this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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There needs to be a widespread p2p solution for opensource projects before its too late. I have lost count of all the amazing stuff that has been gravity bombed from orbit.
There also needs to be a way for authors to submit things anonymously too and maybe sign their things with cryptographic keys to ID it. How many times has a company had a court order someone to cease and desist or simply acquire somebody's work?
That's called Git and it's been around longer than GitHub. There is also Usenet which by now is mostly dead. People fell for centralized alternatives. Oops :)
You'd think Usenet is dead.
It's not.
Git is, but it has no process of discovery or hosting by itself. Those are needed to efficiently share open source software to large numbers of people.
Right? Git is literally decentralized. If you choose to use GitHub as a centralized Git service, that's on you.
(I will caveat this by saying we moved 2009scape off GitHub and the number of new contributors probably got cut in half. Mainstream services have a lot more eyes)
How come Git is decentralized?
Doesnt it need a central component so I can pull your changes?
You can have arbitrarily many git "remotes": GitHub, gitlab, your own custom forge, etc...
Git a cmd tool only. Your can remote wherever you like.
Changes can come from anywhere. The Linux kernel itself doesn't use any central repository like Github, it's instead done via emailing patches that are eventually merged into the mainline kernel repository managed by Linus.
It is 100% decentralized.
Host a git-style repo on IPFS
All you need for this is a global overlay network and a global DNS untied from physical infrastructure. Cryptographic identities (hash of pubkey will do) instead of IP addresses (because NATs are PITA and too many people use mobile devices behind big bad NATs), and finding (in something like Kademlia) records signed by authority you yourself chose to trust instead of asking DNS.
Then come encryption and dynamic routing and synchronization of published states.
One can have some kind of Kademlia for discovery of projects too, but on the next level.
I2P comes close, but it's more focused on anonymity.
OK, I'm not sure what I wrote makes sense. These things are easy to grasp somehow, but hard to understand well.
It's not always takedowns either, just the developer deciding to nuke their own repos. Real annoying, although it's making me more vigilant about forking/mirroring important repos.
Open-source projects are quiet safe on Github. Maybe don't push illegal code? Seems pretty obvious to me.
Do you forget who determines what is illegal?