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Comment by cjbprime | Hacker News Reader

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 as a gossip protocol it doesn't have a way for people you don't know/follow to e.g. send you a PR.

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Gitea, Gogs, and Gitlab all have social-federation-related feature requests open right now. Not sure where they will land, but some are mentioning ActivityPub.

ActivityPub is indeed both simple and extensible. Perfect for issues and comments, also PRs.

For the actual code behind PR I would just setup a git daemon and reference own repo. With appropriate CORS the code can even be cloned in a browser.

Cool! That is really interesting. ActivityPub would be great for this. I've added in links to the issues below:

Gitea:

- https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1612

- https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/184

Gogs:

- https://github.com/gogs/gogs/issues/4437

Gitlab:

- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/44486

- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/4517

edit: added gitlab enterprise link (plus formatting)

And (maybe as a result of this discussion.. who knows) this has just been created:

https://github.com/git-federation/gitpub

Crazy, I was learning about ActivityPub yesterday. The vocab could theoretically support this over torrents, too (although I haven't yet thought through how it would work as a protocol):

    {
        "@context": {
            "@vocab": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
            "git": "https://gittorrent.org/ns/"
        },
        "type": "git:PullRequest",
        "to": ["gittorrent://cjb/gittorrent#master"],
        "git:from": "gittorrent://zamalek/gittorrent#feature/activitystreams"
    }

Regarding Git over Scuttlebutt, there's this apparently:

https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25n92DiQh7ietE%2BR%2BX%2FI403LQoy...

though I just stumbled upon it, no idea how it works and what are the features vs. limitations.

@cjbprime excellent work! We've been using a timegraph CRDT with signed inserts to handle non-web of trusted individuals to send or notify a user of something here at gun. I'd love to be able to chat with you more about your work and possible future solutions - shoot me an email (check my profile)?

What are your thoughts on this project: https://github.com/axic/mango

Looks like it's abandoned, but it's a start at using ETH and IPFS.

@cjbprime do you have any thoughts on this Git/Ethereum/IPFS combo? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17238414

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