YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

This should be about impossible to enforce? Every developer and everyone who has ever cloned the repo has the complete source tree with commits. I can think of a list of countries where United States laws are not a concern, I imagine that shortly this will be one of the most distributed repositories ever.

It also shows again that while free services like Github are convenient, and truthfully their interface is the one to beat, it is better to use them as a mirror of something you self host then the primary.

Some options: (I prefer gitea - easiest to install and maintain, very active development community, single binary, written in Go)

https://gitea.com/

https://gogs.io/

https://about.gitlab.com/install/

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-GitWeb

It's not access to the current program that is at stake, it's the ongoing public updates to handle changes made by the Youtube site.

Understood, just waiting to see where the devs pop up. I imagine that someone will help them with a DMCA counterclaim also. RIAA has been beaten many times, they have a long history of creative interpretation that the courts do not always agree with, and US law is only valid in the United States and Australia (thats a joke, but do hope they get on the brick and road plan or stop acting like a US colony at some point).

That would be true IF youtube-dl was all about downloading YouTube videos only, but it's not. It's used by people to download videos from like a thousand other websites too.

I agree with your concept. The main problem though, is that each of those code hosting web app is a silo of its own. Any new contributor will have to create a new account for each of the self-hosted projects. Youtube-dl is one of those projects that can't survive in such an environment. Sourcehut is free from such requirements - but many complain about difficulty of email-based workflow. Another option is the upcoming federation protocol from gitlab.

There is also https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent but I have not used it myself.

Late reply, but replying since you mentioned gittorrent. The project's author recommended [1] the Radicle project (https://radicle.xyz) instead of gittorrent.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876815