SourceHut, a hacker¹-oriented code forge, recently suffered a couple days’ downtime due to a sustained DDoS attack, and parts of it are still coming online.

I’m impressed by the way Drew and SourceHut are handling the situation, but it’s a good reminder that “Git is a distributed version control system”. Code forges are useful tools—and I’m really grateful for alternatives to GitHub—but programmers who use Git should keep themselves familiar with the tooling built right into it for completely distributed workflows, such as git-send-email² and git-request-pull. Even if only to stay well-prepared for situations like this one.

But we can be more proactive by mirroring other people’s code; after all, the writings that survive from the classical world are only around today because people kept making copies of them. It’s naive to think that any website will last forever, so those of us with our own self-hosted repositories³ can make our communities more resilient by hosting clones of software projects that we find useful or culturally important. I posted a copy of the core Uxn distribution⁴, not because I think my little website will necessarily be around longer than SourceHut or Hundred Rabbits’, but because the likelihood of all three becoming unavailable is slightly smaller than that for just the latter two.