Re: Low budget P2P content distribution with git

Solderpunk wrote about distributing content via git, as a useful-in-many-cases distributed network.

The first thing that struck me about this idea, before I even got to the part where he mentioned it, was how easy it would be to use in a sneakernet or on a data mule (which is almost exactly the same thing).

The second thing was how hard it would be to authenticate that the content really came from the source you expect it to come from, unedited. Because git history can be edited. I don't know how GPG signing of commits work, but if it's simple and solves it I'm game.

The third thing is a thought about external links, which he mentions as being difficult. I think there's an 80:20 solution here, too. Commits have timestamps, after all. If I, in one of my posts, link to an external resource your client will know when I did that. Given access to that particular resource's git repo it could simply check out the latest commit before my link and use that, unless a newer is available (or maybe even if a newer is available).

I'm hoping to revamp a whole lot of my config in the next week (which should hopefully be invisible to all of you), and in doing so I might actually make a git repo of my capsule available. I have some thoughts about how git might handle binary files like my pdfs and images, but it's worth testing. I'm already very transparent about edits I make, and should I change my mind about something I can always make an edit that reflects that. There's a lot of things I've done in my life that I'd rather have undone, but I've found that people judge me more based on who I am than who I was. Our mistakes are a part of us, after all, and they make us human.

-- CC0 ew0k, 2021-10-24