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Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

It's an eye opener. Think about it - today, it was a mistake. But, what if it really happened? What if you really lost access to all your years of hard work? It's a wake up call. A blessing in disguise to store what matters to you the most locally, backed up offline. Never trust any single provider. Be it MS or Google or Apple. RAID is the way.

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People should use something that keeps a local copy of their code and just copies it to Github and to other contributors with a sync process to push and pull changes. Some sort of 'distributed source control system' maybe. Then people would only need a 'hub' to connect to people, and it'd be easier to move somewhere else.

This gets tiresome. Github is a lot more than a host for Git repositories. If you want to suggest that people use something else, you need to suggest a replacement that has the features people use Github for.

Increasingly less and less so as they “upgrade” their offering and have more and more downtime.

yeah, #1, it is free private file storage, and #2, it's a download portal for free as in beer software replacing paid offerings. that's what it is for 99.99% of people.

being a host for git repositories has never been its core competency. neither has its groupware offering.

does it even serve OSS well? a very interesting criteria is, "Have mature or adopted end-user-facing OSS recently merged a large PR from an unallied contributor?" The answer is overwhelming no. This is why there is so much innovation in this space.

I think you missed the joke, which is that the parent poster you're replying to is suggesting a 'solution' to the problem which evolved in complexity until he was just describing Github again.

What you just described is Fossil. It has an auto-sync feature that makes everything feel distributed.

Just set up a Kubernetes deployment and you’re set.

But as others mention, GitHub’s primary strength is collaboration. If you want decentralized, solve this by creating a decentralized collaboration tool on top of fossil and/or git.

For example, how to do pull requests and code reviews?

Why they just described is Git :) pretty sure it was a joke

> Some sort of 'distributed source control system' maybe

The day it broke away and became centralized was when we had a PR + mandatory "Required actions" to merge to main.

That’s only mandatory on the “hub”. I can do that locally anytime.

I like how tech seems to be all about stacking more and more turtles on top of each other:

Gosh, it's hard figuring out what changes Lorne made if only we had a system to merge those changes. Enter git

Gosh it's hard figuring out what packages Rachel had to make this work. Enter rubygems/pip/npm

Gosh it's hard figuring out sync these changes across a network. Enter github

Gosh it's hard figuring out how to get those packages working on my operating system. Enter docker

Gosh centralizing our distributed version control software system onto one website is getting really unreliable. Enter fossil(?????)

If we go any further having one computer per business with a sign up sheep is starting to sound pretty fucking attractive.

I'm looking at setting up rngit mirrors of all my repos on our boat NAS. Conceivably it also allows issue tracking and collaboration without centralized infra

https://reticulum.network/manual/git.html#mirroring-reposito...

I recently got my GitHub account suspended for 4 months. When it was finally reinstated, their support just said it was a "mistake".

Proudly self-hosting Forgejo since then.

This happened to me as well—thankfully not my personal account that I use for work, but the organization associated with an open source project I worked on was suspended. It similarly took 2 months for GitHub to restore the organization.

> Our team is currently experiencing an unexpectedly high volume of tickets which has resulted in longer response times than we prefer. We acknowledge the long wait and apologize for the experience.

> Sometimes our abuse detecting systems highlight accounts that need to be manually reviewed. We've cleared the restrictions from your account…

Fully self-hosted IMO can be an overcorrection. The issue isn’t “relying on other people”—it’s relying on GitHub, when they’ve made it clear they don’t care about uptime and they don’t care about support turn-around-time.

Well yes, my git repositories sit on my laptop, that's the entire point. If github banned my country because its president has a tis, I can push my entire commit history to another company. Same with anyone else who's working on it.

It would be a pain as I'd have to set up a few integrations again, but github is far lower down the risk scale than the vast majority of SAAS providers

I've set up a local gitea now, and configured a few local runners as we test this setup out.

It's a few hours worth of work. Basic git operations and pull requests works fine for us already.

The interesting part will be how much maintenance this will need, and not the least how hard it'll be to port over github actions. We have trivial workflows, but I suspect this conversion will be the painful part.

RAID is not a backup.

They... Didn't describe RAID? More 3-2-1.

The last sentence in the comment is literally "RAID is the way".

I think they were intending to evoke the image of RAID rather than literally referring to a redundant array of inexpensive disks. You host your code on Github, Gitlab, and at home, then you survive a Github outage. It's a redundant array. Not sure it's inexpensive, though.

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