I just wrote a post about self-hosting Git repositories, corporate abuse of FOSS, and liberty-first computing over on my blog. In that post, I explored the idea of an alternative open-source-like model in which honest, independent open-source users/contributors can still operate as such, but where access to large corporations is gated and monetized at the discretion of the owner of the code in question.

It's not a new idea, it just relies on individual choice regarding their self-hosted code and how much they'd like to gate access (and to whom they'd like to gate access), including via monetization, instead of relying on trust in flimsy licenses that corporations have proven to disregard. In my head, that reality just means everyone else should also disregard them (unless they're ready to put their hat in the ring for a legal fight), and close the doors on their code (while still easily opening those doors to those whom they trust).

I am not interested in discussing whether or not anyone here agrees with me, or whether or not anyone thinks it's a good or bad idea. Instead, I want to find like-minded people who are on board with the idea.

If any such people are here, drop links to your website + self-hosted-code here, and maybe we can form something like a '90s-style webring (I've got a few links on my site so far to get the ball rolling).

Here is mine:

• Website: https://rfleury.com
• Code Depot: https://git.rfleury.com

This resonates so much for me. I've been thinking along these lines for a long time and have been self hosting for almost a year.

I love the idea of granting access to trusted members in a community that I have interacted with. Currently I'm working on a project that I intend to try monetize but I'd love to share with active members in the Handmade Community.

I'm not ready to allow access yet as a lot of it is jank and not ready for public consumption. Will post my links here once I've tidied things up.

Thanks for starting this movement, I think this is the right direction given the current state of everything.

I have my own git server without any web interface with SSH access. The biggest problem with accessing the git server directly is that Git then works through the SSH protocol and can't close SSH against attacks, so if someone steals someone's encryption key using physical access, it exposes an attack vector to a user's account on the system. Doesn't matter if one prevents force push in the git protocol if the attacker can just break the super-user password and erase the entire git folder outside of Git. Ideally, the server should only listen to protocols for non-forcing commits and ignore any other protocols and commands. Open source hardware could make it physically impossible to erase memory without physically pushing a clean-up button to allow overwriting memory and erase commits that are not attached to any branch.

In case it wasn't clear in the original post, I am not interested in having a discussion about whether or not any of you think this is a good idea, or your hypotheticals regarding the future of the web. That might be a great discussion for another thread, but this thread was primarily to gather people who are interested in the idea of joining something akin to a '90s Handmade webring.

It's no problem. Yeah, that's right - I am not blocking access to those who don't have a website, or those who don't self-host anything. The idea is just to keep the "doors closed" such that you explicitly gate access and are able to make the decision regarding what access you'd like to give to whom.

The point is that you're able to charge corporations, businesses, or commercial projects fairly for using your code - not relying on the non-reality of licenses - while preserving a more community-driven (the extent of "community" is up to you - you can even charge for that) system for those whom you trust.

In essence, it forms a looser model than corporations w.r.t. code- and idea-sharing. To corporations, it is as if the network is a business that they need to purchase licenses from. To individuals and independent developers, the system preserves the ability of each individual to work on what they want, charge for what they want, share what they want, and so on.

An entire network of people operating this way would - in totality - form a fairly large force in competition with large tech oligopolies, and if enough high-quality tech were under this umbrella, then the members of said oligopolies would need to start paying up, and independent development could flourish a bit more than it does right now.

I'm personally down with the idea, but I can't really see why corporations would prefer hosting on someone's git servers over hosting it on their own, or using an existing "monopoly" service like Github. If there were to be a centralized git server, it's conceptually the same behemoth as Github is. E.g. I'm wondering about assurance that people who use the independent services are guaranteed to have their repository stay, be secure, and with no significant changes. These kind of problems make it unappealing for orgs and corporations to rent git servers from individuals. This also applies to open source organizations, as infamously PHP's own git servers got hacked and inserted malicious code. They then found out it was a vulnerability on their git hosting servers, and promptly switched to using Github. The individual hosters should also be liable for damages, downtimes, and other problems otherwise this would be very unappealing, corporations would lose a lot of money.

Website: https://www.amin.space/blog/

Code Depot: https://git.amin.space/

Woefully neglected, especially now that I need to figure out whether I can safely publish personal code while working at my current job, but I have plans to update it (working on a markup language + static website generator and have multiple articles in draft stage).