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.<p>Bitcoin and BitTorrent v1 were plausible substrates in 2015, but no longer. I think Radicle (<a href="https://radicle.xyz" rel="nofollow">https://radicle.xyz</a>) is the project most deserving of attention at the moment.<p>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 incentivize someone to mirror your repo? Or to build you a delta to satisfy your `git pull`, without making the network fall over when someone realizes they can ask you to spend infinite CPU building packfiles for them? And what happens when someone forgets their password or loses their private key? This space was a humbling experience in the necessity of incentive alignment for me.
After thinking about this for a couple of years while helping the Safe Network (a decentralisation project worth getting to know) I began my own effort to decentralise github based on Safe, just last Sunday!<p>Even before Friday's censorship, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of support and offers to help I received in mastodon. People there are aware, skilled and ready.<p>BTW I've got ideas on how to handle the issue/comment spam and other problems rightly highlighted by @cjbprime in his reply to the OP. But first I have to get git-bug (really worth of support too) compiled to WASM and running in the browser.<p>It's early days, but you can see what I'm up to here: <a href="https://safenetforum.org/t/safe-git-ui-discussion/32793?u=happybeing" rel="nofollow">https://safenetforum.org/t/safe-git-ui-discussion/32793?u=ha...</a><p>Or follow:
<a href="https://mastodon.technology/@happybeing" rel="nofollow">https://mastodon.technology/@happybeing</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/safepress" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/safepress</a>
This is a solution to a non-problem. Hosting taken down git repos is easy an due to gits design all developers already have the source code.<p>The real problem is hosting issues and PRs in such a way. Github has an API and it's possible to script the backup but source code gets backup automatically so when the takedown strikes it's not a big problem.
And another angle, if you want to store a snapshot of a repo on IPFS
<a href="https://github.com/whyrusleeping/git-ipfs-rehost" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/whyrusleeping/git-ipfs-rehost</a>
I don’t understand the need for crypto and/or a global user name. I’m “withinboredom” in a lot of places and it doesn’t bother me when someone gets there first. I also have other names that are better well known, but I digress.<p>Why not just stick a txt record on a domain? You can clone gittorrent://awesome.withinboredom.info.<p>You can easily find a valid gpg key for me in the usual places.
This project really needs more attention. Would have resolved the issue we had earlier today. Some others ideas:<p>* Write a client in C, JS sucks<p>* Make a web-frontend for this so average users can jump on quickly.
Why, yes, as long as each cloned repo is a copy of some set of revisions, it makes perfect sense to use peer to peer downloads.<p>Internal hash consistently could be used for verification.
Wouldn't an activitypub[1] type of github be the perfect solution? Like Mastadon or Peertube but for git. Anyone can setup their own hosting and interconnect to others. There can be global index like peertube is building and spam can be dealt with on each instance.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/" rel="nofollow">https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/</a>