[lifeisstillgood]

I love using GitHub and appreciate the impact it is and has had. But this post is what is wrong with the web today. They have taken a distributed-at-it's-plumbing technology, and centralised it so much that now we need to innovate new load balancing mechanisms.

Years ago I worked at Demon Internet and we tried to give every dial up user a piece of webspace - just a disk always connected. Almost no one ever used them. But it is what the web is for. Storing your Facebook posts and your git pushes and everything else.

No load balancing needed because almost no one reads each repo.

The problem is it is easier to drain each of my different things into globally centralised locations, easier for me to just load it up on GitHub than keep my own repo on my cloud server. Easier to post on Facebook than publish myself.

But it is beginning to creak. GitHub faces scaling challenges, I am frustrated that some people are on whatsapp and some slack and some telegram, and I cannot track who is talking to me.

The web is not meant to be used like this. And it is beginning to show.

[bm1362]

This reminds me of the criticism of Dropbox [1] when it was first announced on HN - I think you're not the norm.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

[petercooper]

Years ago I worked at Demon Internet and we tried to give every dial up user a piece of webspace - just a disk always connected. Almost no one ever used them.

I did. That was one of the best features of Demon at the time, when 10MB of Web space could cost you £100+ per year :-) Thanks for your part in making it work!

[RodericDay]

I started coding 3 years ago, and only started playing around with VPSs a year ago. It's hard to explain how... unaware I was, that I could just have a little "plot of land" on the internet, not managed by anyone other than me (and DO).

[auxbuss]

This is very enlightening. One of things that everyone on HN think as obvious, yet is far from that to most folk; even those with a fair degree of technical knowledge.

[audleman]

Are you saying instead of having Github, we should all be hosting our own Git repos?

> But it is beginning to creak. GitHub faces scaling challenges,

I don't agree that Github facing scaling issues means the web is creaking. More like old wooden boats are being replaced by big, sturdy battleships. I think the web is getting stronger thanks to engineers facing the challenges coming their way.

> I am frustrated that some people are on whatsapp and some slack and some telegram, and I cannot track who is talking to me.

If you're annoyed by people messaging on you through multiple platforms, it seems the solution would be to only have one provider. But you earlier call that "what is wrong with the web today," and that we should have distributed systems.

[lifeisstillgood]

>>> Are you saying instead of having Github, we should all be hosting our own Git repos?

Well, yes. That's the point. It was designed as an entirely distributed setup. It's crazy that in order to post a message to my neighbours I have to send data to Facebook in SV and just as crazy that two devs on the same team need to write their code commits in a load balanced mega server in ... Err ... Washington? Wherever.

And I don't mind having lots of clients but I object to no open standards, incompatible and frequently unavailable APIs and lack of control over my messages and how they are dealt with. I want procmail for messaging platforms ! And I want a pony !

[josegonzalez]

No one is forcing you to use github or facebook. I host my own gitlab installation for certain private repositories and I still send emails to some people when coordinating outings.

[lifeisstillgood]

I Am not feeling forced to use it. I use it because it is easier for me as an individual developer. I use readthedocs because they have better uptime than my own servers.n All the reasons i use GitHub are good choices for me.

I get the economics of centralised vs decentralised service provision - it's just ironic that GitHub is facing load balancing problems precisely because they have taken a distributed technology and made it, de facto, a centralised technology.

We can imagine a perfect storm of GitHub going down just as someone pulls a vital package from npm and Google losing jquery CDN; all Of a sudden the web will stop working.

It's amazing how fragile we can make a system designed to be resilient - I presume there is a real cost with keeping things distributed that a good economist could explain to me

[jstimpfle]

Multiple platforms != distributed

Yes, multiple platforms is overhead. That's why I mostly use mail, basically never IM, even for the most short-lived or informal conversations.

It's no problem at all for me having email conversations with people whose mailboxes are hosted at a diverse set of providers.

[auxbuss]

You're not alone in thinking this (and I was one of those Demon customers back in the day :-) ). I've had pub chats with many tech folk over the years about how we might enable this. It needs to be cheap, of course, like 5 USD pa cheap. But, perhaps, with today's container tech that's viable. It needs other things too.

A fully distributed "web" of personally managed data is where we'll get to one day. It might need a few cycles of centralisation and distribution, though.

It's also one of the reasons why we must not let the "privacy is dead" and "back door encryption" folk have their way.

To be fair, though, I don't think GitHub is a big part of that problem.

[lifeisstillgood]

Those are good pub chats aren't they :-)

I was at PyCon UK, and watched 60 kids connecting up microbits to RPis and inventing ways to send signals over BTLE without a stack. I would like to solve the whole worlds problems, but if the past twenty years have taught us anything, it's that a few kids can invent the fire and we will all follow. So inthinknwe are going to be in good hands.

[jimjag]

++1!!