Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub

http://radicle.xyz#/beta

by dweberz • 6 years ago

864 255 6 years ago

radicle.xyz

dijit• 6 years ago

Not to be confused with Radicale; an Open-Source CalDAV and CardDAV Server

https://radicale.org/3.0.html

cloudhead19• 6 years ago

The shameless plug we all needed

kiwidrew• 6 years ago

I read the title of this link and thought "Hmm, Radicale... not quite sure how a CalDAV server can be a Github alternative".

enedil• 6 years ago

Shameless plugs are when you talk about your product specifically, while this just mentioned some product of this name.

anonymousDan• 6 years ago

Looks cool. Has anyone actually used it?

viraptor9• 6 years ago

Just kicking the tires. The beta was released just a couple of days ago. The very basic features seem to work just fine, and the rest is an obvious WIP.

The team behind it seems super responsive and engaged.

varbhat4• 6 years ago

I don't understand how using Radicle will free my code as they say in the site.

So,how is using Radicle better than:

1. main repo on https://github.com

2. mirror repo on https://repo.or.cz

3. mirror repo on https://codeberg.org

4. local backup on my device and hard-disk.

peer-to-peer is beautiful concept but note that git is already distributed VCS. you can have many remotes and mirrors. Just that p2p is not necessary here in git and using Radicle doesn't free my Code.

half-kh-hacker• 6 years ago

If your main repo lives on GitHub, your (primary) issue tracking is tied to GitHub.

varbhat4• 6 years ago

Actually, it's not fault of git. Workflow of git takes place through email and patches.

But,github wanted to make this process easier for the people,hence they included issues,fork and PR model. It was easily done with intuitive interface without necessity of email for workflow, but if you have asked me, i would have issues,wiki,etc. integrated within repo just like Fossil VCS.

p2p is cool but not solution to this . gitea/gitlab/etc. already provide importing of issues with repos and if not,they must provide that feature.

GuB-42• 6 years ago

GitHub is more than just a git host.

It has an issue tracker, pull request manager, manages releases and users,... All this cannot be replicated with a simple "git clone".

What Radicle seems to do is to offer some sort of social network on top of git. The novelty here is not the decentralized nature of git, in fact it is what radicle relies on to make its social network decentralized.

LockAndLol2• 6 years ago

So you need 3 accounts on 3 different services to achieve what radicle does.

OK, let's say you use your Github account for all of them instead, now you have centralized your accounts and if you're another youtube-dl, Popcorn-Time or just happen to be unlucky enough have the nationality of a country that the USA likes to hate against, that account is gone.

As for updating all those mirrors, how do you do that? `git push --all` ? `git push --mirror` ? Is git configured to so automatically? Or are you going to configure push hooks on one of those services?

What about your issue/ticket and PR/MR management? Where will that be? Are you going to use an in-git solution like https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug, somehow sync everything using custom scripts or wait for https://forgefed.peers.community/ to be finalized and implemented by all code hosts?

How are you going to collaborate with others?

How are you going to introduce newcomers to all these options?

Do you know of a tool that solves most (or all) of those issues?

cloudhead19• 6 years ago

So when GitHub is down, how do users know to pull from your mirrors? How about push?

scoopertrooper• 6 years ago

Notes in the readme? How long are you expecting one of the biggest websites in the world to be down?

meibo• 6 years ago

Why do I have to give them my email to even download the client? Is this a product or not?

Sure sounds nice though, hope it turns out. Hope they are considering a web frontend for the network as well.

dweberz2• 6 years ago

you don't need to give your email to download the client no.

rudolfs• 6 years ago

https://radicle.xyz/downloads.html

adsweedler• 6 years ago

"Work securely offline"

Is... is that a problem with GitHub that stops you from doing that?

YetAnotherNick• 6 years ago

You need internet for pull and push. I think(hoping) that they meant within a LAN it could work without internet.

rsa25519• 6 years ago

(I'm not shooting the messenger here) If so, that would mean pushing/pulling within the LAN only... which Git supports already

cloudhead19• 6 years ago

No, the full feature-set is available offline. You can browse your repos and any other repo you replicated, and push/pull. What offline means is simply that your changes won't immediately be replicated to peers. But the full app experience (Read and write) works offline.

dutchmartin• 6 years ago

Well, reading issues is something you cannot when you are offline from github. Unless you downloaded them beforehand of course.

cloudhead19• 6 years ago

The design of GitHub means that your canonical upstream is only accessible through the internet, and so are your issues, PRs etc. If you're offline, you can't access it, and if GitHub is down, same story.

Radicle, on the other hand, keeps all of this replicated locally, so push/pull works offline, and the code/social artifacts are replicated asynchronously, when you are online, but you don't need to be online to work with your project(s).

alkonaut2• 6 years ago

How does push/pull work off line? That sounds impossible. Just scheduling a push doesn’t actually push anything. That’s like commuting to my local GitHub repo and having a scheduled push/pull every 10 minutes then?

arp2423• 6 years ago

GitHub has a pretty extensive API; it's not hard to write a simple script to clone all that data if you want to, or publish it somewhere else. I'd be surprised if there aren't already a dozen of those scripts floating around already.

fireattack3• 6 years ago

This doesn't look like "alternative to GitHub" to me; you don't need to download any client to use GitHub and having a nice web interface is one of the most defining feature of GitHub.

thruflo22• 6 years ago

GitHub is a “social coding” platform that provides collaboration features (access control, issues, etc) on top of Git.

This is a social coding tool that provides collaboration features on top of Git.

It provides a desktop app because it’s peer to peer. That’s an advantage over a web UI for developers looking to avoid a dependency on a centralised third party.

You are free to continue to play in walled gardens but this is very much an alternative to that.

fireattack3• 6 years ago

Well the disadvantage is it doesn't even have a Windows client.

nnn1234• 6 years ago

like other folks who have said this before, the question is who is this for and what is it that github doesnt provide but radicle does?

I can have git installed on my device, work locally and instead of pointing to github, have a scuttlebutt like updates for PRs

Question is who wants this? and what does this do to open source code?

geranim0• 6 years ago

youtube-dl?

a-dub• 6 years ago

i think this is technically interesting, but i'm curious in practice what it gives project maintainers over hosting their own gitlab instance or similar...

cloudhead19• 6 years ago

Good question. I know of a few projects hosting their own GitLab instance, the problem is that this requires me to create a new account/identity for each of these instances. This is a far cry from what GitHub brought, which was a single "place" and social network where you could browse and contribute to all projects with the same account.

Radicle attempts to take back control (just like running your own instance), but without giving up network effects.

alkonaut2• 6 years ago

I guess for projects that run a risk of being shut down by RIAA or a government, this removes that single point of failure rather than moving it?

I can’t see the point for projects that don’t run this risk though.

viraptor9• 6 years ago

I've got a number of tiny projects. Realistically if they're not hosted on GitHub, they won't get contributions. "Setup another login on my gitlab instance" would close to ensure nobody collaborates on it. This allows me to both disconnect them from a centralised service and remove the "you need a separate identity" step.

pferde• 6 years ago

Oh come on. It's not like making an account is overly difficult or demanding. You are not required to send two forms of ID or a blood sample by mail.

Anyone who really wants to contribute to the project (and scratch their itch) will not have a problem with entering a username, password, and perhaps use a validation link from an e-mail. It might discourage people with just fleeting interest.

And as a hypothetical FOSS project maintainer, I know I'd rather have one of the first kind of contributor than ten of the second kind. Especially if the alternative is to be beholden to the likes of Microsoft.

Of course, the best solution would be something like ForgeFed, but I can't see that meaningfully taking off (there's no way Github will ever adopt it). I'd love to be wrong, though.

isaacimagine• 6 years ago

Tried out radicle a while back with a recent project - it's really cool!

casi• 6 years ago

This looks fun, will give it a go. The inbuilt funding sounds interesting, is that like bounties on issues? Or more like Patreon sponsorships?

cloudhead19• 6 years ago

More like the latter. The first funding feature we are launching will allow you to set a monthly budget and have it split amongst a set of users/maintainers of your choosing.

LockAndLol2• 6 years ago

Is there a CLI? I can't download yet another Electron app and waste 90MB on another Chromium instance.

cloudhead19• 6 years ago

I feel you. A CLI is on our roadmap, as well as moving to a lighter-weight app container[0]

[0] https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri

ilaksh2• 6 years ago

I wonder if they started on an Ethereum 2.0 L2 implementation. Maybe it can actually be almost the same thing?

cloudhead19• 6 years ago

Almost the same thing as what?

ilaksh2• 6 years ago

As L1

nikitaga• 6 years ago

What a nice funky design. That front page has a soul, unlike almost everything else I see nowadays.

viraptor9• 6 years ago

There's a post about the design here: https://radicle.community/t/the-journey-to-radicles-new-bran...

throwaway_pdp094• 6 years ago

The main site page is just awful. It's amateurish, image/animation heavy to no value, almost negligable information. They may have something good but the site's just obscuring it.

nulbyte• 6 years ago

I like the sketch of the first design presented there. It seems to fit with the product. Unfortunately, the cult-route they went with produced a busy page with lots of animation that distracts the reader. Also, overlapping headings with animations and changing colors immensely reduces readability.

If it weren't overly animated and the headings were legible, this design might actually be pleasantly nostalgic. But in its present state, it makes me wish for old radicle, when it was built on ipfs and had no GUI. The overt use of animation is exactly how I tend to think of unnecesary GUIs.

2bitencryption• 6 years ago

this is just me, but I'm honestly way more interested in this design post than I am about the product itself.

love the design - it's honestly something I've never seen before (at least, not in the context of software). I love how it rejects the tired old aesthetic of the "software tool front page" and goes in a totally different direction while still getting the point across.

yunohn• 6 years ago

Especially for a FOSS project! Usually they tend to go with a default theme with the most drab design. As an engineer, I sympathize with the effort needed to make it look good though.

theelous3• 6 years ago

Reminds me of the better aspects of brutalist web design: https://brutalistwebsites.com/ mixed with some actual formatting.

studius2• 6 years ago

the site design is cool. hosting it on GitHub is ironic, though. could it instead just be hosted via radicle? (mirrored to GitLab, GitHub, BitBucket, SourceForge, Savannah, ...)

thiht• 6 years ago

I came here to say just the opposite. The first thing I did when seeing the frontpage was to leave. It just felt overcrowded, unreadable and aggressive to me.

It's fun to see how different our opinions can be about this kind of things, I really didn't expect it in this case but here we go :)

enriquto• 6 years ago

way offtopic, but can you point to a couple examples of websites that "have a soul" according to your personal criterion?

ljm• 6 years ago

I didn't like it at first, but it's grown on me since. It makes a bold statement and feels unique.

derbOac• 6 years ago

I think page design standards need drastic changes, but to be honest I thought this page was broken the first couple of times I visited. I'm still not convinced there isn't some broken elements involved in its appearance.

That being said, I'm all for distributed systems so I hope for the best with this (without meaning to imply anything about it one way or another relative to other similar things that have been developed).

madoublet• 6 years ago

Very cool design. Matches well with the name. In my mind, Radicle invokes the design of the 90s (skids, grunge, hip-hop). This isn't quite that but it still works.

d0100• 6 years ago

Nice design, but I couldn't understand anything. I have a 21' screen and it way to wide. Our peripheral vision was made for motion, if you want human attention, put it in the center!

I can only digest the content properly if I stand a couple of meters away

theferalrobot• 6 years ago

Totally agree, design today takes itself way too seriously to the point that it all looks like it came from the same corporate hell hole. This is a breath of fresh air.

fungos3• 6 years ago

At first I thought it was broken as I opened in mobile and it was very confusing. Otherwise, on desktop it looks funky, but fine - not awesome but not bad.

bigbubba• 6 years ago

I like the GITS gif, but the page in general feels like a fever dream to me.

messo• 6 years ago

I agree, it stirs up feelings of the web that was, but in a modern and functional way. (mobile view)

kzrdude• 6 years ago

Feels like a new decade. If we remove some of the UI screenshots, which look like they are stuck in current design styles.

futhey• 6 years ago

This might be the coolest website I visit all month, if it ever finishes loading.

rarestoma• 6 years ago

cool! I really love the design!

MartijnBraam• 6 years ago

This seems so unnecessary, replace the blockchain stuff with email and you have git as it was originally intended. no custom software needed.

dweberz2• 6 years ago

I believe you didn't even read the text. Ethereum is used to send money to maintainers. not sure how email does that...

CryptoPunk• 6 years ago

To add to that: there are several major stablecoins on Ethereum: USDT, which is backed by BitFinex and has $12 billion in circulation, USDC from Coinbase/Circle with $3 billion in circulation, GUSD, from Gemini, BUSD from Binance with $700M in circulation, and DAI, which is decentralized and has $1 billion in circulation.

These are all ERC20 tokens so easy to integrate into Radicle, and offer a way to allow developers to get paid peer-to-peer while completely avoiding the price volatility of typical cryptocurrencies.

arp2423• 6 years ago

There are so many issues with email that I'm not even sure where to start, and they've been repeated many times in previous HN threads anyway. Suffice to say that clearly it doesn't work for a lot of people, because otherwise we'd all be using it.

t0astbread3• 6 years ago

How can email alone replace GitHub? Email with something like GitHub (like sourcehut) maybe but "no custom software" definitely not.

mch82• 6 years ago

git-send-email

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-send-email

Git was designed for patches (diffs) to be sent in email. That’s how many people used it before GitHub.

tyrion• 6 years ago

This seems really cool!

I am wondering if it can host private repository as well, or is it just meant to host public repositories?

xla10• 6 years ago

For now the focus is on public collaboration on public projects. Features for private/encrypted repos are definitely on the roadmap.

dessant2• 6 years ago

Awesome project, though the perpetuation of open source software needing to be free is regrettable.

Software as it should be.
Free forever

Mostly all popular projects need some form of funding, and setting the expectaction of a free lunch forever for new users is not healthy. Btw, do you remember who used the tagline "It's free and always will be"? It was Facebook.

xla10• 6 years ago

Important to note that "Free" here doesn't refer to "for free". You rpoint about funding of popular projects was at the heart of radicle from the beginning. We believe that FOSS as backbone of the digital infrastructure needs to be sustainable, which includes the resources/funds to maintain it and keep it free and open. If you wanna find out more about the philosophy we follow, here is the original research and premise: http://oscoin.io/

merelydev• 6 years ago

I think it is Free as in Freedom.

saberd• 6 years ago

So free as in open source, why is this called free and not open then?

dessant2• 6 years ago

That's possible, but they also mention "Completely open source" in the same list, and that would make "Free as in Freedom" redundant.

Taek7• 6 years ago

I've been back and forth with members of the open source community a few times on this, and it seems like a battle that isn't going to be won. Software that has a price tag attached to it is unlikely to be accepted as open source, from what I can tell.

Which makes me wonder: should we come up with a new name/classification for software that is 'free as in freedom' but not 'free as in beer'?

samatman• 6 years ago

The unfortunate conflation of libre and gratis in the English language is... not a new observation on your part.

krageon• 6 years ago

the perpetuation of open source software needing to be free is regrettable.

You think it would be better if we gated access to a valuable technology behind something that excludes people without money to spend?

sdan• 6 years ago

It's weird to think P2P is becoming all the craze for "privacy" while it's the backbone of the internet: it is p2p. It's just nowadays its more of P2(big cloud servers)2p; which could be a good thing depending on who you ask and your usecases.

sktrdie• 6 years ago

I always thought maintaining servers was silly since BitTorrent already proved we can achieve higher bandwidth throughput using lots of clients communicating together.

But p2p is more about the network connectivity than whether the node is an Amazon server or a mobile phone. The normal Web for instance does not build on this network nodes capabilities. We need more apps that build these kind of collaborative and self-sustainable networks

skohan• 6 years ago

I mean it works in the use-case where you have a single file version everyone is hosting, but it gets a lot more complicated when you’re talking about dynamic content doesn’t it? For instance how would you synchronize all the content on a hacker news thread between all the clients?

ryanar• 6 years ago

I spent a lot of time watching the GIFs on repeat rather than reading the text on the web page. It is quirky, I like the style, but it is a distraction from the message.

dsign• 6 years ago

We kind of need this yesterday... what's the point of having a decentralized git if the issues are centralized at Github? (which, not to make too fine a point of it, is owned by Microsoft). Even if you host your own Gitlab, there is always that day when the hard drive of the server fails and the ops have to spend a weekend restoring backups while changing hosting company because who crashes the hard-drive of an expensive VPS anyway...

I hope Radicle gets a lot of funding and tons of adoption.

fn1• 6 years ago

Can't you just serialize all issues into the repository and then write scripts/hooks to sync them in/out of textfiles in the repo?

dm3• 6 years ago

I know of an attempt to implement an approach to track issues and code in a decentralized manner with SIT[0]. Unfortunatlely the project seems to be dead.

[0] https://github.com/sit-fyi

m4rtink• 6 years ago

Pagure does something like that: https://pagure.io/pagure

All the issues, wiki, PR review are stored in Git as well. You still need a Pagure instance (that you can self host if you want) to provide the web ui, but you can easily just clone the repo and put it to a different instance, keeping all your metadata.

masklinn• 6 years ago

This was attempted multiple times in the past. None succeeded, in large parts because at a fundamental level issues are a synchronisation point, making issues part of the repository adds overhead and complexity but doesn't really give you anything, and furthermore it increases complexity for reporters.

hamaluik• 6 years ago

I’ve used git-bug[1] successfully in the past for something similar but more ergonomic.

1: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

Frost1x• 6 years ago

I always find it comically ironic how the industry basically centralized a version management system (git) that was inherently designed to be decentralized. "Git is so great! Let's add these higher level project management features but let's do it in a centralized model!"

neurobashing• 6 years ago

the industry aggressively seeks centralization. One browser always ends up taking huge amounts of market share. A small number of sites end up being hubs for large amounts of activity. We then spend forever trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube - federated social networks and chat, stuff like this.

ehejsbbejsk• 6 years ago

Physical infrastructure itself needs to be federal. I believe that’s the most economical solution. But it could be virtually decentralized.

dangoor• 6 years ago

I think the centralization comes from convenience. Building a good, decentralized UX is a lot harder than making a centralized one (evidence: almost every attempt at P2P networks.)

mistercow• 6 years ago

I don't think that's any more ironic than it is to point out that LLVM is backend agnostic, yet we always end up hooking it up to backends that lock the end result to a specific architecture. It's not ironic; it's the advantage of the design.

In git's case, its decentralized nature ends up being an advantage because it decouples centralization from the VCS itself, which has allowed the centralized aspects of code and project management to evolve independently and be tuned to specific use cases.

bob10293• 6 years ago

We use Github and we are not that interested in the decentralized aspects of git itself.

The low-friction UX and integration of issues/PRs/code makes it lightyears easier to ramp new developers than if I had to sit down and also explain Jira & Jenkins to them. The fact that git is centralized or decentralized crosses our minds precisely zero times per week.

In the absolute worst case where Microsoft somehow loses everyones' issue/PR/project data (assuming non-enterprise cloud hosted account), we could still rebuild with whoever has the latest master copy on their local. Presumably, one of our developers must have made the latest commit so this should work out always. We have a process where we include the issue numbers in our commits, so it would be possible to reconstruct a large portion of these with inference across commit history. Personally, I trust Microsoft to safeguard our business data more than I trust our 7 person team w/ a $2000/m AWS budget.

Ultimately, I think the objective of making all things around your source control technology look & talk like your source control technology is a huge mistake. Issues and code are completely orthogonal things that intersect in very narrow ways. These intersections are hugely valuable, but we are not interested in aligning the planes of functionality.

p5a0u9l2• 6 years ago

this is naïve. the problems being addressed do exist, independent of whether this particular solution will work. that’s great that the status quo is working for you, but it’s silly to then assert that progress cannot be made.

indymike2• 6 years ago

Disclaimer: I love Github. From a commercial development standpoint (ie. my day job), it's fantastic.

BUT: What a lot of developers, myself included, feel like is the source control in git is great. The project management tools (issues, actions, etc...) require centralization of certain processes, that for some projects (open and closed source), don't fit well. Sometimes the 'how it works' is a bad fit. Other times, it's where it has to be to work. For example, running CI on a container on Azure from actions. Yes you can move where it runs. But for some projects, localhost is where that should happen. I'm really happy to see people working on this, because it will be just as transformative as git and Github has been.

jakry• 6 years ago

Is this based on Matrix?

cloudhead19• 6 years ago

It isn’t, no. It’s based on a protocol we’ve developed called Radicle Link, which provides a gossip layer on top of git.

Aeolun3• 6 years ago

How and why is literally everything peer to peer in the tech community also somehow connected to ethereum?

cloudhead19• 6 years ago

Because you want a way to move money around eventually. Eg. How do you do GitHub sponsors p2p?

Aeolun3• 6 years ago

Is there anything wrong with using actual money to do this?

hobofan• 6 years ago

Because the cryptocurrency hype funds/funded most of those projects and/or the prospect of adding a cryptocurrency to the projects causes VCs to fund those projects.

In this particular case Radicle came out of OScoin (or is the new incarnation of it?) and was funded by BlueYard.

amself• 6 years ago

Right. I was surprised to see they chose to implement social coding after integrating with Ethereum, but it makes sense considering all the hype.

ffpip• 6 years ago

Peer to peer AI Machine learning with blockchain on AWS cloud.

simias5• 6 years ago

My first reaction when I read "peer-to-peer" in the title was "cool" followed immediately with "oh it's going to push some cryptocurrency crap, isn't it?"

But honestly after reading the page it look fine to me. Oddly enough they seem to use cryptocurrencies as... currency. They don't bullshit you by saying that you're going to store your code on the blockchain.

Besides, while I long ago became tired of the cryptocurrency crowd reinventing squared wheels every other month, the problem of rewarding open source developers is still very much an open issue, so I'm willing to give it a chance, even if I'm not holding my breath.

This seems like a cool project frankly, at least on paper, I don't think it's fair to discard it just because it bundles some optional Ethereum support.

Actually after downloading the upstream client my only complaint so far is that it's yet an other bloated Electron app, but such is life in 2020...

OJFord• 6 years ago

Also I actually think it could be used pretty effectively - not saying it does this today or would ever - but it could let you offer a bounty for 'whoever submits a PR that closes this issue; that the maintainer accepts; that is not reverted within 30 days' in a trusted but decentralised way.

b_fiive• 6 years ago

quick hand raise for the IPFS community, which is yes p2p, no blockchain. I'm working a "git for data" project atop IPFS and aren't hawking a coin.

I'll readily admit there are very few yes-p2p and no-blockchain projects out there, but we exist

JJJollyjim• 6 years ago

In fairness, filecoin is linked on the IPFS homepage (though it is less prominent than I remember)

Taek7• 6 years ago

quick reminder: the team behind IPFS raised over $200 million selling tokens.

studius2• 6 years ago

Without an external entity assisting with proof-of-stake like Kraken, etc., Bitcoin (the system) is dependent on not just peers connecting to each other to have merry time with financial transactions, but on something called proof-of-work (https://www.kraken.com/en-us/learn/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of...).

That proof-of-work in the Bitcoin system itself (without use of an external entity to handle proof-of-stake) is today largely handled by workhorses like those getting cheap electricity from thermal vents in Iceland (https://www.wired.com/story/iceland-bitcoin-mining-gallery/) verifying more and more transactions for less and less benefit. They're reliant on Moore's law and cheaper and cheaper energy, with more and more trust overhead processing by validating transactions, which doesn't necessarily scale, creating a need for proof-of-stake entities to substitute.

Etherium (the system) contains within it proof of stake, but external entities (e.g. Kraken, etc.) can still validate proof of stake, if desired. Personally, I'm unsure if Etherium's proof of stake on its own is enough, because I think blockchain can be compromised (https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/19/239592/once-hail...).

So, that's essentially why they choose Etherium (proof of stake).

Global equity and inequity revolves around those that essentially "hold" the value (proof of stake), and banks hold the money in our current financial system, largely based on USD (https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/11/popular-curre...). Large banks have the ability to basically "re-use" debt multiple times, creating debt from debt (via Fractional Reserve Banking) as well as other means (https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081415/under...). Wherever you are and whatever chaste you're in, if you can sell your potential for paying a bank back, they can create money out of debt for you. Yes, this devalues the currency, but if you do well with it, you come out on top, you give back in interest, and the overall value is greater than the inflation of the currency, and outsiders investing in those companies can be important. If investment, etc. fails or the market fails, that system fails. Otherwise, it kind of works ok.

The proof-of-stake entities will hopefully continue to generate value similar from nothing/debt to help those that can help others until this world is done and we move on.

Of course, if there were no money and we all just did work for each other, I think that could work also. While money was still made from work, there is some element of communal living / working for each other in Christianity (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskBibleScholars/comments/ah5850/di... https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/maps...).

But, 1960s hippie communes tended to get corrupted by drugs, relationship problems, abuse, etc. (https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/03/us/excesses-blamed-for-de...) And countries that adopted Communism and Socialism have tended to include leaders that really mistreated their population or performed other atrocities, or it just didn't work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Soviet_Uni... https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/asia-and-the-pacific/ch... https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/three-nati...).

I'm not an expert in these things, so let me know what I'm not understanding.

Taek7• 6 years ago

Ethereum (and blockchain tech in general) genuinely open new doors to development and make it possible to do things that were not possible before. Especially now that we're several years further along, the tooling is a lot better and the design space is significantly more thoroughly explored.

Yes, there's a lot of shady activity, a lot of scams, a lot of broken technology, and a lot of people with visions they can't deliver upon, but the same was true in the early days of the Internet and blockchain is starting to move past the 'dotcom bubble' phase and onto 'this tech is actually useful' phase.

It's not there yet, most of the tech is still nascent, but it's a lot less nascent than it was in 2017, and there are more people working on it than ever.

Aeolun3• 6 years ago

I literally still have to see the first useful piece of blockchain software. For anything other than magic wealth building anyway.

jeanlucas• 6 years ago

If it's free forever I'll give four years and check it.up again

t0astbread3• 6 years ago

It's P2P, so "free forever" isn't unrealistic.

jillesvangurp• 6 years ago

Somebody still needs to agree to hosting your data. Incentivizing peers to host your encrypted data is not a solved problem. IPFS is trying to bootstrap some cryptocurrency to fix that but they seems to be taking their sweet time with that.

So, ultimately, you always end up with somebody providing the convenience of not throwing your data away for a fee. Github and Gitlab seem to be the popular options for that. Gitlab is actually open source and you can self host it if you want and many do. But the reason they have a nice valuation is that they have lots of customers that prefer them to do it.

Given that it's MIT Licensed, you can even do that and offer it as a service probably (Amazon, there's a nice idea for you :-) ).

nrvn• 6 years ago

I would like to see a comparison with Sourcehut.

htrap6• 6 years ago

We are building https://gitopia.org

- Permanent Data Storage provided by Arweave

- Works from within git with the help of git-remote-helper `npm install -g git-remote-gitopia` so no need to learn new tooling

- Built-in incentivization to token holders who also take part in the governance of Gitopia

- Token holders share revenue made by the platform

- You can mirror your GitHub repositories now using the Github Mirror Action. Follow step by step from here -https://thetechtrap.com/posts/push-your-code-to-gitopia/

- We are now working on the governance and collaboration workflows that will enable transparency in open source development and provide the stakeholders to have a say in the direction of the project.

You can reach out to us on

https://twitter.com/gitopiaOrg

https://discord.gg/mVpQVW3vKE

htrap6• 6 years ago

Link to git-remote-gitopia source hosted on Gitopia:

https://gitopia.org/#/z_TqsbmVJOKzpuQH4YrYXv_Q0DrkwDwc0UqapR...

SamuelAdams• 6 years ago

Hey FYI your landing page gave me this error, Firefox ESR 78.5.0. Right now it's a big blank screen with no content.

{…}

code: "EACCES"

errno: 13

message: "Error: EACCES: Permission denied."

path: undefined

stack: "n@https://gitopia.org/main.js:277:55609\non/<@https://gitopia....

syscall: ""

<prototype>: Object { constructor: n(t, n, r), toString: toString(), toJSON: toJSON() , … } main.js:339:94885 c https://gitopia.org/main.js:339 configure https://gitopia.org/main.js:277 store https://gitopia.org/main.js:277 on https://gitopia.org/main.js:277

htrap6• 6 years ago

Thanks for flagging this. We'll look into it. Meanwhile you can try from a different browser.

ape4• 6 years ago

The "push" icon looks like he's pulling

lftherios4• 6 years ago

Thank you for sharing your work and great to see more attempts on the same problem. I am one of the maintainers of the Radicle project.

The main problem we encountered with similar systems that rely on blockchains / dht for storage is the problem of 'blockchain poisoning'.

This is when someone deliberately adds illegal content to an append-only source in hopes to make the sole act of replicating the project legally problematic, as correctly pointed out by Konstantin Ryabitsev of the Linux foundation with regards to a previous version of Radicle that was relying on IPFS. see https://radicle.community/t/the-radicle-social-model/317

htrap6• 6 years ago

Considering the illegal content is added by someone who has access to the repository. The right way to address that would be via community voting, which then can decide to hide it from the platform since the data is permanent on Arweave. This governance workflow will enable the community to make such content policies.

Taek7• 6 years ago

I think you could add moderation to a project like this much the same way you can add moderation to a centralized project. You don't need to be as heavy handed as "community voting", you could just have each client nominate a moderator who is able to append instructions to ignore content that the client would follow.

Under this model, every user (or project) can choose their own moderators, which means you don't have to worry about other parts of the community having different ideas for ideal moderation - each project/user can subscribe to the moderation feeds that they like, and ensure that they get a clean experience.

This type of moderation is actually an upgrade from centralized systems, because it is much easier to nominate new moderators if you don't like what the old moderators are doing.

simias5• 6 years ago

I'm not sure I see the point of building a complex platform with governance and whatnot. What I want is an easy way to publish my projects and for other people to contribute, I need something more like email (independent, self-hosted servers with a well defined protocol to communicate between them) than Facebook.

I don't care about the governance of my git remote, or getting money out of it. I care about it being reliable, fast and simple. If I'm unhappy with it I want to be easily able to switch to a different host, or create my own.

Frankly I would be perfectly fine with the current situation where you have a bunch of effectively centralized code hosting solutions (github, gitlab, bitbucket etc...) if you could trivially move your project from one to an other. For the code it's easy, git is built that way. For issues, PRs and the like it's trickier.

For me that's the problem that needs solving, I don't need an ultra complicated blockchain-powered solution where people can vote for the font of the UI with cryptotokens.

At a glance, and if I understand it correctly, Radicle seems more pragmatic in that way. Cryptocurrency is used for donation and securing entries in the global namespace in a decentralized way, the rest is just a bunch of standalone servers. Then you can decide to host your code on an existing instance or spawn your own. A bit like how Mastodon works for instance.

htrap6• 6 years ago

I feel that there is a real need for permanent Storage with respect to Open Source.

Code breaks when old packages are unpublished or repositories deleted. Push once and fetch forever solves this.

Also Centralized solutions are providing open source collaboration tools for free, storage for free, because of their revenue from enterprise customers.

What happens when they decide to shut down? or change their policies? or just comply with wrongful takedown notices?

doublerabbit• 6 years ago

Would recommend OneDev.

https://onedev.io

xipho• 6 years ago

I need something more like email (independent, self-hosted servers with a well defined protocol to communicate between them)

The problem with email servers is you need a special type of sys admin to maintain them properly, they are not for the light at heart when used anywhere beyond the most trivial case. Any server that grows to some well-used size has a myriad of problems (getting outright blacklisted, etc).

StavrosK2• 6 years ago

How about hosting your own Gitea instance? It works quite well.

vicek22• 6 years ago

You might be interested in https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug. It stores issues directly in the git repository so the whole issue tracker is as distributed as the rest of your code. I can't speak to the UX though.

whichquestion• 6 years ago

The best solution from my perspective for the community would be to have a standard that handles issues/prs and the like that could be taken from one code hosting solution to another. Just like how you can take your code with ease from one solution to the next by cloning.

It’s the same idea that we already use for our code but applied to all the other bits that are necessary for maintaining projects.

There are some pretty obvious problems with actually implementing this, however. One of which comes down to getting all the existing code hosting solutions to agree on a standard. As they could simply create ancillary standards to differentiate thenselves. Not to mention all the work involved in implementing this when most people are accepting of what we have now (until it bites them somehow).

olah_13• 6 years ago

- Permanent Data Storage provided by Arweave

This kind of thing always makes me sweat. Are deletes at all possible? What if someone accidentally pushes keys to the repo? On regular github, at least you can nuke the whole repo and start over if need be.

jasonpeacock3• 6 years ago

Those keys absolutely need to be rotated, regardless of whether you delete the commit or repo after accidentally pushing them.

At which point you may as well leave them there...

okokok___2• 6 years ago

what blockchain are you using?

okokok___2• 6 years ago

nvm found it. It's something I've never heard of called `arweave`

jwmoz• 6 years ago

That design is amazing.

rational_indian• 6 years ago

Isn't git peer-to-peer already? Why would anyone need this?

cloudhead19• 6 years ago

Have you used GitHub? It adds a bunch of functionality on top of git.

Taek7• 6 years ago

GitHub's primary value add to the world isn't that it's a web interface to git. It's also a social network, an issue tracker, a workflow management system, a code review tool, a wiki-builder, a frontend for your CI, and plenty more.

If github disappears tomorrow, all the code will be safe and decentralized already, yes, but most of the workflow of the software world would be significantly stunted for a good while, because everyone would need to migrate to something else (like GitLab) and then take the time to rebuild all of the data and flow that is on Github but isn't captured within the actual git repository.

xla10• 6 years ago

This comment is spot on, people who jump to the conversation with the argument that Git is already decentralised don't understand where the most value is captured when it comes to collaboration. It's the social artifact, issues, PRs, etc. And the cost of migrating the community of a project/organisation and their social artifacts is a massive cost, carrying the risk of splitting the community and or stifling any other progress to stay relevant.

simias5• 6 years ago

I've installed the "upstream" client but I must say that I'm a bit confused. I imported a couple of git repositories that ended up on http://seedling.radicle.xyz/, so I thought I did it right, but then if I try to add projects from that very page it keeps searching and never finds anything (they're stuck in "keep looking" mode).

Also I don't see how you can create issues. Is it not implemented yet?

It's an interesting project but it feels like very early alpha-grade to me. The client gives very little feedback on what's happening and what you can do.

xla10• 6 years ago

This is really helpful feedback. Especially the part about not getting enough feedback during operations. And yes social features like issues and PRs have not been the focus in this release, as we focused on replication. If you are looking for more help you can join the community matrix and we take it from there: https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/using-radicle/join-the-communi...

simias5• 6 years ago

Thanks for the feedback on my feedback. My recommendation would be to make a very simple tutorial (maybe even a video) walking the user through checkouting a remote project, publishing their own and start hacking while explaining the core concepts. The docs are pretty good from what I see, but when you're just starting and you don't know what you're looking for it's a bit overwhelming I thought.

erk__• 6 years ago

It seems that it is sadly only built for AppImage and MacOS neither of work on any of my current machines. Though I guess it just means that I have to figure out how to build it myself.

fastglass2• 6 years ago

it would be super interesting to know how private would work

lucb1e• 6 years ago

It's not 1989 anymore, we have proper cryptosystems now. I don't have a worked example but elsewhere in the thread someone, it sounded like a dev, mentioned it's being worked on. You can encrypt for certain public keys and then only those people can decrypt the contents.

cloudhead19• 6 years ago

Privacy by necessity will use end-to-end encryption, as artifacts will end up being propagated on the network. This isn't however so easy for long-lived artifacts (eg. what happens if your key is compromised sometime in the future), and we will need things such as forward secrecy.

fastglass2• 6 years ago

forgive the abbreviation, I was referring private repositories

18af219e• 6 years ago

Interesting idea, but 'peer-to-peer'? Is water wet?

flas9sd• 6 years ago

at the end of the LPC2019 talk "Reflections on kernel development process, quality and testing" by Dmitry Vyukov there's a slide with some Radicle examples. The following slide he links to a post by Konstantin Ryabitsev "Patches carved into developer sigchains" that shows Securescuttlebut on IPFS as an alternative to Email as decentralized system (search for git-ssb).

LeicaLatte• 6 years ago

Very cool!

gitweb• 6 years ago

Look into how the Linux Kernel and other projects do development. I think a larger issue is why do we need a platform like GitHub when SCM can be done through email?

hanklazard• 6 years ago

Would you consider linking a white paper off the homepage? (If there is one, I'm not finding it). I like the sound of this project but I really would like to understand it more fully.

lftherios4• 6 years ago

docs here https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/what-is-radicle.html

fungos3• 6 years ago

I'm impressed and I see potential on this one. I tried different ones over time but most fail at on-boarding. This was seamless and really easy. In about 2 minutes I successfully shared my project and followed known projects. This means this mvp works and it let me craving for more, I want to use this! I want issues and PR support to prove this can effectively work as a github replacement to me.

Now, the downside of this mvp is that there is no project discovery in the client itself. We need to go search for projects in a browser, in this page http://seedling.radicle.xyz/ which is a bit confusing. Considering the client itself is electron, it could at least, open this page for us somewhere. Or, we could at least have a less "noisy" seedling page focused on search and I would not even know it wasn't part of the client itself.

Overall, awesome project. I really hope it will grow and add the missing essential features. If I could vote, with priority these would be:

- project discovery integrated in the client - issues support - pr support - multiple identities

Anyway, great job!

geoah• 6 years ago

hm, that is interesting, the fact that projects are public and advertised by default was not clear to me while going through the onboarding.

xla10• 6 years ago

Thanks for flagging that, definitely something we are looking to improve in making it clear but also in how much control the user has over that.

erichdongubler• 6 years ago

For reference: https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/understanding-radicle/faq/#can...

cloudhead19• 6 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! The priorities you mention are very close to our own, and we have already started working on some of them. We will definitely be integrating discovery more closely into the app in the long run.

dotancohen• 6 years ago

Recently I started a personal project to enable storing issues in the git repository itself. Then I discovered git-bug which, though lacking a good UI, has the data formats nailed almost perfectly in my opinion.

I highly recommend considering using git-bug natively for Radicle's issue tracking system. It seems perfect for the task.

philips• 6 years ago

Oh wow. This seedling website needs to be suggested as the next step after creating your device id, etc.

noisy_boy• 6 years ago

I was very interested but unfortunately my experience was quite opposite. I launched the app image on Pop_OS but couldn't sign up no matter which user name i chose (even resorted to random strings) - finally just gave up.

xla10• 6 years ago

If you find yourself stuck, you can reach the team through one of the many channels: https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/using-radicle/join-the-communi...

Or you can file an issue on the app repo directly over here: https://github.com/radicle-dev/radicle-upstream/issues/new

NoelJacob• 6 years ago

Gooyz, Windows?

snvzz• 6 years ago

Trying to read the website drove me away.

There's a time and a place for this sort of web design. I feel strongly that presenting some software to technical minded people is not.

NickRRau• 6 years ago

Is it possible to self host this and isolate it on your own p2p network? Would be really cool to handle the decentralized part on my own computers without needing to hook into the global p2p.

Gonna keep an eye on it.

xla10• 6 years ago

That's absolutely possible. Everyone is empowered and encouraged to run their own seed nodes. Which would allow you to have an isolated network. Check the docs to find out how to run your own: https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/using-radicle/running-a-seed-n...

hadcomplained• 6 years ago

For any given P2P system which can be used to share a large amount of files, we can prove the system cannot exist with this question: Is there a way to prevent classified documents of the US stolen by China, or child pornography from being shared using the system?

If the answer is yes: I'm afraid to tell you that the system is not peer-to-peer in the sense that there is a central authority to censor what content is to be shared. Therefore projects like youtube-dl can be easily erased.

If the answer is no: Such a system with no possibility of censorship is too dangerous. What if there is literally no way to prevent information that threatens the security of the US from being shared? Fortunately as of now, no such a system exists on the planet. Maybe you now have a vague idea why such a system does not exist.

Shared404• 6 years ago

Fortunately as of now, no such a system exists on the planet.

Tor, GNUnet, I2P?

orthecreedence2• 6 years ago

The internet itself?

cutemonster2• 6 years ago

What if the biggest threat against a country can instead be the president of that country.

RootKitBeerCat• 6 years ago

Why Ethereum? Why not Bitcoin?

pokstad• 6 years ago

Looks cool, but the p2p protocol seems over engineered. The problem is not so much how to share the code, you can still use email or some other centralized federated service to communicate with peers. Hell, you can even use S3 to store your backups and EC2 to run CI. The main issue is owning the platform that hosts your code, issues, and other artifacts. A hybrid system that allows you to host code with peers while integrating with existing infrastructure services would be more robust and an easier sell.

orthecreedence2• 6 years ago

I specifically want to work on git projects, including the project management aspects, without having to deal with running my own server. The p2p protocol is not over engineered, it's exactly what's needed. Git is p2p. Why shouldn't it have p2p pm tools?

kyancey• 6 years ago

Or just use Fossil. It's already a distributed alternative to github. Every fossil install includes a built in web server with bug tracking and a wiki.

tarruda• 6 years ago

Fossil seems very interesting, especially because it uses sqlite as the storage format and is created by sqlite authors.

Do you know if it is possible to use fossil locally pushing/pulling to/from git remote repositories? Thinking of some kind of bridge like git-svn.

regularemployee• 6 years ago

I don't understand peer to peer. Is every fork on everyone's computer? Who holds the latest source of truth? How does a client know if they are up to date if everyone else around the client is behind?

Is there a good resource for learning p2p and how the protocol works around establishing who owns the most up to date data?

worldmerge• 6 years ago

This is incredible. When will a Windows client be a available?

egotripper• 6 years ago

I'd love to see just one (1) sentence on their home page that describes what Radicle is and does. I searched for the simple description by scrolling across the entire web page, from top to bottom, and did not see anything like it. There were all sorts of hints that it could be interesting, but c'mon.

themacguffinman• 6 years ago

At first glance the desktop client GUI looks really nice and easy to use, which I think is pretty important to get right.

Unfortunately it loses a lot of convenience by not having some kind of web interface, even if it's only for discovery. One way for something like this to spread is by sharing project URLs that anyone can open in a web browser.

xla10• 6 years ago

There is a webview for discovery, you can find it over here: http://seedling.radicle.xyz/

There is a lot more we want to do for discovery, in this release we focused on replication of git based projects.

stefanha• 6 years ago

This is an interesting idea. I found the "How it Works" page a little confusing and have tried to explain the core ideas in a different way here:

http://blog.vmsplice.net/2020/12/understanding-peer-to-peer-...

This doesn't cover how Radicle works but instead explains the general ideas of peer-to-peer git forges.

cloudhead19• 6 years ago

Fantastic, thanks!

xla10• 6 years ago

Fantastic post indeed. Had a read and this has been an incredibly succinct outline of how our system works. Thanks for taking the time and sharing it.

lftherios4• 6 years ago

This is awesome. Thank you for the write-up.

jy14898• 6 years ago

I haven't tried it yet, but I really like the concept and what I've seen so far.

nextaccountic• 6 years ago

How will issues and PRs work?
Social collaboration features (i.e. bug reports, patches, discussions etc...) are all on the Radicle roadmap. They will work very similarly to the experiences we have now, but will be local-first and cryptographically signed. This means issues, PRs, and discussions will be more secure, available offline, and stored on your machine as git objects — not on a central server!

Consider using an existing solution like https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue or https://github.com/neithernut/git-dit or https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

OOPMan• 6 years ago

I was interested until I saw the etherium opt-in

Keep your cryptocurrency out of my SCM

niutech• 6 years ago

Here are similar P2P git-like projects:

https://github.com/welldan97/WeGit

https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent - based on BitTorrent

https://github.com/dhappy/git-remote-ipfs - based on IPFS

https://github.com/noffle/hypergit/ - based on Dat

Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub

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