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Nintendo Wipes Out 400+ Switch Emulator Repos in Single-Day GitHub Sweep * TorrentFreak
(torrentfreak.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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Technology
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Maybe we could build a distributed Github you can't just delete with something decentralized and versioning, like Hypercore protocol or IPLD (InterPlanetary Linked Data), Ceramic Network?
About legality: that's (japanese) Nintendo using US media laws gone rogue to swipe repos on a US hoster (Github). Maybe don't use a US hoster next time.
And yeah, Europe isn't much better there.
It'd be interesting to see something built ontop of things like IPLD or IPFS (which uses IPLD)
Speed isn't really a important factor for something like this.
Github =/= git.
Just stop using Github already.
and also we have a generic term for GitHub like things, they are called forges, in this case (GitHub) it is a forge for git (the underlying SVC powering it) only
I am not so sure this situation would be much better on other services. Nintendo could steamroll smaller companies.
You can host it on servers outside of their jurisdiction or with laws that better protect or prevent companies abuse. Anyone can host git is the point, you dont have to use GitHub.
Have you seen what happens to ANY website hosting pirated Nintendo content? How many of them are still online?
Git is meant to be decentralised
And it is.
Github isn't.
Yeah, but it needs a address to point to, to work with others repositories. Which with http is centralized. Wouldn't be with a distributed protocol.
I don’t think you know how git works
I do know that it keeps a local copy of the repo. But it's not designed to work with a pool, so it needs a specific address to work together/clone/share repos.
I'm by no means an expert in git, did i overlook something?
Technically you can add as many remotes to a repo as you want and push/pull to any/all of them. Might be annoying though
Its quite common in some industries. Lots of different git remote references no github. It works well when you dont care or dont want piulic repos out in the wild.
I used to do a ton of contract work that way. It went away forva bit but about 3 years ago its coming back. Ive heard complaits about ai and that github is much less stable.
You cant have downtime in some industries.
I have not tried/used it (yet?), but the kids are building Radicle for this very purpose. It gets a fair amount of techie coverage (blogs, comments, etc.) but sits in unique space compared to, say, Forgejo (classic self-hosted git).
Looks interesting, thanks!
But i thought more, like; since IPFS doesn't delete data, writes changes separately. If we had that with protocolizing (which IPLD seems to do), we would have something like a decentral git.
There are already alternatives to GitHub and I think Forgejo is still working on federation. The most active Yuzu fork (as far as I'm aware) is Eden and that has its own Forgejo instance.
There's also a p2p "plugin" to git, but things like that always feel like a workaround to me. The random hacker in India also doesn't know about it.
I don't really see what that solves tbh. Not having a central source of truth seems like it could cause issues and git is already pretty much decentralized because everyone who's working on a repo will have a copy on their own device and cam upload that to whatever forge they want. Aside from that, you lose all the features a git forge gives you, especially the ability for people to actually find the repo.
Vs. a random git URL or a centralized repo everyone knows?
Everything you can find on the internet is a "random URL" in that sense but that URL can be searched on search engines and shared. But I don't know how that p2p git thing works, so maybe I'm assuming it's more complicated than it actually is.