[At-Risk Shares] Enumeration of Reasons to Leave Github

[jamesd at echeque.com]

On 2020-10-15 07:30, Karl wrote:
> https://discourse.phabricator-community.org/t/question-on-issue-and-wiki-access/4293/4
>
> gmkarl
> 
> > I’m thinking of how relevant phabricator is for decentralized
> > community work, where the person running the server may not keep
> > running it forever, and people will want to be able to migrate on.
> > Similar to the model of git itself.
>
> avivey
>
> > Phabricator is not built for this kind of workflow; it’s much more
> > oriented towards centralized workflows, with a single source-of-truth.

A single source of truth is convenient, user friendly, and efficient.

Trouble is it becomes entrenched, and thus becomes a high value target,
what economists call an attractive nuisance.  Evil people infiltrate,
enter, take it over, and make it a source of lies instead of truth.

Hence the purging of Linus and Stallman.  And hence when I add a valid
desktop file to ~/.config/autostart in Debian running Gnome3, it dies.

The best solutions combine both, with an automatic failover mechanism
should the single source crash or go off the internet, or if any
subgroup of peers stop  accepting its truth.

What should happen if it goes down is that few people notice, they just
wind up, after a slight delay, connecting to the peer that was next in
line to become the single source of truth if the one first in line went
down.  Maybe the most recent updates get lost and have to be resubmitted.

Git was designed on the no single source of truth model, and a lot of
its user hostility in collaboration is a result of this architecture,
so anyone trying to facilitate collaboration using git is apt to drift
away from this model to the locked in, locked down, single source of
truth.

Decentralized collaboration is *hard*.  Tools to make it easy are hard.