Good analysis @keks, specially from the security and social aspect.

I think a person clearly taking initiative right now to build something is @noffle, so let's follow his work and see if we can detect and discuss on early design decisions.

Part of the work is philosophical: deciding what is the meaning of names and conventions that we use, then how that affects social dynamics. I wrote a bit about this in a blog post https://staltz.com/open-source-without-maintainers.html and I plan to write another blog post about convergence versus divergence in open source and git. Roughly, convergence is merge commits, divergence is forks or branches. Convergence is agreement, divergence is extension. The GitHub social dynamics so far because it emphasizes convergence, it's "diverge a little bit so that soon you can agree", and it leads to several problems because it conflates the author role with the maintainer role (the person who initiated the project is now expected to do convergence work forever). I'm getting ahead of myself because there are lots of ideas to unwrap, but I mean that we shouldn't just copy GitHub over to git-ssb, we need to actually think how to make open source social dynamics more reasonable than GitHub.

The other part of the work is practical and looking for the right databases (SSB? Hyperdb?), looking for loopholes, solving code distribution versus solving code collaboration, looking for features that may alter the social dynamics in unexpected ways, etc.