5 ms·

I can't really see the obsession that everyone has with centralised and closed services like github. We need to start moving away from them, not move more proje

I can't really see the obsession that everyone has with centralised and closed services like github. We need to start moving away from them, not move more projects to them. Mailing lists and NNTP make decentralisation quite easy while being open standards and without having the need to have any account in any centralised service, why drop all these features away?

amorphid 9y ago
I like free and easy to use, so even if I wanted to leave GitHub, doing so would be pretty low on my list of priorities.
ythn 9y ago
It's really nice having some things standardized. I can tell from a glace how popular a project is by the number of stars. I can tell how many bugs it has by perusing the issues. I know I'm not going to get any spyware if I download something. The fragmented approach means you have to learn a bunch of different services, each with their own nuances. Then you have crap like sourceforce injecting adware into the download and now I have trust issues.
- qu4z-2 9y ago
  > I know I'm not going to get any spyware if I download something. You mean aside from that intended by the project maintainers?
  - snakeanus 9y ago
    If this is indeed what ythn means then git supports commit signing, so I fail to see how this would be an issue.
jordigh 9y ago
Git itself is already a monoculture, which makes me sad because it means I have very few people to speak hg to. Github makes it even worse. But having everyone speaking the same VCS language has obvious advantages, especially when part of that language is where to host it and how to get a web view of it and how to share it. People centralise because it means someone else takes care of the boring work and you can go back to writing code. There are disadvantages to centralisation, just like there are disadvantages to giving up your privacy, but it's so damn convenient to do so that nobody has enough activation energy to do the opposite.
BinaryIdiot 9y ago
> We need to start moving away from them, not move more projects to them. It seems this topic comes up quite frequently on HN. Unfortunately, while it sounds great in theory, no one ever has a practical way of doing this. The main problem here is the user experience. When using GitHub I can find an open source project, copy the URL, pull it down, make changes, push and click a button for a pull request. A little bit convoluted but overall it's a very simple workflow. Now try decentralizing away from GitHub. If you have to add any steps then you increase friction likely lowering the UX and making adoption harder. Now, if you can figure out a way to decentralize a service while maintaining the same level or less friction from the centralized version then you have a real winner and things can start happening. Until that happens the idea of decentralizing things is just going to remain a pipedream. In my opinion, of course. I love the idea of decentralizing things like GitHub I just can't imagine a good UX way of doing it.
- mgbmtl 9y ago
  I think that works for smaller projects, but for larger projects that require more coordination, have heavy c-i running, etc, I don't think it makes as much of a difference. However, there are some alternatives for larger projects: 1- make sure your community has a business model (donations or other forms of funding) for core infrastructure, 2- self-host a Gitlab instance :-) It doesn't completely take care of decentralisation, but nothing stops from having multiple instances and some c-i duct tape. Github can also make a good mirror.
- roblabla 9y ago
  There's git-appraise[0] which decentralizes issues and PRs by putting them as objects inside of git. It also features a webui[1] [0] https://github.com/google/git-appraise https://github.com/google/git-appraise [1] https://git-appraise-web.appspot.com/static/reviews.html#?repo=23824c029398 https://git-appraise-web.appspot.com/static/reviews.html#?re...
  - david-cako 9y ago
    This is actually the one good way of handling it IMO. Decentralizing git without losing the UX benefits of using a site like github is done by handling it like torrents and packaging everything into the repo/technology itself. The Linux kernel is already part of the way there, it's just the "local client" aspect that's missing, along with a focus on actually making it intuitive and fully integrated into git itself. The repo itself should contain all of the bookkeeping, and git should host a local UI (web and CLI) that allows you to interact with it as you would with github, rather than the send-mail rituals, the relative difficulty of following development on mailing lists, and the "here's how to set up one of 20 different email clients to send mail as plain-text". Imagine get_maintainer.pl and send-mail being replaced with a built-in pull-request-like interface that is disseminated to everyone that pulls from the remote. That's what git-appraise is trying to accomplish. The traditional mailing-list-based development is tried and tested, but at risk of displaying my appy app iPhone youth naïveté, it's really inconvenient IMO.
u801e 9y ago
> Mailing lists and NNTP make decentralisation quite easy For mailing lists, most people use one of the big email providers (like gmail), their ISP's email service, or they set up their own mail server. The last option is what would make email truly decentralized, but, in order to be able to send messages to others, you would also need to set up SPF and DKIM on your MX to ensure deliverability to other servers. For NNTP, on the other hand, you would either have to use Google groups, or one of the free Usenet providers. If you set up your own news server (which would make this option truly decentralized), then you would also need to enter into a peer arrangement with several other usenet providers in order to have your articles distributed on usenet. I don't have first hand experience with either option, so I don't know how much effort is involved for the decentralized options I mentioned above.
- snakeanus 9y ago
  > in order to be able to send messages to others, you would also need to set up SPF and DKIM on your MX to ensure deliverability to other servers This is actually quite trivial nowadays. I did hear that setting up and configuring mail servers was difficult with Postfix and Sendmail but I personally had no problem setting up qmail and opensmtpd. > For NNTP, on the other hand, you would either have to use Google groups, or one of the free Usenet providers. If you set up your own news server (which would make this option truly decentralized), then you would also need to enter into a peer arrangement with several other usenet providers in order to have your articles distributed on usenet. Not everything really needs to have its articles on the usenet. There are many NNTP networks that do not have that.
  - jimktrains2 9y ago
    But spf and doing still don't prevent mail from being dropped by big providers like Microsoft and Google. Hosting your own mail is roulette.
  - u801e 9y ago
    > This is actually quite trivial nowadays. I did hear that setting up and configuring mail servers was difficult with Postfix and Sendmail but I personally had no problem setting up qmail and opensmtpd. I haven't really looked into it, but at least it's not as difficult as I thought it might be. The only other problem is that a lot of ISPs block outgoing connections on port 25, so you would either need a business account with them or would need to have a server on a hosting provider that allows outgoing connections on that port. > Not everything really needs to have its articles on the usenet. There are many NNTP networks that do not have that. While that is true, that would require that contributors sign up for some type of account on that NNTP network to post and it wouldn't nearly be as visible to potential contributers (unless they advertise their NNTP server information and not require authentication for read only access). gmane is one example that I know of (though you cannot post articles through it as far as I'm aware).
oelmekki 9y ago
Were you around before github? It was extremely painful to contribute to any opensource project, back then. Some projects were on sourceforge, others were on self hosted svn near project homepage, others were grouped in community efforts like savannah.gnu.org ... It felt back then as you had to know maintainers personally to contribute to a project. Most of the time, you had to mail people to ask how to contribute (thus, patch mails are kind of obvious). Centralization is indeed a problem, but I think we should all thank github for having standardized how to find opensource projects and contribute to them. This really gave opensource (especially opensource libraries) the kickstart they needed. And now, this centralization is lowering with concurrent products like gitlab, so everything is fine.

amorphid 9y ago

I like free and easy to use, so even if I wanted to leave GitHub, doing so would be pretty low on my list of priorities.

ythn 9y ago

It's really nice having some things standardized. I can tell from a glace how popular a project is by the number of stars. I can tell how many bugs it has by perusing the issues. I know I'm not going to get any spyware if I download something. The fragmented approach means you have to learn a bunch of different services, each with their own nuances. Then you have crap like sourceforce injecting adware into the download and now I have trust issues.

qu4z-2 9y ago
> I know I'm not going to get any spyware if I download something. You mean aside from that intended by the project maintainers?
- snakeanus 9y ago
  If this is indeed what ythn means then git supports commit signing, so I fail to see how this would be an issue.

jordigh 9y ago

Git itself is already a monoculture, which makes me sad because it means I have very few people to speak hg to. Github makes it even worse. But having everyone speaking the same VCS language has obvious advantages, especially when part of that language is where to host it and how to get a web view of it and how to share it. People centralise because it means someone else takes care of the boring work and you can go back to writing code. There are disadvantages to centralisation, just like there are disadvantages to giving up your privacy, but it's so damn convenient to do so that nobody has enough activation energy to do the opposite.

BinaryIdiot 9y ago

> We need to start moving away from them, not move more projects to them. It seems this topic comes up quite frequently on HN. Unfortunately, while it sounds great in theory, no one ever has a practical way of doing this. The main problem here is the user experience. When using GitHub I can find an open source project, copy the URL, pull it down, make changes, push and click a button for a pull request. A little bit convoluted but overall it's a very simple workflow. Now try decentralizing away from GitHub. If you have to add any steps then you increase friction likely lowering the UX and making adoption harder. Now, if you can figure out a way to decentralize a service while maintaining the same level or less friction from the centralized version then you have a real winner and things can start happening. Until that happens the idea of decentralizing things is just going to remain a pipedream. In my opinion, of course. I love the idea of decentralizing things like GitHub I just can't imagine a good UX way of doing it.

mgbmtl 9y ago
I think that works for smaller projects, but for larger projects that require more coordination, have heavy c-i running, etc, I don't think it makes as much of a difference. However, there are some alternatives for larger projects: 1- make sure your community has a business model (donations or other forms of funding) for core infrastructure, 2- self-host a Gitlab instance :-) It doesn't completely take care of decentralisation, but nothing stops from having multiple instances and some c-i duct tape. Github can also make a good mirror.
roblabla 9y ago
There's git-appraise[0] which decentralizes issues and PRs by putting them as objects inside of git. It also features a webui[1] [0] https://github.com/google/git-appraise https://github.com/google/git-appraise [1] https://git-appraise-web.appspot.com/static/reviews.html#?repo=23824c029398 https://git-appraise-web.appspot.com/static/reviews.html#?re...
- david-cako 9y ago
  This is actually the one good way of handling it IMO. Decentralizing git without losing the UX benefits of using a site like github is done by handling it like torrents and packaging everything into the repo/technology itself. The Linux kernel is already part of the way there, it's just the "local client" aspect that's missing, along with a focus on actually making it intuitive and fully integrated into git itself. The repo itself should contain all of the bookkeeping, and git should host a local UI (web and CLI) that allows you to interact with it as you would with github, rather than the send-mail rituals, the relative difficulty of following development on mailing lists, and the "here's how to set up one of 20 different email clients to send mail as plain-text". Imagine get_maintainer.pl and send-mail being replaced with a built-in pull-request-like interface that is disseminated to everyone that pulls from the remote. That's what git-appraise is trying to accomplish. The traditional mailing-list-based development is tried and tested, but at risk of displaying my appy app iPhone youth naïveté, it's really inconvenient IMO.

u801e 9y ago

> Mailing lists and NNTP make decentralisation quite easy For mailing lists, most people use one of the big email providers (like gmail), their ISP's email service, or they set up their own mail server. The last option is what would make email truly decentralized, but, in order to be able to send messages to others, you would also need to set up SPF and DKIM on your MX to ensure deliverability to other servers. For NNTP, on the other hand, you would either have to use Google groups, or one of the free Usenet providers. If you set up your own news server (which would make this option truly decentralized), then you would also need to enter into a peer arrangement with several other usenet providers in order to have your articles distributed on usenet. I don't have first hand experience with either option, so I don't know how much effort is involved for the decentralized options I mentioned above.

snakeanus 9y ago
> in order to be able to send messages to others, you would also need to set up SPF and DKIM on your MX to ensure deliverability to other servers This is actually quite trivial nowadays. I did hear that setting up and configuring mail servers was difficult with Postfix and Sendmail but I personally had no problem setting up qmail and opensmtpd. > For NNTP, on the other hand, you would either have to use Google groups, or one of the free Usenet providers. If you set up your own news server (which would make this option truly decentralized), then you would also need to enter into a peer arrangement with several other usenet providers in order to have your articles distributed on usenet. Not everything really needs to have its articles on the usenet. There are many NNTP networks that do not have that.
- jimktrains2 9y ago
  But spf and doing still don't prevent mail from being dropped by big providers like Microsoft and Google. Hosting your own mail is roulette.
- u801e 9y ago
  > This is actually quite trivial nowadays. I did hear that setting up and configuring mail servers was difficult with Postfix and Sendmail but I personally had no problem setting up qmail and opensmtpd. I haven't really looked into it, but at least it's not as difficult as I thought it might be. The only other problem is that a lot of ISPs block outgoing connections on port 25, so you would either need a business account with them or would need to have a server on a hosting provider that allows outgoing connections on that port. > Not everything really needs to have its articles on the usenet. There are many NNTP networks that do not have that. While that is true, that would require that contributors sign up for some type of account on that NNTP network to post and it wouldn't nearly be as visible to potential contributers (unless they advertise their NNTP server information and not require authentication for read only access). gmane is one example that I know of (though you cannot post articles through it as far as I'm aware).

oelmekki 9y ago

Were you around before github? It was extremely painful to contribute to any opensource project, back then. Some projects were on sourceforge, others were on self hosted svn near project homepage, others were grouped in community efforts like savannah.gnu.org ... It felt back then as you had to know maintainers personally to contribute to a project. Most of the time, you had to mail people to ask how to contribute (thus, patch mails are kind of obvious). Centralization is indeed a problem, but I think we should all thank github for having standardized how to find opensource projects and contribute to them. This really gave opensource (especially opensource libraries) the kickstart they needed. And now, this centralization is lowering with concurrent products like gitlab, so everything is fine.