We have to federate git hosting services, asap

[fakefred]

Outraged by GitHub's or the US's or whoever's decision, I proposed a federated approach to git hosting and interactions between developers, which consists of a network of decentralized nodes, possibly as a middleware or plugin to existing git self-hosting software, enabling a neutral, diverse and non-discriminative git community, while retaining the choice for git instances to remain isolated. >> https://blog.fkfd.me/4​

[fakefred]

@1995parham I feel sorry for your being marginalized by the "agile" SaaS provider under the influence of US government. We need liberty, not a platform that rules us all with arbitrary but inhumane policies. That's why I'm advocating federated git hosting. Therefore, instead of "support" (though I do support this movement), I would rather suggest a "proposal" label for this issue. Various ideas can potentially form the new roadmap of open-source software development, where free is literally free.

Best Regards,
@fakefred

[1995parham]

@fakefred You are right, I have changed the label to the proposal. sorry for the miss understanding. I will be glad to hear more about your idea.

[fakefred]

@1995parham Thank you for the favor. I will try my best to spread awareness.

[ShalokShalom]

This already exists and its developers surely are happy to get help 🤗

All repos in git ssb are quasi private by default and the current way is that you accept contacts optionally, so they can see the repos you share.

In order to gain some public available service like Github, some of us will host lots of repos and accept all/lots of incoming contacts, I imagine.

[fakefred]

@ShalokShalom Glad to learn about git-ssb! If I understand correctly, their approach is total decentralization, with users as nodes maintaining their own logs. But this is not what most GitHub users are used to. I wish there could be as less burden as possible for users from GitHub, which in my approach (arguably a middle ground between centralization and peer-to-peer) is as simple as:

1. sign up an account on a node
2. make a copy of their GitHub repo
3. add a remote to their local copy
4. do git stuff as usual

...while the peer-to-peer approach loads the developers with extra and currently unnecessary burden of, e.g.

• data management (a laptop is more likely to get stolen than a 19-inch rack)
• multi-device synchronization (you don't have one account for each device holding your data)

IMO the GitHub alternatives are doing really well, and implements GitHub features quite seamlessly. We should take advantage of that. And what's stopping them from overtaking GitHub? Lack of adequate userbase. A plugin-like thing would be lovely; we can use the GitHub API to intergrate GitHub with the federated servers.

Note for fed git devs: The ssb is one clever idea. That should be an option.

[ShalokShalom]

Why is bittorrent successful then? Distributed is Git already - Github is a centralised platform for a completely distributed service. Linus Torvalds said that the attribute of being distributed is the number one benefit which such a system provides. I suggest to reduce the burden, opposed to the safety net. :)

I love Gitea, that being said. I also can see Go working fine in such an environment, while somethin on Erlangs VM could be ideal.

Just me considering all the options.

[fakefred]

@ShalokShalom I agree that git is already clever itself, and decentralized as well. We're trying to replicate GitHub's social platform functionalities.

Please correct me if I make any mistakes/misunderstandings in the following paragraph.

Does ssb require a static IP address? Because if it does, afaik IPv6 coverage is quite low where I am, i.e. China, especially with all those ISPs reluctant to deploy it. And I believe devs in more regions are unable to obtain such privilege, thus making marginalized regions still marginalized.

[ShalokShalom]

I dont think secure scuttlebut requires a static IP, I would wonder myself very hard on that.

Ah yeah: And you would be also interested into TiDB and CockroachDB, two decentralised databases with the interesting implementation of an MariaDB/Postgres API, so you can simply use one of these two.

I also think we could simply all host our source code on our own, a Raspberry Pi 4 is surely enough for most projects.

[fakefred]

@ShalokShalom
That's a relief. And the DBs are neat, sounds like they fit our use case if we need such a DB network.

While some tech-savvies are for hardcore decentralization, I'm not a big fan of hosting code "all on our own", because of reasons I mentioned yesterday, and because homeservers aren't something you can get in a grocery store (although I'd be glad to get one there). RPi4s still have not started shipping here. Maybe we give users more options... what do you think?

[ShalokShalom]

Yeah, I actually think combining all these idea is feasible. It is all Git, nonetheless so we can combine different approaches, since the technical limitations in those individual concepts could be much less of an issue opposed to the custom prioritys.

This means, since integration of much different persons into this project is a goal for us, that it also means that much different prioritys will clash together, like decentralisation and complete distribution, different hosts and different implementations.

Some might love Gitlab, some Phabricator and all can name sane reasons for it. So, this is one more indication that some form of united database could come in handy.

I honestly think Github has a lot of pro's going for it, so it will likely stay. Public uploads from the bespoken blocked countries are now fully legal and the transition is easy?

So all we are talking is about the closed source repos, correct?