this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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That's called Git and it's been around longer than GitHub. There is also Usenet which by now is mostly dead. People fell for centralized alternatives. Oops :)
Right? Git is literally decentralized. If you choose to use GitHub as a centralized Git service, that's on you.
(I will caveat this by saying we moved 2009scape off GitHub and the number of new contributors probably got cut in half. Mainstream services have a lot more eyes)
How come Git is decentralized?
Doesnt it need a central component so I can pull your changes?
Edit: Thanks to all that explained it to me :)
Changes can come from anywhere. The Linux kernel itself doesn't use any central repository like Github, it's instead done via emailing patches that are eventually merged into the mainline kernel repository managed by Linus.
It is 100% decentralized.
But... How does that work? The code has to be stored somewhere...
The code is replicated by everyone who works on it, and on various public and private servers, so you might say it's stored everywhere.
......I need to watch a video on this 😂
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control
Linus memorises it.
Sounds like it's centralized around Linus...
It's just for the "last mile" where code gets packaged up into releases. There's still thousands of developers that have all of the code on their machines as well, it's just that their local repos aren't the ones that end up in the hands of end users.