Gitlab is not immune to DMCA notices either since it's a US company. The RIAA probably won't try to take it down unless the youtube-dl development is actually relocated there or they become aware of it somehow. You'd have to host it in a country where DMCA can safely be ignored (anonymously of course), e.g. the Netherlands or Russia, if you want it to stay up reliably.

I made a read-only backup on IPFS in the likely case it gets DMCA'd.

git clone https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmVJ6BtoavbWRJwWH8JmTd5Bf6i3zEzsecnBKTM...

While this situation is a reason to look more closely at GitLab due to the ability to host your own instance, why not also look at a solution like Fossile: DVCS, wiki, and issue tracker all in a cross-platform, single executable file?

https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

Anyone else here think Downloading an executable as root from a URL that follows redirects is a bad idea? Seems like they could break the (Unix) install down into a few more steps that take some caution

I've cloned this to my laptop. I suggest that everyone does the same.

Curious in general how often Youtube breaks things on their end, i.e. how long roughly this specific version of youtube-dl is expected to keep working without any active development?

I with there was an issue tracking thing that you could clone as easily as a git repo. My first thought was email as an ongoing distributed solution, but as far as I know you can't just download an archive of issue tickets, bug reports etc into a maildir without a fair amount of faff?

And there is GitCenter, which us git (with issue tracking) over Zeronet (a p2p network)

Any centralized code versioning system can easily be DMCA'd so does it change anything?

How do you verify this isn't malicious? Who is running this repo?