Does anyone have time this weekend to manually test and validate and prove out this spec I’m calling Gitxt? A Twtxt-inspired purely decentralised Git federation/forge? 🤔 Hit me up! You need only git, curl and a web server of some kind.

gitxt is a purely decentralised git forge. There is no federation protocol, no instance-to-instance API, no accounts on other people’s servers. Each forge instance is fully independent; collaboration is an act of publishing and reading plain text files over HTTP

@fossham@twtpub.com I honestly think the most unique and interesting thing about doing this at all is that it is in fact inspired directly by Twtxt / Yarn.social itself – That is to say, I am confident I can do this in such a way as to be “truly decentralised”, no inter-networking like ActivityPub, no centraised forges like Github or Codeberg. You run your instance, I run mine, we just are able to collaborate. Think exchanging patches over Email, just without all the hard-to-learn ways to do that (enough though it’s not hard for some of us, but still).

@movq@www.uninformativ.de So the way this works in my design/prototype is this. You fork my repo in the app, it clones it to your own forge, follows my instance and it’s repo for updates and ping my instance to indicate “you’ve forked me”. Then when you publish changes, I can see them by pulling your instance’s feed. It all works on the same plain text principles of Tstxt itself. The feeds are “pull”-based with push-based “pings” on things like “someone forked your repo”, “a new issue has been raised against your repo”, etc.

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm. 🤔

Okay, suppose you host a project using this new forge, and I want to send a pull request. What do I have to do?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de In the meantime tell me all your “wishes” and things you wish/want a good decent “pure” decentralised Git forge should do 😅

I am finally building a Twtxt / Yarn.social inspired Git forge. I’m actually quite confident that y’all will quite like it, but I won’t post links yet until I’m quietly confident in its design, functionality and behaviour(s).

Stay tuned 🤞 It’ll be like no other Git forge you’ve ever seen! 🤣 Actually, it’s already more like cgit than anything with plain text feeds that power it’s “pure decentralization” as you can no doubt imagine 😅 #twtxt #git #forge

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I am seriously rethinking and re-contemplating building a new Git forge of some description that avoids all of these stupid problems that we’re now seeing in the wild

@prologic@twtxt.net Oh, yes, just for clarity: This wasn’t a “pro GitHub” argument. 😅 I won’t go back there (or to another “forge”).

I think we’re totally on the same page: Decentralized Git hosting is good, but we haven’t solved the “collaboration” part yet. Or rather: We have to modernize it. The tools are already there, but (many) people don’t want to use them and think they’re clunky.

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