GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub (2015)

Hi! I started this project in 2015, using Bitcoin and BitTorrent -- since then, I think Ethereum and IPFS have become better substrates for this sort of work. And, I think it remains the case that the difficult part of decentralizing GitHub is not working out how to share repositories using p2p bandwidth, but instead working out how to use p2p for the social features of the site, like comments and pull requests. Secure Scuttlebutt has some potential there, but…

Hi! I'm the GitTorrent author. It feels strange to have it show up on the front page whenever GitHub does something bad, more than five years later. Bitcoin and BitTorrent v1 were plausible substrates in 2015, but no longer. I think Radicle (https://radicle.xyz) is the project most deserving of attention at the moment. The hardest thing about such a project is economic: how do you handle issue/comment spammers? Or someone creating as many accounts as they can? How do you…

I really like what’s happening with SourceHut[^1]; that aims to make a lighter-weight, very self-hostable forge. How many of the problems that these decentralized systems aim to solve could be in large part mitigated by more self hosting? For sure, there are some technically desirable aspects of decentralization: higher resilience to data loss, etc. but the problems of centralized, closed-source, freedom-destroying services can be affected quite a bit by running your own $service. [1]: https://sr.ht/

That's really cool. I had never heard of this. Shame it hasn't been worked on since. It would be a really interesting thing to use. There's also https://radicle.xyz/ for those interested in something like this.