I actually don't care whether it's centralised or decentralised, or who's managing it.

But you are right that I want reliable and easy-to-use services. And centralisation is often one way to go there.

As an interesting counterpoint: Git itself is decentralised and replaced centralised services like Subversion. And that made git easier to use, especially easier to get started with: no need for a server, no need to be online, just do `git init` in any old directory.

A GitHub-clone could be more decentralised, but they'd need to use that decentralisation to drive those other features that people actually care about day to day.

> no need for a server, no need to be online, just do `git init` in any old directory

svn doesn’t require a server and there is no need to be online. It works perfectly fine over the file:// protocol.

Interesting.

Was that always the case? I remember it being quite a hassle to set up (following tutorials online), but that was about 15 to 20 years ago or so.

And a `git remote add name url` and you are setup to use another remote server.

Only if your repo doesn't have any other critical integrations like CI/CD, jira, etc

Why? We use github and its CI/CD system, but locally I still only need to add the git remote to work with it.

Ironically github is sort of the exception that proves the rule: decentralized in the one way that really matters (decoupled development on individual systems), but centralized for easy interaction in the way the market demands.

But it demands both. The ability to develop in a parallel, decentralized way, and the ability to integrate things at a central point, an authoritative source and a blessed official destination.

It's similar to how databases allow to begin parallel, concurrent, even contradictory transactions, and also guarantee serialized, consistent database state, and rejection of invalid updates, at commit time. Both aspects are utterly important.

Similar thing that happens with crypto exchanges, also swift transfers and federal states for that matter.

Yes, subsidiarity is a great principle.. in-principle, but in practice it often gets the curb. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

So far, having individual small countries seems to keep the centralisation at bay for longer than just having states in a federation.

(Look at Germany, Austria, Australia, the USA for examples of the latter. Interestingly, the UK is legally not made of federal states, but in practice they have granted more autonomy to eg Scotland over the years. And everyone knows that Scotland would secede and get away with it, if there was a power grab by London. In that sense, they are more federal than the US, where secession is very much verboten.)

this, especially if it's a business

Thats mostly because of herdmentality not because of a considered approach. Decentralization assumes the majority are anti social.

How so?

Decentralization can be hidden from the user, it's an implementation detail.

There's literally a popular decentralized social network.

It's less about the tech, and more about the execution.

Historically we can look at LimeWire or PopcornTime as an example.

Both decentralized, both popular due to the ease-of-use.

> There's literally a popular decentralized social network.

Not there isn't. Not a single one.

There are a few federated social networks, which is a fancy way of saying that they are centralized networks that have (or can have, in principle) more than one "center".

In practice, the overwhelming majority of users of such networks gravitate towards one or a handful of large providers. And many of those providers actually refuse to federate with other providers unless they follow an ever-growing list of politically-charged rules. This is just centralization with extra steps.

bluesky has over 27 million users

Bluesky is federated, not decentralized.

what a convoluted way to say you do not agree with this. when you are dealing with people of all skill levels, every step that you put on the development process costs real money. over that, not everything is and has to be open source. we all have source code that is proprietary and has a value for us as it is. making that decentralized and private is not something easy to achieve (and I don't really see a benefit). the problem from my point of view is that we have a single player (github) that managed to attract a huge percent of the market and the competition, while it exists, it's minor.

...ironic

No, it's because complexity comes with a cognitive cost, and delegating responsibility to other entities minimizes this

If you don't account for the benefit, it looks irrational, but this is true of absolutely anything

And I'm sure they'll continue to feel that way right up until the first time they experience "the" internet from a minority partition for more than a few days. I just hope that the distributed stuff is easy enough to limp along with if/when that happens.

No, they'll continue to feel like that even after that. GitHub being down once in a blue moon is more acceptable to the vast majority of users than having to cobble together your own nerdy distributed version of everything.

I was imagining something a bit more disastrous than that. A big enough solar flare could take parts of the planet offline for months. Years if they can't source enough replacement transformers. There are also political reasons that countries go offline.

Then it'll be up to the nerds who manage to cobble together their own distributed version of everything--even if it's a significantly reduced definition of everything.

If large parts of the planet lose their digital infrastructure for months, I really don’t think that “finding a good platform to host my code” is going to be one of my biggest problems.

Especially if the problem was due to a lack of electric grid as they're suggesting.

I think that how big those problems get is going to depend on how much critical infrastructure we can hack back into a working state despite the fact that it can't phone home, which is going to be a problem if nobody knows how to work offline anymore.

Or, if it's a political scenario, it may depend on how well we can coordinate en masse without the cut connection. If we can exceed a certain threshold then we'll have removed the incentive to cut it in the first place.

At that point the enormously powerful central players like big tech and militaries and tax collectors will be more than incentivezed to use every remaining resource they have to bring everything back online and re-centralize power. And if they can't - society and power wasn't exactly more distributed in the distant past lol. Your local warlord/military dictator/whatever will probably not be supportive of nerds acting independently.

Even if that's a concern in a doomsday scenario, self-hosting gitlab is super easy and a good (some would argue better) alternative.

Self-hosting gitlab is not and has never been easy if you do it right, it's very heavy on resources and take lots of time and effort to upgrade. It's also extremely complex and has many moving parts. Stick to gitea or forgejo, they upgrade just by restarting the daemon. MySQL for the database if you want comparable ease of maintenance (same thing: upgrading between major versions requires replacing the binaries and restarting the daemon).

You've described a scenario disastrous enough that my primary concern would be drinkable water.

ok fine, ill thank the nerds in that case.

I doubt it, I don't think the distributed stuff is anywhere near ready. Instead it'll be time to kiss the ring of whoever manages to grab control during the gap.

There is not actually a need to choose between a single centralised monopoly and going full-on techno-prepper and running all your own services in your garage as an individual . We could have intermediate points, such as having services run by professionals but based on portable open standards.

git is a great portable standard. But if I were GitHub, I'd make damn sure I didn't have issues, actions, and the rest of it be based on something users could just yank out in a portable format and take elsewhere though.

Portable VCS is simple. Portable anything with the integration everyone expects (issues connects to source which connects to builds which connects to releases) is hard. Git being so open and portable means it isn't a moat.

this should be on a wall somewhere