This page you're reading is not hosted on a social network. It is the social network. The whole profile — the Top 8, the wall, the profile song, this blog post — is a public git repo, rendered to a static site by GitHub Actions and served free on GitHub Pages. I'm calling it GitingSocial: a place for repos.

How it works

• Your profile is a repo. profile.json holds your name, bio, mood, away message, Top 8 repos, interests, and profile song. Every box on the page has a little ✎ pencil that opens the editor for the file behind it.
• Posting is a commit. This post is a markdown file in posts/. The commit that added it cut a GitHub Release — and every repo gets a free Atom feed of its releases, so that's the follow mechanism. No algorithm, no ranking: whoever you follow, you see, newest first.
• Friends are files. Following someone means adding a one-line JSON file to your friends/ folder. A friend request is a pull request that adds your file to their folder. Merge to accept. My Friends page assembles a feed in your browser from each friend's feed.json — static files reading static files, no server anywhere.
• The wall is a markdown file. Sign it by PR. Moderation is code review.
• There's also a webring, 88×31 buttons, bulletins, and a marquee bio, because it's 2005 and I make the rules now.

Delete your repo and your data is gone from the network — because your repo was your account. If GitHub vanished tomorrow, every member still has their entire profile, posts, and social graph in a folder on their machine.

Make yours (~2 minutes)

1. Go to mcowser-p/GitingSocial-Template and hit Use this template → Create a new repository. Name it <your-username>.github.io (public) to get the root URL, or anything else for <you>.github.io/<repo>/.
2. Settings → Pages → Source: Deploy from a branch → main, folder /docs.
3. Actions → publish → Run workflow to force the first build.
4. Open your new site and start clicking pencils: put your name in profile.json, rank your Top 8, set a profile song (a YouTube link embeds the player).

Then sign my wall, or send me a friend request — there are buttons on the left. Both are pull requests, which means the entire social site runs on the same machinery as code review, which is the funniest possible way to run a social network.

New template features ship as PRs to you too: Actions → sync-template pulls the latest machinery without touching your content. And if you use Claude Code or another agent, the repo ships skills that teach it to post, follow, and handle friend requests for you.

Welcome to GitingSocial. A place for repos.