But it’s a categorical error. The analogy is about “git”, not “git repositories” or “DVCS repositories”.
Comment on what's the difference?
merc@sh.itjust.works 9 months agoGit is a DVCS. GitHub is a place where DVCS repositories are hosted. There are many other places where DVCS repositories can be hosted, but GitHub is the most famous one… Porn is a type of content. PornHub is a place where porn is hosted. There are many other places where porn can be hosted, but PornHub is the most famous one. It’s a pretty good analogy.
dan@upvote.au 9 months ago
I mean… Everyone that’s cloned the repo has a full copy of it. You could clone it directly off someone else if you wanted to.
merc@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Sure… and you could pass around porn on thumb drives. But, having a central website where you can browse public repos and clone the interesting ones is a pretty key part of Open Source / Free Software development.
dan@upvote.au 9 months ago
How many people use Github for discovery though? I usually find interesting projects through a search engine, through word of mouth, through posts on here, etc. at which point it doesn’t really matter where the repo is hosted. A lot of the useful projects I use aren’t even on Github.
As far as I know, Gitea is current working on federation support, which will be great. It’d be like Lemmy where you can browse repos, submit issues, etc from one instance even if the repo is hosted at a different one. Git was really designed for a model like that, not for a centralized one.
spiderplant@lemm.ee 9 months ago
How many people use Pornhub for discovery though? I usually find interesting content through a search engine, through word of mouth, through posts on here, etc. at which point it doesn’t really matter where the porn is hosted. A lot of the useful content I use aren’t even on Pornhub.
Seriously though, I agree with you, githubs value to open source is not it’s discover-ability. Personally I think its value comes from the stability, as much as I’m an advocate for self-hosting I know from the amount of dead links on the internet that we could have lost a lot of projects or at least they would move about as hosts went down.
I quite like the idea of federated gitea, although technically there is already a federated platform for porn if you count Lemmy and/or mastadon.