commit 4c2ab568a68eeabd90de175c1338dd67dff9dc24
parent 529cdc7f9657122c676b1b6b735ef74e5f582db0
Author: FIGBERT <figbert@figbert.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2024 12:03:57 -0700
Add Ideating Tragit
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+title = "Ideating Tragit"
+date = 2024-07-30
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+
+There are many, many `git` forges to pick from. I'm going to make
+another one—but before I do, I'm going to do a little thinking out loud,
+and outline the what and why of this side project I'm embarking upon.
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+Decentralization is hugely important for the long-term health of the
+internet. Indeed, this quality has been fundamental to the network since
+its inception. This is easy to forget, and hard to see, now. But email
+was not always Gmail and `git` was not always GitHub.[^1]
+
+A big reason that these protocols have become so centralized is because
+the companies that offer these services have genuinely innovated on
+form. Google *invented* effective, user-friendly webmail. They pioneered
+email's contemporary security features and user-facing advancements.
+They were rewarded for that with users.
+
+Nowadays, however, these capabilities no longer require the dedicated
+engineering of whole teams of Google 10x-ers. With the mature and
+effective tools and languages available to every developer, the
+evolution of the open-source ecosystem, and the integration of big-corp
+features into the open standards of the web, self-hosting does not have
+to mean settling for less.
+
+This has played out most clearly, again, with email. If you wanted to
+email people, you used to have two choices: assemble the world's largest
+house of cards and hope the incantation you crafted from terrifying
+words that make no sense like [dovecot] and [mailcow]—which represent
+interconnected services that do things you only sort of
+understand—actually works with any meaningful consistency, or sell out
+to the Oligarchs. No longer! Want one open-source binary to take care of
+sending, receiving, security, accounts, redirects, and everything else?
+It exists, and it's called [maddy], and I've been using it to host my
+email for years now with no effort.
+
+`git`, on the other hand, is very much still in the first stage. You
+can, of course, use [GitHub]. It is a colossus, practically unavoidable
+as a developer, and enabled my start as a programmer. The pull request
+collaboration paradigm they created has totally supplanted the
+[email-based method] that preceded it. But if you want your code to live
+outside of Microsoft's proprietary claws, the process is far from
+simple.
+
+[My own setup] is representative of this problem, and quite janky. It's
+a delicate combination of [`stagit`] and the built-in [`git-daemon`],
+running via Docker Compose, pointed at the home folder of a bespoke
+`git` user. I push to the server over `ssh`, relying on some weird
+nested home directory hack that makes me very uncomfortable in order to
+have a nice destination string. To publish a repo I have to create two
+separate magic files, `git-daemon-export-ok` and `stagit-export-ok`.
+Metadata lives in aptly-named files like `description` and `owner`.[^2]
+I clone and pull with the daemon's `git://` protocol. Any changes mean I
+have to restart `stagit` so it will generate the relevant pages again.
+Collaboration is allegedly facilitated over email with a [crabmail]
+instance, but it's been broken since I first attempted to set it up.
+The whole thing is rather delicate and rough around the edges, which is
+maybe the worst combination of characteristics for an important service.
+
+I think there's a real opportunity here to build something that could
+have an outsized impact on the self-hosted web. I don't want my git
+setup to evoke the same feelings as the word "modem." I don't want to
+compromise. I want big tech capabilities in a small and efficient
+package. So let's leverage ecosystem advancements, think deeply about
+how we can [facilitate collaboration], and make something.
+
+Keep an eye out for some form of [tangible] [deliverable] in this area
+sometime (hopefully) soon. I'm probably going to call it Tragit.
+
+---
+[^1]: I have met a profoundly depressing amount of young programmers who
+cannot distinguish the latter two.
+[^2]: The latter of which, of course, is purely aesthetic and has no
+bearing on security or access rights.
+
+[dovecot]: https://www.dovecot.org
+[mailcow]: https://mailcow.email
+[maddy]: https://maddy.email
+[GitHub]: https://github.com
+[email-based method]: https://git-send-email.io
+[My own setup]: https://git.figbert.com
+[`stagit`]: https://codemadness.org/stagit.html
+[`git-daemon`]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-daemon
+[crabmail]: https://crabmail.flounder.online
+[tangible]: @/posts/tangible-deliverables.md
+[deliverable]: https://fosstodon.org/@FIGBERT/112734909021642855
+[facilitate collaboration]: https://pr.pico.sh
