding to metastasise through policy-making and civil administration realms until you get effective control of tech markets, although laws like GDPR are an interesting start.

> But if you use an @gmail.com email address and Google decides to ban you, you're screwed.

You can loose control of your domain too. And if someone else snatches it up they could even read your newly incoming email. I'm willing to bet when gmail bans an account, they don't recycle it.

    Anyway, my point is that centralisation isn't bad if it's painless to decentralise again.

I'd love to see GitHub (and GitLab) offer a custom domain name option which would proxy HTTPS and SSH clones via a company's custom domain (e.g. code.example.com) to GitHub's hosting. That way, if a company needs to move away from GitHub (or GitHub goes away), developer's references to some company's code is not stuck pointing to some stale github.com domain.

Hosting such a proxy (and the repos) takes infrastructure, time, and experience to secure and make available, so from a user's perspective it's great if a company does this as a service as long as you provide the domain.

Has there ever been a plan for Git to support looking up SRV records? This would solve your problem without proxies.

Good point. I'll have to look through some git docs/source and forums to see if it's been discussed.

I do quite like the idea of using DNS instead of standing up proxies.

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