[donatj]

It's interesting to me every time one of these "I just figured out I can use git without GitHub" posts comes up.

The entire design of git was intended to be decentralized. You really don't even need the centralized bare repo! You can just point your machines at each other. With Tailscale these days that's especially easy.

Admittedly, I'm getting old, but for the first couple years I used git professionally ~2008-2011 we just pulled from each other's machines. Directly over SSH. We worked in an office, all had each other's machines as remotes. "Hey, is that feature done? Cool, I'll pull it". It worked really well.

Eventually we tossed a bare repo up on a server in the office and switched to push instead of pull. Finish a feature? Push it up! At some point our devops guy installed Gitlab around that, but we never really used the web ui.

Winds changed, we moved to GitHub, eventually a pull request / code review workflow. Here we are now.

[pimlottc]

GitHub did an incredibly good job of capturing mindspace around git, to the extent that many users don’t realize that there is any distinction between the tool and the hosting platform.

[varun_ch]

I’m not sure if this is a large scale thing, but I know it’s definitely true for myself and some others.

My first exposure to Git and GitHub was through GitHub Pages. I was told to use the GitHub web editor, ignore all the ‘git’ stuff, and just write the HTML files there. Then I grew into using GitHub desktop and later VSCode’s git integration. At no point did I have to use ‘git’ on the command line so I didn’t really understand what the tool did or why. I think many people simply don’t see git without GitHub. Some even see GitHub without touching git eg. see the infamous ‘I am new to GitHub and I have lots to say’ post https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_to...

[tpoacher]

Indeed.

The best way to make the distinction really obvious is the phrase: "Github is to git what Pornhub is to porn".

Alas, not a phrase you can use in an educational setting though. And I haven't really found other "hub" examples which would be as instantly recognisable and demonstrative of the difference.

[1718627440]

Yeah, you can even just push to an USB stick, if you don't have an Ethernet cable available.

[aquariusDue]

I sometimes clone stuff around my local filesystem and pretty much yeah it's a shame GitHub has captured so much of the mindshare around git.

[mettamage]

> Admittedly, I'm getting old, but for the first couple years I used git professionally ~2008-2011 we just pulled from each other's machines. Directly over SSH. We worked in an office, all had each other's machines as remotes. "Hey, is that feature done? Cool, I'll pull it". It worked really well.

Haha I'm jealous.

We used Airdrop.

And then I was like "shouldn't we use git?"

"Nah, this works fine, you have the code you need now, don't you?"

I was still in my second year of my information science bachelor and he was +60 years old and had programmed for over 2 decades. I was not going to argue with someone that experienced. In retrospect, I should have. But I'd probably been shot down with being "that youngster that always wants to use new technologies" (despite git not being that new anymore).

[cratermoon]

I recall a time when github was having an outage at the same time me and a coworker were trying to fix a high priority issue. I had pushed my changes before the outage but he couldn't pull them. I proposed that I share my repo locally so he could pull from me, but he looked confused and didn't get it, so I let it drop.

[harshalizee]

Exactly! I was in university around that time. Our team project needed a non-public repo for us to sync to. Free/Personal Github at the time did not allow for private repos, so I just used my Dropbox folder as the "server". Worked well enough for a bunch of students to use that as a centralized repo.

[inatreecrown2]

Funny you mentioned Tailscale, since the Author seems to work there.