Looking for a better way to #git.
Tired of #libre sofware #sourcecode being centralised on big players' platforms.
Sourceforge is dying a slow death. Github is too big (but not too big to fail!) Gitlab is now controlled by VCs.
I could setup my own git server, but don't want to isolate myself from potential collaborators.
Today I tried this 3 repo setup:
- Main repo on https://framagit.org by @Framasoft
- Gitlab.com setup as a mirror bridge, pulling from Framagit and pushing to Github
Sounds like someone needs to develop gittorrent. Probably could build on btsync and avoid reinventing the wheel.
The crazy thing is that git is already federated. It was designed that way from the beginning. So once you clone a repo, you can set multiple upstreams and then push/pull to your heart's content (modulo permissions).
Discoverability is another thing, but does not have to be tied to git itself.
I have local copies of things with upstreams all over, GitHub, gitlab, git-ssb, repo on Dropbox folder, repo on filesystem.
Yeah, it's a tragedy. Even when using decentralised systems we tend to converge (centralise) on the same services anyway (eg. Gmail)...
@mayel @alanz @cykros @Framasoft I've recently found out about "Anti-Disintermediatization" where formerly decentralized tools were centralize-able, and hence were centralized. Kleiner suggest we make tools which *cannot* be centralized, where they only run on your local machine.
Which (IMO) is a fascinating new perspective (for me)
@ebel @Framasoft @cykros @alanz @mayel
We did all of this stuff for long enough before the silos came along, we used just mailing lists and usenet.
One of the reasons RMS doesn't like APIs as I recall is that they allow non-free software to interact with free software, where the preferred alternative is that anything leveraging your code basically has to be a derivative work.
@gracie @ebel @cykros @alanz @mayel
Yes we had libre versions. And what happened? It says to hard and complicated and there was money in controlling and centralising it, so that's what happened. The thing with the counter anti dis intermiatisation is to make tools that are impossible to centralise. We should learn from what happened.
@ebel @mayel @alanz @cykros
We already know how to do this is the point. A mailing list is federated. We could see these things coming, which is why there was a concern about gcc adopting a plugin api for example. I think we've gotten too used to corporate sponsored floss as the new normal and it's normalised a sort of consumer experience simulacrum of cooperation. We managed to create things like git without things like github.
@gracie @cykros @alanz @mayel Yes mailing lists are federated, and email is the last surviving popular bastion of the decentralized web. But it's barely hanging on.
We should look at how come people use centralized mailing list software? Why do centralized email services dominate?
I really like the idea of "solving" that problem by making software/services that *cannot* be centralized! That would solve it for real.
@gracie @bob IMO debian repos *are* federated. You can set up your own mirror and sync from the main one. If it goes down you can use another mirror. Local groups can (and do) use their own mirror.
Now imagine what a p2p system would look like, where everyone running apt was also part of the swarm. That's the counter-anti-disintermediatisation