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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

Everyone centralizing in Github is very, very unhealthy and fragile.

There have been at least a few truly decentralized efforts along the lines of GitHub. There is almost no interest. I also feel that just going with one or two other companies is better than exactly one monopoly but we can do much better.

For some reason if I say p2p on HN it's not appreciated.

The issue is more that p2p is always touted as the solution and yet there's been almost zero actually useful solutions developed. There's some fundamental issues preventing the decentralized network to be a generic solution and until that's sorted out, it doesn't seem to add to a conversation to bring up p2p as a solution.

The issues clearly aren't fundamental enough to stop software pirates or the Onion network.

There are multiple useful solutions. They are just ignored.

Notice you didn't mention any fundamental issue specifically.

Git seems to work pretty well p2p without the hub.

If you don't need to collaborate with people sure it does. Everything works well until you need to collaborate.

There are numerous collaboration tools aside from Github that can be used, though.

If the project, company, or specific person you want to work with is using Github, you're using Github.

Git LFS would like a word.

You can tell when a decentralised technology becomes successful, because then someone will build something centralised on top of it.

This should be a named theorem

I was thinking about this recently. What does "truly decentralized" Github look like? In particular, I'm curious about decentralized code review and so on. Probably not technically difficult or mind-blowing, but I'm curious nevertheless.

Centralization is just too convenient for most people. Most people - technical or otherwise - won't accept the slightest quality-of-life (edit: and network size/activity) hit in exchange for the greater robustness of decentralized options, regardless of the application.

Note how the vast majority of people who use or interact with cryptocurrencies converge around a few centralized options. Even a ton of the technical people who develop cryptocurrency-related systems do.

The quality of life on the Fediverse is pretty good, in fact it's better than on Twitter because the default app has a lot of features from the long defunct custom clients. What people won't accept is a social network their friends aren't using.

While not a perfect solution, I think organisations like Codeberg§ are a step in the right direction.

§ https://codeberg.org/

I get losing your PRs and comments, and pipelines. But if you get banned from Github, can't you just pick different remote and keep rolling?

If it's about the PRs and comments, and pipelines, then those are features specific to Github so where is the fault for acting unhealthy?

If this happens randomly to a small-medium size foss project that doesn't have strong attention from GitHub the corporation it could be catastrophic.

Issue/discussion portability is much harder than code/history portability, I think is a deeper issue.

> But if you get banned from Github, can't you just pick different remote and keep rolling?

If you have a local copy. I imagine that if you have 1800+ repositories on Github, there'd be at least a few you probably didn't have installed anymore, because you knew you could always get them back from Github.

PRs are useful, and so is the discussion system. These things are at par with other platforms that are pretty much equally barrier-free.

Any of the workflow automation stuff might be more difficult to replace, but I haven't had an especially good experience with it anyway. I don't know about everyone else, but it's been pretty unreliable and fragile. Even the Azure integration, which ought to be first-class, is pretty opaque. I really wanted to lean into that stuff, but for now, I'm happy running my own.

Let me guess, we need a fediverse solution or source code now?

Web 3.0 for code.

Not your keys, not your repo!

Maybe not, but this is a decent time to remind everyone to local-cache all your dependencies.

Git is already a distributed VCS. Just host someplace other than Github, honestly.

Putting the source somewhere else: easy, git push and change the URL in your doc.

Moving all the issues: hopefully someone must have done a script to fetch the issue and convert them.

Moving your CI: just rewrite your GitHub action away from these horrible yaml command. This is just going to be a bit more expensive than the 100% free GitHub plan.

Getting the community of millions of user that can report issues, propose PR and star your repository. Good luck with that.

The network effect of the community is the barrier to the change. Unless you do proprietary software, then you don't care.

> Getting the community of millions of user that can report issues, propose PR and star your repository. Good luck with that.

Oh my stars! The network effect of "the community" is the worst part of Github. Your life and your project will be much better without whiny entitled people spamming the same issues expecting free support, and endless "i got an error" bug reports.

Git is already decentralized. So no, we don't need a fediverse equivalent. Crazy idea, but what if you hosted your code on your infrastructure, like the "old days"? Or, move to an independent forge, or stay where you are. The concern isn't about GitHub directly, but that everyone storing all their source code in one place is concerning.

Git is flexible. I'm kind of surprised at how ubiquitous GitHub is given how easy it is to host your own repositories and set up a mailing list to accept patches and discussion on.

Self hosting is painful and not a real solution for most people. Mailing list also have terrible UX. I'd rather risk Github nuking all of my 50 or so repos than work over a mailing list.

As much as I love doing things myself, the reality is that I spend wayyyy more time doing things myself than I save, and time is my main constraint. Getting booted off of GitHub would be a pretty minor inconvenience compared to the time sink of doing it myself, especially if I botch something and lose data.

> Git is flexible. I'm kind of surprised at how ubiquitous GitHub is given how easy it is to host your own repositories and set up a mailing list to accept patches and discussion on.

The UX you're proposing is far worse than what GitHub provides for less effort, and anyway GitHub isn't just "repo hosting + code review", you also get web hooks, CI, user/org management, code search (such as it is), a web interface (as well as mobile app), etc. And you don't have to teach people how to use it effectively.

It exists: https://radicle.xyz, but it doesn't really get used.

I think gittorrent was the right name for the concept, really, hard to beat that. But that one withered on the vine: https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent

I can't tell if you're being ironic, but Git is already federated. Like, GitHub should be just another remote, and which remote happens to be the source of truth is a policy decision. The sticky part are the value-add, non-Git parts like GitHub actions, the issue tracker, wiki, static hosting, access management etc. But most of those are orthogonal and federating them (perhaps as git repos themselves) seems like a good idea.

(disclaimer: work for MS, not on GitHub, also hi again superkuh)

To be fair, this is an inevitable consequence of using distributed revision control.

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