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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

And I'm sure they'll continue to feel that way right up until the first time they experience "the" internet from a minority partition for more than a few days. I just hope that the distributed stuff is easy enough to limp along with if/when that happens.

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No, they'll continue to feel like that even after that. GitHub being down once in a blue moon is more acceptable to the vast majority of users than having to cobble together your own nerdy distributed version of everything.

I was imagining something a bit more disastrous than that. A big enough solar flare could take parts of the planet offline for months. Years if they can't source enough replacement transformers. There are also political reasons that countries go offline.

Then it'll be up to the nerds who manage to cobble together their own distributed version of everything--even if it's a significantly reduced definition of everything.

If large parts of the planet lose their digital infrastructure for months, I really don’t think that “finding a good platform to host my code” is going to be one of my biggest problems.

Especially if the problem was due to a lack of electric grid as they're suggesting.

I think that how big those problems get is going to depend on how much critical infrastructure we can hack back into a working state despite the fact that it can't phone home, which is going to be a problem if nobody knows how to work offline anymore.

Or, if it's a political scenario, it may depend on how well we can coordinate en masse without the cut connection. If we can exceed a certain threshold then we'll have removed the incentive to cut it in the first place.

Even if that's a concern in a doomsday scenario, self-hosting gitlab is super easy and a good (some would argue better) alternative.

Self-hosting gitlab is not and has never been easy if you do it right, it's very heavy on resources and take lots of time and effort to upgrade. It's also extremely complex and has many moving parts. Stick to gitea or forgejo, they upgrade just by restarting the daemon. MySQL for the database if you want comparable ease of maintenance (same thing: upgrading between major versions requires replacing the binaries and restarting the daemon).

ok fine, ill thank the nerds in that case.

I doubt it, I don't think the distributed stuff is anywhere near ready. Instead it'll be time to kiss the ring of whoever manages to grab control during the gap.

You've described a scenario disastrous enough that my primary concern would be drinkable water.

At that point the enormously powerful central players like big tech and militaries and tax collectors will be more than incentivezed to use every remaining resource they have to bring everything back online and re-centralize power. And if they can't - society and power wasn't exactly more distributed in the distant past lol. Your local warlord/military dictator/whatever will probably not be supportive of nerds acting independently.

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