3 ms·

This seems to be a general rule-of-thumb tendency with "distributed anything". In general, in distributed systems a number of inconveniences arise as a natural

by borplk 9y ago

This seems to be a general rule-of-thumb tendency with "distributed anything". In general, in distributed systems a number of inconveniences arise as a natural cost of the distributed nature of the system. This creates a tendency for a critical mass to circle around a single central entity that uses its central position to provide convenience and further creating a "distributed in theory if you really want it but not really" environment (example: Github). Not really super related to Cloudflare, just a general observation.

scrollaway 9y ago
Github's existence does nothing to change the distributed nature of git, just like GMail's existence does nothing to change the nature of email. They offer/sell a service that is built using those technologies. People go to them for the convenience you mention. If there were other convenient ways to use those services people would use them as well. ... and there are! Github has competitors (Gitlab, bitbucket, ...) and GMail has competitors (Fastmail, hotmail, yahoo, and a bazillion others). Maybe it doesn't feel like they have enough competition, but if they actually turned git/email into "distributed only in theory" then there wouldn't actually be competition.
- dasyatidprime 9y ago
  GitHub has gotten a ways there socially. Repositories which are not on GitHub are not socially first-class for many subsets of contributors, because the only habits you can rely on them having in easily-accessible brain memory are based on GitHub-specific workflow. So if you are used to Git and not GitHub, projects you want to contribute to may ask/demand that you do the GitHub-specific thing instead (and feel justified by norms in doing so), and contributors to any projects you publish may do the same in the other direction (more likely, just quietly give up if they can't use GitHub to interact with you). When that happens, you can't move your repository around and still be able to collaborate even if your server's publishing on perfectly good Git-accessible protocols, because the centralized convenience has turned into a necessity in order to keep up / because it was common enough. That's far from the perfect opposite of “distributed and open”, since these habits can be more fluidly shifted and alternate versions of the convenience processes can exist in theory, but it's also far from what I usually hear people implying when they expect things to be socially distributed as well as technically. (I'm told that GMail similarly changes the nature of email by making it socially unsafe to operate email addresses in certain ways, but I believe this effect is weaker and I don't have real experience with it.)
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    git doesn't offer what github offers (PRs, reviews, comments, ...). Do people here actually think about the alternatives when they complain certain systems are too centralized? If you stop using Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket today, you won't be able to collaborate because you no longer have a way to do the things Github lets you do. This isn't Github's fault. Git is decentralized in that it has logic that allows multiple upstreams/downstreams. It's not magic. It's not "blockchain" or whatever. Github is not decentralized, it's a SaaS product which offers git-compatible and svn-compatible repository storage, an excellent UI, comments, reviews, issue tracking and a bunch more. FOSS developers are asking you to create accounts to Github not so you can download their repository (you don't need to!), but so you can actually use the contributing tools on offer. Sorry, I realize this isn't the tone you want to hear, but these comments about "centralized systems in decentralized worlds" are just so empty and meaningless. There's a few projects out there which actually try to solve the abstract issues you mentioned by, for example, adding comment/review metadata to git repositories. But you still have access control to take care of and at the end of the day, you need to trust some party; just like at the end of the day, with DNS, you have to put in a couple of IPs that you trust to provide you with good results. Yes, you have to create a Github account to contribute to some projects. Has nothing to do with git, has everything to do with being able to use the services that Github provides. What is it that you're actually suggesting?
    - majewsky 9y ago
      > If you stop using Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket today, you won't be able to collaborate to projects on these sites because you no longer have a way to do the things Github lets you do. FTFY Git works without a website just fine. Linus manages one of the largest Git repos purely via e-mail. And you can do the same. Sure, Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket is more convenient, but you can just put up a Git repo with a static website that says "send patches to <mailinglist>" like it's 2003.
      - scrollaway 9y ago
        Right, that's what I meant to say.

by borplk 9y ago

scrollaway 9y ago

Github's existence does nothing to change the distributed nature of git, just like GMail's existence does nothing to change the nature of email. They offer/sell a service that is built using those technologies. People go to them for the convenience you mention. If there were other convenient ways to use those services people would use them as well. ... and there are! Github has competitors (Gitlab, bitbucket, ...) and GMail has competitors (Fastmail, hotmail, yahoo, and a bazillion others). Maybe it doesn't feel like they have enough competition, but if they actually turned git/email into "distributed only in theory" then there wouldn't actually be competition.

dasyatidprime 9y ago
GitHub has gotten a ways there socially. Repositories which are not on GitHub are not socially first-class for many subsets of contributors, because the only habits you can rely on them having in easily-accessible brain memory are based on GitHub-specific workflow. So if you are used to Git and not GitHub, projects you want to contribute to may ask/demand that you do the GitHub-specific thing instead (and feel justified by norms in doing so), and contributors to any projects you publish may do the same in the other direction (more likely, just quietly give up if they can't use GitHub to interact with you). When that happens, you can't move your repository around and still be able to collaborate even if your server's publishing on perfectly good Git-accessible protocols, because the centralized convenience has turned into a necessity in order to keep up / because it was common enough. That's far from the perfect opposite of “distributed and open”, since these habits can be more fluidly shifted and alternate versions of the convenience processes can exist in theory, but it's also far from what I usually hear people implying when they expect things to be socially distributed as well as technically. (I'm told that GMail similarly changes the nature of email by making it socially unsafe to operate email addresses in certain ways, but I believe this effect is weaker and I don't have real experience with it.)
- scrollaway 9y ago
  git doesn't offer what github offers (PRs, reviews, comments, ...). Do people here actually think about the alternatives when they complain certain systems are too centralized? If you stop using Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket today, you won't be able to collaborate because you no longer have a way to do the things Github lets you do. This isn't Github's fault. Git is decentralized in that it has logic that allows multiple upstreams/downstreams. It's not magic. It's not "blockchain" or whatever. Github is not decentralized, it's a SaaS product which offers git-compatible and svn-compatible repository storage, an excellent UI, comments, reviews, issue tracking and a bunch more. FOSS developers are asking you to create accounts to Github not so you can download their repository (you don't need to!), but so you can actually use the contributing tools on offer. Sorry, I realize this isn't the tone you want to hear, but these comments about "centralized systems in decentralized worlds" are just so empty and meaningless. There's a few projects out there which actually try to solve the abstract issues you mentioned by, for example, adding comment/review metadata to git repositories. But you still have access control to take care of and at the end of the day, you need to trust some party; just like at the end of the day, with DNS, you have to put in a couple of IPs that you trust to provide you with good results. Yes, you have to create a Github account to contribute to some projects. Has nothing to do with git, has everything to do with being able to use the services that Github provides. What is it that you're actually suggesting?
  - majewsky 9y ago
    > If you stop using Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket today, you won't be able to collaborate to projects on these sites because you no longer have a way to do the things Github lets you do. FTFY Git works without a website just fine. Linus manages one of the largest Git repos purely via e-mail. And you can do the same. Sure, Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket is more convenient, but you can just put up a Git repo with a static website that says "send patches to <mailinglist>" like it's 2003.
    - scrollaway 9y ago
      Right, that's what I meant to say.