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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, someone should invent a version control system that does not rely on some central entity but is actually distributed.

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I know you're joking, but what I suppose would need to happen is for someone to also come up with ways to do federated code discovery, search, browsing and ways to show off contributions. For issues and PRs there's mailing lists, but it seems the young uns are appalled by that, so maybe that too.

Maybe Fossil SCM by the sqlite authors would be a starting point?

Gitea and forks exist, Fossil is also a plausible alternative although it seems not everyone likes its workflow. Maybe discovery could be handled simillar to Mastodon through ActivityPub, I think it wouldn't even be too hard to integrate into existing Git code forges.

Forgejo [1] (a fork of Gitea) is working on integrating activitypub [2].

[1] https://forgejo.org/ [2] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59

Awesome, this could change the status quo of code forges. Also tangentially related, but just the fact that Forgejo is self hosting gives me more confidence in it than Gitea (which is on GitHub LOL), hopefully both projects share any improvements between each other.

The problems are not discoverability, but servers. GitHub is mainly successful because they simply offer services for free, and maintain them well. Most other features they offer is just a bonus. Though, at this point the weight of their accumulated fame, features and repos is also a reason for continuation, as long as they behave well enough.

It's strange isn't it how people keep inventing distributed systems such as the internet itself, and yet money/politics/laziness entices people to use a centralised resource with all the problems that go with that.

Tragedy of the Commons

How do we know how to trust it without a central entity looking over its quality OR the next best thing such as provide usage statistics and community tools like an issue tracker etc.

Linux's model of trusting people seems to work for them. Github doesn't guarentee quality - the primary developer(s) were always the artiber of quality. There are also various projects managing issue tracking inside or alongside git, or git alternatives that integrate an issue tracker.

Yeah, but the problem is that if you have some project running on someone's server, how do you find the issues related to that project if they are not on that same server and managed by that same project owner?

If there is a security issue with some project on GitHub, then you can ask GitHub to look at it and they will take the project down. This cannot be done with projects running on someone's web server.

Git maybe decentralized but working in a group, making releases, pull requests etc. That is not part of git and that needs to be decentralized.

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