Yeah, let's fork the client and make it decentralized[1], and write an open source version of the server[2] so people can host their own instances!

[1] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Distributed-Git-Distributed-W...

[2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org

I like Gitlab but that's not exactly what I have in mind, I think about something more similar to torrents. The problem with everyone having their own instance without discoverability & interoperability between them is that you lose most of the value of Github.

>I like Gitlab but that's not exactly what I have in mind, I think about something more similar to torrents

So everyone runs their own gitlab instance, and there's some sort of gitlab "tracker" that you can search through?

>without discoverability

What is this "discoverability" you speak of? If you want a library to do "foo", do you search up "foo" on github and look through the repositories? Is this better than searching up "foo" on google?

>& interoperability

The only "interoperability" I can think of is for pull requests, and I do agree that having to make an account on the instance and push to it to make a PR is a pain. This can easily be solved by allowing remote git repos to be used as PR sources, and using social sign in for account creation (so you don't need to create an account to create contribute).

Secure Scuttlebutt's git-ssb is kind of this

https://git-ssb.celehner.com/%25n92DiQh7ietE%2BR%2BX%2FI403L...

I guess git hosting is already available on IPFS.

Anyway, hosting is not allowed/feasible on 4G (maybe also won't be allowed on 5G?), which is what everyone has.

The software stack isn't the issue, and smartphones are powerful enough to host contents, the problem comes from the current mobile telcos operators who doesn't allow hosting on their networks because of NAT/bandwidth/political concerns

So, what you're saying is that everyone should just switch to GitLab?

gitea is community driven

git is already decentralized. You can use it easily without github.

This restriction is from the U.S. Government, not a "corporation."

Why do we always have a comment like this completely missing the point about Github? If git was synonymous of Github, Microsoft would not have spent 7 billion to buy it, there's a lot of features on top of git. And for me, whether it's a decision of the US government or Github does not matter much.

Maybe Microsoft missed the point of it! I don't use github. I use Amazon CodeCommit.

The fact is, github adds value because it isn't "decentralized". And any organization that runs something will have people that disagree with it and/or government regulations it will need to follow.

git, however, it nicely distributed and you can host a repo anywhere you want and be discoverable through other means.

> The fact is, github adds value because it isn't "decentralized"

Exactly. It's the most popular brand, same as Disney buying Hulu. Not to make Hulu into Disney, but to bring the customers into an arena for control. While I do not use github, npm does, for example.

You do still use Github if you have any popular dependency in your project, which you probably do. The point is that when it's decentralised, nobody would be able to take the repo down that easily or prevent someone access to public repo due to arbitrary rules.

What does “decentralize Github” mean?

For me, that means having all the features of Github available in p2p.

Pretty much like IPFS. You can already host your pages and DNS using an IPFS gateway.

This is something that needs to happen. Megacorp/government controlled source code hub is simply not acceptable for cultural and ideological reasons. There should be no centralized control of a repository distribution, if you publish it and people use it, no government or corporation should be able to censor it.

people could commit to a box in another legal regime? Which is a viable option now but requires a smidge of additional overhead.