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.

> 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).

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.

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

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