Back when the npm registry was really struggling with reliability (I believe because it was secondary to profit for Joyent) I was saying we needed a decentralized registry solution.

But right when that got some upvotes on r/node, within a few days isaacs had npm inc. going. And within a few weeks or months, the npm registry was pretty rock solid. And I have not had a single registry issue in forever.

And npm 4 works well, and I'm sure npm@5 works even better.

I still think it makes sense to have a decentralized repository and I guess its nice to have a non-commercial alternative to npm. But for me its not important anymore because npm is working really great now.