GitHub

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GitHub is a specialized content hosting silo for code, issues, comments, and static content that has some aspects of a commons, and through free domain mapping, a content hosting service as well.

Contents 1 Features 2 POSSE to GitHub 2.1 IndieWeb Examples 3 Self-hosted alternatives 4 Criticism 4.1 DMCA harassment 4.2 DDoS collateral damage 5 See Also

Features

• star a repo: serves as a personal bookmark and ranking the popularity of the repo
• watch a repo: receive notifications of updates to the repo
• . . .

POSSE to GitHub

While git is inherently distributed, all the extra functionality (issues, pull requests, etc.) that GitHub adds on top is not. GitHub has a nice API for interacting with repositories, which makes it pretty easy to POSSE issues, comments on issues, stars, and maybe more.

IndieWeb Examples

• silo.pub supports creating issues, commenting on issues and pull requests, and starring repositories since 2016-04-22

Self-hosted alternatives

There are some self-hosted alternatives to GitHub. Gitlab and Gogs support issue tracking and project management as well.

• GitLab: full-featured GitHub replacement
• Gogs: full-featured GitHub replacement
• Gitolite: web interface for managing repositories, with fine-grained access controls
• Gitweb: simple web interface for browsing git repositories
• Formerly Gitorious (acquired by GitLab in March 2015)
• Formerly Gitosis (deprecated long ago in favor of gitolite)

Criticism

DMCA harassment

You can lose your data due to unjustified DMCA takedowns:

• Takedown and Apology
• Github has since improved this process by defining how they are handled better, specifically allowing for the owner to make needed corrections or to move hosts. https://github.com/blog/1908-a-better-dmca-process

DDoS collateral damage

Github is sometimes the target of DDoS attacks, apparently targeted at specific projects. While GitHub seems to be handling the attacks in such a way as to keep access working, this is a vulnerability of any centralized service, that it attracts attacks unrelated to your use of it, that jeopardize your use of it (collateral damage).

• 2015-03-26 DDoS attack [1] via unsuspecting browsers executing scripts from (MitM) faked Baidu requests[2].

See Also

• github-pages
• code
• issue tracker
• commons
• Getting Started
• silo