this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
1021 points (99.5% liked)
Technology
59780 readers
4848 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sure, but the networking and consent-finding are defining features of a blockchain. Nobody calls a git repo a blockchain.
You mean a "github repo". Git by itself doesn't give a hoot about validating authors what-so-ever (I could sign as "Bill Gates [email protected]", and git would happily accept the commit), and it's not federated (multiple people manually downloading various states of the repo at various times doesn't count).
Github ensures owners are who they are, as linked to their profile (though email validation only goes as far as "Well, they clicked the link in the email, so this must be their email account"). Github also isn't federated, since that one site going down takes all the repos with it (unless someone had it cloned, but again, random people downloading at random times yields different states of the repo, depending on when the clone/fetch occured, but then you'd end up with tens/hundreds/thousands of sources of various levels of truth).
It's not a minor nitpick. The comment was that "nobody calls a git repo a blockchain". It's because it's not a blockchain, or even remotely similar to one.
You are right, I was just poking fun a little. No hard feelings. You did just kind of um akshually my use of um akshually tho
No worries. I just correct people on it because it's caused problems at work before. It's a pain when people think that git automatically means github, and they start complaining about cost, and Microsoft feeding their AI, and setting up user accounts, and etc etc etc.
I'm like... dude, I just want to sync the code from a central server, we can do it in house for free in 5 minutes...
Github is a website, controlled by no less than Microsoft lol.
A git repo can be spread out like a "blockchain" without the messy validation and coin earnings, maybe that was the intended comparison?
Could it be? Sure, I don't see a technological reason why someone couldn't build a system like that.
Are they now (federated, or blockchained)? No.
True.
I'm working on a decentralised sharing protocol, but it uses reciprocal sharing so you'd have to have large storage anyways.
Hoof, yeah. Collaboration tools always seem to come down to bandwidth, storage, or both.
You need to use something I guess :-) Any examples?
Honestly, despite not actually being federated, I've been using raw Git a lot recently. As opposed to ActivityPub, you can always download the current state lf the central repo and bring yourself up to current. I just wish it were easier to store binary data in it (e.g. sharing my MP3s between my laptop and phone)
Of course, that's not a collaborative use-case. I have no intention of opening my files to the world. Just noting that ActivityPub has some pretty severe limitations (if my mbin server is offline, I wont get the updates I missed while it was down, ever. And if I can't process messages in real-time, I miss those too).
Honestly, despite not actually being federated, I've been using raw Git a lot recently. As opposed to ActivityPub, you can always download the current state lf the central repo and bring yourself up to current. I just wish it were easier to store binary data in it (e.g. sharing my MP3s between my laptop and phone)
Of course, that's not a collaborative use-case. I have no intention of opening my files to the world. Just noting that ActivityPub has some pretty severe limitations (if my mbin server is offline, I wont get the updates I missed while it was down, ever. And if I can't process messages in real-time, I miss those too).