[Sir_Substance]

That also depended on the project. With the right ports forwarded on your home router, servers can pop up and down as required.

Mercurial had a single command for this, "hg serve", that would just pop up a webserver for sharing. It was extremely useful for me during university, and I've often considered it a key failing that git does not provide a similar command out of the box. As a result, the distributed nature of git is hidden from a lot of people.

For the record, the command to make git do what mercurial does with hg serve is "git daemon --reuseaddr --base-path=. --export-all --verbose --enable=receive-pack".

Obviously this is insecure and anyone who can establish a connection can push and pull from your repo, but if you're just jamming with some friends you don't need github.