“Decentralised Collaborative Version Control using Matrix” is the title of the dissertation I wrote for my third year studying Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. The motivation behind this project was recognising what we lost when GitHub started to dominate ever since it launched in 2008. The Linux project, for which git was originally invented, doesn’t use GitHub but instead email. As someone who learned about GitHub before learning about Git, learning this fact felt like I was studying the behaviour of a prehistoric civilisation. Except of course they still do the same today! The core idea of my disseration and the project alongside it was to try and modernise this older method using Matrix, a more modern protocol for decentralised communication.
Cleaning up the code into a usable state and open-sourcing it is on my todo list!