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If the question is really about "can", than the answer is definitely yes.
If it's about if you should, than it's a clear no. Because storing data in a GitHub Project is not the use case. Nothing in the protocols or the platform itself is optimized for that. Also GitHub could just pull the plug of your project if they ever feel that it is against their terms.
that "can" is all i need to know/confirm. im not using git in a conventional way at all.
it'll be unfortunate if github pulls the plug on my app. a key detail about git is that its decentralised. users can use different providers like gitlab (many have a free offering). git itself can have multiple remotes for redundency.
Pretty easy for the few platforms offering this to ban you and any accounts hosting your project, even if you make a new one.
In any case it wouldn't be on my account. It would be great for users to self-host. Things like GitHub would only make it easier to get started to test things out.
Why would they ban my account? That would be unsettling. I'm a developer. The code itself is fairly basic git stuff.
My project is hardly popular, but if it gets there, I'm sure it would impact githubs performance. Would the concern be that my app ddos GitHub? I can explicitly prevent remotes like GitHub if necessary.
Maybe you should warn your users that there is a risk of getting banned so they don't use their actual account for that.
thanks. i'll aim to do that. i'll see if i can figure out who to reach out to from github and etc to ask.
Using it in this manner is explicitly against their tos. You are not the first person trying to abuse the service.
GitHub has a maximum of something like 10GB of storage available. That being said, I think your described requirements don't actually match git. If you're just publishing messages publicly (even if encrypted) then you can do the same thing with a simple http server.
I think it's a really poorly thought out idea.
in my project there is a focus on client-side storage. i hope it doesnt ever get to 10GB. as messages are published/read, the git DB is cleared as appropriate. i dont need the git history so i'll do what is needed to reduce the data consumed. i dont expect it to get to that 10GB capacity, that isnt its purpose and thats a bridge i dont exprect to cross any time soon.
your absolute right about there being alternative ways to do this. i specifically want some thing a user can manage. my app right now doesnt have offline-capabilities and this is an approach to introducing that capability. using a http server would be centralizing an otherwise decentralised architecture.
i have given it some thought and i think this is the only way it makes sense for me to introduce offline messaging without centralizing.
the project is pretty complicated and its difficult to describe how it would work without an exampler so id like to share the initial idea here before i try things out to demo.
Git is designed as a permanent, historical record of text documents. You don't "clear" it out by deleting stuff, committing, and pushing. That stuff still exists, even if you change commit history it's going to stick around in the reflog for a long time.
Honestly Git sounds terrible for this. And how is it decentralised if you are using GitHub?
i understand how it must sound but ive thought about it for a while, and it seems ideal for my particular architecture.
github isnt decentralized, but git can have multiple remotes for redundency. you could use multiple providers including selfhosted options.
You have noticed that GitHub has had a lot of downtime recently, right? You'd probably prefer something more stable.
Ideally I can advise people to self-host. I'm hoping to make something generic so it it can work with any git backend lit gitlab, codeberg, etc.
If you’re mostly looking to build a front end you can use the chatmail core library to handle all message delivery and profile creation. That way you instantly tap into the hundreds (if not thousands) of chatmail relays people are already running and as a bonus you can be compatible with other chatmail messengers like Delta Chat, Arcane Chat, etc.
Thanks! I haven't come across chatmail before. I'll take a look there and see how it works.
With git, I like that there are many providers with a free-tier. It'll make it easier to get started. Although it seems this way of using git could be against ToS.
Git changes are accumulative so not great for messengers because the server should only temporarily store the message until the other client has fetched it.
There is a Repo size limit on GitHub and Codeberg, sorry to say. It's definitely only in the MB. If you go over the size limit then there is a grace period followed by a deletion.
That would be acceptable. I can limit it to only text messages.
The aim would be for it to be able to use a generic git backend. Perhaps the advice I give should be to self-host a git server.