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Comment by EGreg

8 years ago

Guys and girls, I really don’t get this. It’s 2018! Why do we need third party domains to act as landlords for our content?

Git is decentralized. Why do we need GitHub, when we can have a decentralized network of dumb servers storing various encrypted chunks of stuff, replicated? (At least use the new keybase software, or host GitLab on the servers of your choice.)

Why do we need to choose a landlord? Amazon’s store, Google’s search engine, Apple’s app store, Facebook’s social network ... don’t you see the power imbalance with these gatekeepers?

Suddenly the landlord changes hands and we’re upset. Oh no, what’s the new owner going to do?

With a network that no one controls, we wouldn’t worry about that.

We are technologists. Why did we stop at DNS? It’s a hierarchical database. Why did we stop at the Web? It requires us to rely on and trust our data to “the cloud” ie some servers owned by someone else.

Why? Look at IPFS and SAFE network for instance. To me that represents the disruptive future with no gatekeepers, and everyone free to work on what they want.

4 comments

EGreg

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rbanffy  8 years ago

We don't use Github to host Git repos alone. We use it as a tool for collaboration - to track bugs, host some documentation, do code reviews, track workflow and so on. And, most of all, we use it for discoverability. It's easy to find things on Github.

> Why did we stop at DNS?

A lot of companies host their domain servers on AWS because Route 53 makes it convenient.

A real successor to Github would allow all the extras around Git, but in a federated way. We'd deploy a server for our projects, different addresses for our repos and all members of this federation would agree on an API and share data with each other.

It's doable, but, unless it's easier than other options, it won't fly.

  • EGreg  8 years ago

    Back in 2011 I saw this problem — that social networking (profiles, ratings, collaboration of all kinds) is all based on centralized platforms.

    Even github as you said provides all the social layer on top of git and you jusy have to trust them.

    There was no good software to take care of that stuff. So we built it. It’s exactly the federated API layer you’re talking about!

    Here it is:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

anoncow  8 years ago

Can you provide more details on how IPFS/SAFE can help and if there are any interesting projects?