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Comment by blacktriangle | Hacker News Reader

Same goes for GitHub. We took the most trivially distributed and self-hosted technology ever written and converted it into a single point of failure.

We software developers as a profession seem to have cultivated an almost active distain for anything resembling long-term thinking.

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Trying to figure out where a github outage actually really impacted us in any meaningful long-term manner in the past five yeears. maybe we couldn't ship code for a couple hours, but all those PRs still did get out in an eventual timely fashion? I suppose there might be some people who had a service outage at the same time and their restrictive pipelines could only take tweaks via github, which would suck, but I'm guessing a majority of people, it's not worth hosting and maintaining all this infra yourself?

Github is really great for discoverability and the open source ecosystem, but I agree that depending on it for issues, pull requests, releases and the like is a bit sad for decentralization.

I don't really know the solution. I know Fossil [1] has bug tracking, wiki, forum and now even a chat, but I've never used it and use Github instead. Maybe adding issues and things like that to git itself would be a solution? I don't know what's the percentage of people using git the "Github" way (with at least issues intergrated into it) but if it's really high maybe it's time for git to follow usage?

[1]: https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

Honest question: how often do you discover a project on GitHub? For me the answer is never. It's not like it has an interface for searching or browsing in any meaningful way. Usually you do a web search for some appropriate terms, find the project's main site, which will then have a GitHub link.

There is no "people who imported this package also imported..." type functionality, and I don't think it would be useful if there was.

You can still have multiple origins or email patches if you really need to commit here and now.

At least you can still work when your Git server goes down. And if your Git server is GitHub, you can keep working on your code and not have to go play sysadmin with your Git server.

We've managed to accomplish something similar for cryptocurrencies, too, with overpowered exchanges!

Think this is over the top Worst case put git repo on LAN.

That gets access to the repo, but not issues, actions, code reviews, etc etc.

Once you take all this into account:

> That gets access to the repo, but not issues, actions, code reviews, etc etc.

(to the extent that it's external to git, e.g., housed in GitHub rather than the repository), I think we're no longer talking, as your grandparent was, about:

> the most trivially distributed and self-hosted technology ever written ….

I rarely run into projects using just git these days, and I don't seem to have confused anyone by slightly shifting the topic.

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