I agree that NNTP was a nicely federated system, and just a couple of days ago I was pondering the use of NNTP to publish Git pushes. Git&#x27;s support for signed commits and content addressed objects is a great start for distributed, trustworthy collaboration. I still can&#x27;t envision exactly how it would all function. There are lots of benefits to the GitHub model. They&#x27;re a semi-trusted and well-funded entity who guarantee a highly available and fast synchronization. Sure, when it goes down everybody has a problem for a while... but with more distributed models you can get way more complicated failures, like &quot;this object isn&#x27;t seeded by a connected peer right now&quot; or &quot;this federated shard doesn&#x27;t carry this repository&quot; or whatever it may be.<p>I&#x27;m really interested in the future of distributed code collaboration. I just think it&#x27;s not so trivial, and so it&#x27;s very understandable that people have gravitated towards a semi-centralized model that already works.