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Comment by fishgoesblub | Hacker News Reader

Let this be a reminder to never trust any service be it one ran by a billion dollar company, to one ran by volunteers. You will be eventually screwed over. Make backup plans, and self-host whatever you can so nothing can be taken from you. For Git forges, I personally recommend Gitea[1], or Forgejo[2] (a Gitea fork by Codeberg)

[1]: https://about.gitea.com/ [2]: https://forgejo.org/

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Yeah. Buying my own domain and migrating my email to it is one of the best things I've ever done. Setting up wireguard into my LAN permanently changed the way I used computers. Looks like it's time to get myself a VPS and just start hosting even more stuff.

Sovereign personal infrastructure is amazing. Highly recommended. Dealing with the government's rules and their politics is obnoxious enough. I'm starting to really lose patience with all of these communities.

Radicle provides self-hosting with decentralized mirrors for both added availability and DDoS resistance.

A Tor-hosted mirror provides extra protection against attacks on DNS or your domain name, and some additional DDoS protection.

Self-hosting based on an external project is still a dependency on Someone Else to keep it up to date, unless you have both the time and skill to take over maintenance of that project.

It’s probably not too important to choose a service that you think you can trust fully, because that trust might be broken at some point. But having an identifier that can be swapped to different backends, so people can find you again when the host inevitability changes, is a stronger strategy. I think the importance of owning domain names will increase, and using those as the canonical identifier of a project will give it more permanence. The procedures for seizure and censorship with domain names are better established and understood.

Last week the USA censored the domain name of a Dutch porn site.

I’m using self hosted GitLab; any reason I should check out something else?

(I also mirror projects to public GitLab and to GitHub.)

The ability for others to send you pull requests without requiring an account on your gitlab instance

I’m referring to the self hosted part. The outside world can send pull requests via the public GitLab mirror, or they can actually also access my self hosted GitLab instance via its public address - although I doubt anyone would bother.

(Pull requests also can, and should, be sent via ways such as submissions to mailing lists.)

It's a mirror so you'll want to merge the pull requests on your self-hosted instance probably, don't you?

GitLab is a kitchen sink tool for all the good and bad that entails. Forgejo is much more lightweight.

there's decentralized git on Nostr:

https://nostrapps.github.io/nostrgit/

Your public key is your sovereign ownership of your project, and with Nostr is no longer bound to any single entity.

Git over Reticulum is another option. You get git, issue tracking (work documents), release management

https://reticulum.network/manual/git.html

GIT IS DECENTRALIZED

But the identity part of git is not (unless you count pgp signing of each commit, which never took off at a large scale)

and the git tools don't automatically propagate repo changes by default across a network

The identity of a repo is its url so yes, the identity part is decentralized

Identity is more than a name. It is also proving that you own that identity (aka authentication)

But if you just hashed all the changes and put them in Merkle tree to verify, wouldn't that make it so much better?

Issue tracking and collaboration tools are not. (Although many small projects could get by with a todo.txt and a mailing list.)

Yup, but the community you build around a project is not.

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