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Hi! I'm one of the "replacing GitHub with something decentralized!" people (via GitTorrent). And one of your Patreon backers! Thanks! Please don't hand-wave

Hi! I'm one of the "replacing GitHub with something decentralized!" people (via GitTorrent). And one of your Patreon backers! Thanks! Please don't hand-wave away the UX challenges of getting to a GitHub replacement. We need a way that someone can access and leave comments on a project that's better than "well, first I would have joined the project mailing list months earlier". We need to not depend on people running their own 24/7 server infrastructure. We need to not require command-line proficiency. We need to understand that infrastructure has inertia, and mindshare can be everything. For example! Gmail rejects outgoing email from most home ISPs, and mangles patches in ways that cause vger.kernel.org to just reject email from Gmail, as I understand it. Is that really our example of an accessible federation? Are we actually trying to compete, or just trying to build ourselves tiny gardens where we can say to ourselves that we're doing things the right way, even though no-one else is?

johnny22 8y ago
I'm really glad to hear you take those concerns seriously. There's nothing that sours me more on "decentralized" versions of X than that.
blablabla123 8y ago
> Gmail rejects outgoing email from most home ISPs The configuration must go with the flow, for example it's recommended to at least configure SPF or DKIM. For each E-Mail a score will be calculated and both make it better, there's also DMARC for further improvement. In fact not only Gmail does this, most non-trivial mail setups do inbound filtering. Nowadays there are even Docker containers for that. Not saying that E-Mail is great but automation will get one really far and there doesn't seem to be a decentralized alternative for that yet. (Obviously there are centralized alternatives; and of course there's XMPP)
- cjbprime 8y ago
  None of these suggestions make sense. DKIM, SPF, and Docker are all irrelevant to whether Gmail will accept mail that is relayed to them through a broadband IP address. (They won't.)
  - tyler_larson 8y ago
    The idea of SMTPing email out from your home ISP turned out to be problematic once spam became a business model. Gmail's not the only place that categorically won't trust it. You need a mail server. You can run it yourself if you're in to that sort of thing, but you can't run it off a residential/consumer uplink. Sorry, this one's non-negotiable. Then your home server authenticates to your mail server as a client, and send email through your mail server. Your mail server is recorded as the IP address of origin, not your home address. MTAs are already designed to do this with nearly zero effort on your part, so you don't have to change your workflow, just your config file. Don't want to pay for a mail server? Good news! There's like a gazillion services that actually do this for free. Gmail actually turns out to be one of them. Don't want to have to use Oauth? Good news! Gmail's not the only mail service. There's ten billion others.
    - xg15 8y ago
      > Then your home server authenticates to your mail server as a client, and send email through your mail server. But then, why can't I do that with Git?
      - xte 8y ago
        Mh, because cars are about moving on roads and boats on water? Git is a dCVS, so a software to store source code tracking history and users, not a communication platform, mails on contrary are communication platform. If you want something like Fossil (dVCS with built-in webserver with a mini-site for bugtracking etc) integrated with something like ZeroNet well, we do not have anything like than and yes, it can be an interested thing, far more interested than IPFS monsters etc.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
      > Sorry, this one's non-negotiable. It totally should be. If you use SPF and DKIM, that should override distrust of IP addresses. If your domain has good reputation and SPF and DKIM prove that you are authorized to send using your domain, then only the reputation of your domain should be considered (and affected) when processing the inbound email. > Then your home server authenticates to your mail server as a client, and send email through your mail server. That just overcomplicates things in that you now have to maintain two mail servers. Just set up a tunnel to route the public addresses of your server to your home server, then you can send directly to whereever using static addresses. Also has the advantage that the TLS is terminated on your own hardware, rather than on systems with potentially questionable security of some cheap hosting provider, so less trust in proper security and data protection practices of the hosting provider is required. > Don't want to pay for a mail server? Good news! There's like a gazillion services that actually do this for free. Gmail actually turns out to be one of them. Giving power to Google both over your data and over the direction of email in general is not free. That's the one thing everyone should finally grasp. Using Facebook isn't free, using GitHub isn't free, using Gmail isn't free, ...
questionasked 8y ago
I very much agree with this. One of the reasons I have so far stayed away from linux kernel development is because I really dont like the idea of having to deal with mailing lists.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
  First of all, why would you possibly not want to "deal with mailing lists"? But also: You don't have to. For small contributions, there is no need to deal with mailing lists. Linux kernel development has one of the lowest barriers to entry ever. Except for some weird psychological effect apparently that keeps people from doing the trivial things required to contribute.
  - wild_preference 8y ago
    I find that mailing lists are such a poor medium for discussion that I participate in zero of them today. Every time a community switches from a mailing list to a forum (like Elm lang recently), they seem to agree with me. This statement is often met with nerd rage on HN (“why wouldn’t you want to deal with mailing lists?!”) but it’s something you’ll just have to understand or take for granted if you are going to understand what people want from a Github competitor, for example.
    - chriswarbo 8y ago
      > Every time a community switches from a mailing list to a forum (like Elm lang recently), they seem to agree with me. I don't disagree, but would point out that the mailing list/forum choice is a false dichotomy. Nix recently switched to using Discourse and I've found it pleasant enough to interact solely through its mailing list mode. Presumably there are other projects which provide a similar dual interface.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
      > I find that mailing lists are such a poor medium for discussion that I participate in zero of them today. Which doesn't really answer the question why, does it? > This statement is often met with nerd rage on HN (“why wouldn’t you want to deal with mailing lists?!”) but it’s something you’ll just have to understand It's impossible to understand it if people don't explain themselves. > or take for granted if you are going to understand what people want from a Github competitor, for example. I personally don't care for a Github competitor that has the same terrible usability as Github, so I am not sure I'd be willing to take for granted some unjustified demand for bad usability.
xte 8y ago
Join an ML is normally quicker than join a forum/discourse/stackexchange etc. You generally only need to send an email with subscribe inside to a given address. If for you send an email is not immediate (personal case shift-F6 directly open a new message buffer ready to receive destination address and body, C-c C-c send the message) than you have a problem in your workflow that it's also a problem in development.
erikb 8y ago
> We need to not require command-line proficiency. Why? You also need a driving license to drive a car. There are a lot of problems in this world that have a certain internal complexity. You can't UX it away. And the command line is exactly that. It's actually not complex at all. It's so simple that a student can write one before graduating from college. And the learning you need to do to use it is actually learning to interact with a computer. It's really harmful that people nowadays act like hard stuff wouldn't exist and having to interact with hard things would be discrimination. Hard stuff does exist and you need to get used to handle it or suffer never to be able to do anything. --- Also email is actually one of the most simple communication protocols. It's so easy that you can manually read and write most of the stuff. You don't need anything fancy for it. A text editor is enough. And while I think people don't need more than git and email or ssh, I'm all in favor of also implementing ActivityPub. One leg of stable distributed systems is the ability to use another transport if your preferred transport is not available.

johnny22 8y ago

I'm really glad to hear you take those concerns seriously. There's nothing that sours me more on "decentralized" versions of X than that.

blablabla123 8y ago

> Gmail rejects outgoing email from most home ISPs The configuration must go with the flow, for example it's recommended to at least configure SPF or DKIM. For each E-Mail a score will be calculated and both make it better, there's also DMARC for further improvement. In fact not only Gmail does this, most non-trivial mail setups do inbound filtering. Nowadays there are even Docker containers for that. Not saying that E-Mail is great but automation will get one really far and there doesn't seem to be a decentralized alternative for that yet. (Obviously there are centralized alternatives; and of course there's XMPP)

cjbprime 8y ago
None of these suggestions make sense. DKIM, SPF, and Docker are all irrelevant to whether Gmail will accept mail that is relayed to them through a broadband IP address. (They won't.)
- tyler_larson 8y ago
  The idea of SMTPing email out from your home ISP turned out to be problematic once spam became a business model. Gmail's not the only place that categorically won't trust it. You need a mail server. You can run it yourself if you're in to that sort of thing, but you can't run it off a residential/consumer uplink. Sorry, this one's non-negotiable. Then your home server authenticates to your mail server as a client, and send email through your mail server. Your mail server is recorded as the IP address of origin, not your home address. MTAs are already designed to do this with nearly zero effort on your part, so you don't have to change your workflow, just your config file. Don't want to pay for a mail server? Good news! There's like a gazillion services that actually do this for free. Gmail actually turns out to be one of them. Don't want to have to use Oauth? Good news! Gmail's not the only mail service. There's ten billion others.
  - xg15 8y ago
    > Then your home server authenticates to your mail server as a client, and send email through your mail server. But then, why can't I do that with Git?
    - xte 8y ago
      Mh, because cars are about moving on roads and boats on water? Git is a dCVS, so a software to store source code tracking history and users, not a communication platform, mails on contrary are communication platform. If you want something like Fossil (dVCS with built-in webserver with a mini-site for bugtracking etc) integrated with something like ZeroNet well, we do not have anything like than and yes, it can be an interested thing, far more interested than IPFS monsters etc.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
    > Sorry, this one's non-negotiable. It totally should be. If you use SPF and DKIM, that should override distrust of IP addresses. If your domain has good reputation and SPF and DKIM prove that you are authorized to send using your domain, then only the reputation of your domain should be considered (and affected) when processing the inbound email. > Then your home server authenticates to your mail server as a client, and send email through your mail server. That just overcomplicates things in that you now have to maintain two mail servers. Just set up a tunnel to route the public addresses of your server to your home server, then you can send directly to whereever using static addresses. Also has the advantage that the TLS is terminated on your own hardware, rather than on systems with potentially questionable security of some cheap hosting provider, so less trust in proper security and data protection practices of the hosting provider is required. > Don't want to pay for a mail server? Good news! There's like a gazillion services that actually do this for free. Gmail actually turns out to be one of them. Giving power to Google both over your data and over the direction of email in general is not free. That's the one thing everyone should finally grasp. Using Facebook isn't free, using GitHub isn't free, using Gmail isn't free, ...

questionasked 8y ago

I very much agree with this. One of the reasons I have so far stayed away from linux kernel development is because I really dont like the idea of having to deal with mailing lists.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
First of all, why would you possibly not want to "deal with mailing lists"? But also: You don't have to. For small contributions, there is no need to deal with mailing lists. Linux kernel development has one of the lowest barriers to entry ever. Except for some weird psychological effect apparently that keeps people from doing the trivial things required to contribute.
- wild_preference 8y ago
  I find that mailing lists are such a poor medium for discussion that I participate in zero of them today. Every time a community switches from a mailing list to a forum (like Elm lang recently), they seem to agree with me. This statement is often met with nerd rage on HN (“why wouldn’t you want to deal with mailing lists?!”) but it’s something you’ll just have to understand or take for granted if you are going to understand what people want from a Github competitor, for example.
  - chriswarbo 8y ago
    > Every time a community switches from a mailing list to a forum (like Elm lang recently), they seem to agree with me. I don't disagree, but would point out that the mailing list/forum choice is a false dichotomy. Nix recently switched to using Discourse and I've found it pleasant enough to interact solely through its mailing list mode. Presumably there are other projects which provide a similar dual interface.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
    > I find that mailing lists are such a poor medium for discussion that I participate in zero of them today. Which doesn't really answer the question why, does it? > This statement is often met with nerd rage on HN (“why wouldn’t you want to deal with mailing lists?!”) but it’s something you’ll just have to understand It's impossible to understand it if people don't explain themselves. > or take for granted if you are going to understand what people want from a Github competitor, for example. I personally don't care for a Github competitor that has the same terrible usability as Github, so I am not sure I'd be willing to take for granted some unjustified demand for bad usability.

xte 8y ago

Join an ML is normally quicker than join a forum/discourse/stackexchange etc. You generally only need to send an email with subscribe inside to a given address. If for you send an email is not immediate (personal case shift-F6 directly open a new message buffer ready to receive destination address and body, C-c C-c send the message) than you have a problem in your workflow that it's also a problem in development.

erikb 8y ago

> We need to not require command-line proficiency. Why? You also need a driving license to drive a car. There are a lot of problems in this world that have a certain internal complexity. You can't UX it away. And the command line is exactly that. It's actually not complex at all. It's so simple that a student can write one before graduating from college. And the learning you need to do to use it is actually learning to interact with a computer. It's really harmful that people nowadays act like hard stuff wouldn't exist and having to interact with hard things would be discrimination. Hard stuff does exist and you need to get used to handle it or suffer never to be able to do anything. --- Also email is actually one of the most simple communication protocols. It's so easy that you can manually read and write most of the stuff. You don't need anything fancy for it. A text editor is enough. And while I think people don't need more than git and email or ssh, I'm all in favor of also implementing ActivityPub. One leg of stable distributed systems is the ability to use another transport if your preferred transport is not available.