Radicle: Open-Source, Peer-to-Peer, GitHub Alternative

https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/seed.radicle.garden/rad:z3gqcJUoA1n9HaHKufZs5FCSGazv5

by aiw1nt3rs • 2 years ago

807 282 2 years ago

app.radicle.xyz

lionkor• 2 years ago

So it uses git, right? The readme should make that clear.

sebastinez2• 2 years ago

yeah, the underlying storage layer is git. There is more information on https://radicle.xyz/ about how it uses git

gsaslis9• 2 years ago

Yes, radicle is built on top of git and even uses git as its storage backend for its own data model. [1] has more details on how Radicle depends on git.

[1] https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/seed.radicle.xyz/rad:z3trNYnLW...

EGreg• 2 years ago

Isn’t git already open source and peer to peer?

So this is just a web interface to git? Like gitlab?

pure-orange• 2 years ago

its an open source alternative to github, not git

viraptor3• 2 years ago

and peer to peer?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39601209

est2• 2 years ago

This looks like a fine project for its purpose, but I think git is already open-source and p2p. You don't need sh<(curl) a bunch of binaries, instead simply connect to another git server, use git commadns to directly pull or merge code.

What's missing in git is code issues, wikis, discussions, github pages and most importantly, a developer profile network.

We need a way to embed project metadata into .git itself, so source code commits don't mess up with wikis and issues. Perhaps some independent refs like git notes?

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes

codetrotter• 2 years ago

What's missing in git is code issues, wikis, discussions, github pages and most importantly, a developer profile network.

Radicle adds issue tracking and pull requests. Probably some of those other features as well.

On mobile there are buttons on the bottom of the screen in the op link, click those and you get to the issue tracking tab and the pull request tabs etc

9dev4• 2 years ago

But that’s not what parent meant. Those things should be embedded in the git repository itself, in some kind of structure below the .git/ directory. That would indeed make the entire OSS ecosystem more resilient. We don’t need a myriad of incompatible git web GUIs, but a standard way of storing project management metadata alongside version control data. GitHub, Gitea, Gitlab, and this project could all store their data in there instead of proprietary databases, making it easy to migrate projects.

viraptor3• 2 years ago

You're missing the discovery part. You want to get the repository X from user Y cloned - how do you find it? Especially if you don't know Y and their computer is off?

Also radicle does want to tackle the issues / prs and other elements you mentioned as well.

BlueTemplar• 2 years ago

How do you find a website ?

And presumably the person hosting it will make sure that the computer hosting it is often on, for instance ISP routers and TV boxes are a good way to popularize it, since they often come with NAS capabilities :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebox

(Notably, it also supports torrents and creating timed links to share files via FTP.)

bawolff8• 2 years ago

and most importantly, a developer profile network

What has the world come to where that is the most important part?

I think gerrit used to store code reviews in git.

blueflow• 2 years ago

Welcome to the era of self-promoters and narcissists.

IggleSniggle2• 2 years ago

Repositories and code-sharing are inherently about trust. Even if you personally audit every line of code, you still need to trust that the owner isn't trying to slip one past you. Identity is a key component of trust.

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

While Git is designed in some way for peer-to-peer interactions, there is no deployment of it that works that way. All deployments use the client-server model because Git lacks functionality to be deployed as-is in a peer-to-peer network.

For one, it has no way of verifying that the repository you downloaded after a `git clone` is the one you asked for, which means you need to clone from a trusted source (ie. a known server). This isn't compatible with p2p in any useful way.

Radicle solves this by assigning stable identities[0] to repositories that can be verified locally, allowing repositories to be served by untrusted parties.

[0] https://docs.radicle.xyz/guides/protocol#trust-through-self-...

ianopolous2• 2 years ago

How do you handle the SHA1 breaks in an untrusted p2p setting?

mariusor5• 2 years ago

it has no way of verifying that the repository you downloaded after a `git clone` is the one you asked for

Respectfully disagree here. A repository is a(or multiple) chain(s) of commits, if each commit is signed, you know exactly that the clone you got is the one you asked for. You're right that nobody exposes a UI around this feature, but the capability is there if anyone would have any workflows that require to pull from random repositories instead of well established/known ones.

hanniabu2• 2 years ago

The problem I'd like to see solved is source of truth. It'd be nice if there were a way to sign a repo with an ENS or domain withiut knowing the hash.

Another thing is knowing if the commit history has been tampered with without knowing the hash.

The reason for needing to not know the hash is for cases like tornado cash. The site and repo was taken down. There's a bunch of people sharing a codebase with differing hashes, you have no idea which is real or altered.

This is also important for cases where the domain is hacked.

adastra22• 2 years ago

The entire Linux kernel development team wouldn’t to differ…

Fice• 2 years ago

We need a way to embed project metadata into .git itself, so source code commits don't mess up with wikis and issues.

Fossil (https://fossil-scm.org) embeds issues, wiki etc. into project repository.

IggleSniggle2• 2 years ago

Also Radicle, evidently

zamalek2• 2 years ago

Classic git does not evade censorship, such as the extremely recent news concerning Nintendo. An idea like this has been rolling around in my head, and I'm overjoyed that someone has done the hard work.

grumbel• 2 years ago

Git evades censorship just fine, since it is properly decentralized and doesn't care about where you got the repository from. Plain HTTP transport however does not and most Git repositories are referred to by HTTP URL.

If you simply host Git on IPFS you have it properly decentralized without the limits of HTTP. IPNS (DNS of IPFS), which you need to point people to the latest version of your repository, however wasn't working all that reliably last time I tried.

e12e2• 2 years ago

Fossil has a few of these.

clemiclemen• 2 years ago

I think this already exists for issues. git-bug [1] uses git internal files to store the issues. It is distributed and it even comes with a web ui in addition to the usual cli.

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

colinsane• 2 years ago

do you know of any projects using [anything like] git-bug?

i know i've encountered something like this once in a notable repo. thought it was graphics related, like mesa or something, but looks like they're using GitLab.

kamikazechaser• 2 years ago

A friend of mine wrote a similar tool. https://github.com/nolash/piknik.

colesantiago• 2 years ago

Is this the same Radicle that issued a crypto token ($RAD)?

If so, I'm glad that it completely failed and they decided to focus on the actual product of a 'P2P GitHub'.

Although stay away from their 'drips' crypto thing, looks like a tax and accounting nightmare for individuals and businesses.

toastal• 2 years ago

Can this handle patch stacks or is this just another pull/merge request model with all the flaws that entails?

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

It can handle them, though we haven't built that much tooling around them. However, unlike GitHub, updates to PRs (Patches in Radicle) are non-destructive, just like Gerrit[0], and code reviews are tied to specific revisions of patches. This is in my opinion one of the biggest flaws in GitHub's model.

[0] https://www.gerritcodereview.com/

dancek• 2 years ago

That's indeed the biggest flaw in the Github PR model. I've been hoping for a gerrit-like code review experience in a Github alternative for years. I'll be sure to try Radicle.

killerstorm• 2 years ago

I see no information about properties in README.md, and ARCHITECTURE.md is empty.

What are the capabilities?

If a node is down, would other nodes step in? Where's stuff stored? How is it replicated?

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

See https://docs.radicle.xyz/guides/protocol

viraptor3• 2 years ago

This should cover it:

https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/seed.radicle.xyz/rad:z3trNYnLW...

lftherios• 2 years ago

Hi HN. I am the co-founder of the project. If you are interested in how the protocol works under the hood, start here: https://docs.radicle.xyz/ Docs are still WIP though.

throwaway2200336• 2 years ago

How much budget was spent on Radicle, how many people did work on it, how long you've been building it and who is using it ?

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

I won't reveal anything about our finances, but the current code base is a little under 2 years old. We've worked on the general problem for over 4 years in total though. The team is around 12 people, split between protocol, cli, tui, web and content.

The product is set to launch this month, so we're just starting to onboard users, but many people in the community are already using it, and we've been using it internally for about a year.

wokwokwok2• 2 years ago

I read the documentation and this stands out to me:

Radicle repositories, which can be either public or private, can accommodate diverse content including source code, documentation, and arbitrary data sets.

If this is, basically, a peer-to-peer file sharing application, what part of the protocol handles dealing with abuse?

Otherwise, how is this different from the previous generation of file sharing applications (BitTorrent, winny, etc) where people just share arbitrary copyrighted content like movies, songs, software, etc?

I feel like a few bad actors will ruin this?

Can you partition your “personal” network somehow, so you can use it with absolute confidence your not participating in anything illegal?

zlatan_todoric6• 2 years ago

you can choose which nodes you follow and which nodes you block - you can even decide that you will seed particular repos and not the entire node.

(P.S. I am working at Radicle)

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

Good question!

One of the key ideas is that each user chooses what repositories they host via pretty fine-grained policies. This means you can easily block content you're not interested in seeding, or simply configure your node to only host content you explicitly allow.

You can also choose which public nodes to connect to if you'd rather not connect to random nodes on the network; though I don't expect most users to go this route, as you are more likely to miss content you're interested in.

Though Git (and thus Radicle) can replicate arbitrary content, it's not particularly good with large binary files (movies, albums etc.), so I expect that type of content to still be shared on BitTorrent, even if Radicle were to be popular.

computerfriend• 2 years ago

Sharing arbitrary copyrighted content did not ruin BitTorrent so I don't see why it would ruin this.

djha-skin• 2 years ago

I'm interested in this, but I noticed a base58 hash on the page. I'm not really interested in crypto. How much could I use this product without adopting crypto? Is this attached to some digital currency like ipfs or is it independent?

bordumb3• 2 years ago

It’s independent.

No need for crypto/digital currency whatsoever.

badoongi• 2 years ago

Fascinating project! I'm curious what's the business model? it's listed on Crunchbase that you raised 12M$ so I'm assuming you do have plans to make money?

rapnie2• 2 years ago

Curious as well. Searching around I found this documentation on their ecosystem [0], which may shed some light on the organization structure. It may be they are organized as a DAO? From the intro:

Radworks is a community dedicated to cultivating internet freedom.

They do not shy away from cryptocurrency technology, though AFAICS that is not directly applied to the Radicle project. Another project of Radworks is Drips [1], to help fund open source.

[0] https://docs.radworks.org/community/ecosystem

[1] https://www.drips.network/

crabbone2• 2 years ago

Hi. While not actively looking for replacement to proprietary services s.a. Github or GitLab, from time to time I'm asked about an alternative.

I'm all for a distributed self-hosting solution, so Radicle is definitely hitting the mark here, however:

Linux or Unix based operating system.

For the kind of project I have to assist with, this would be a deal-breaker. Since the code seems to be in Rust: do you intend to make it available to MS Windows? (I took it for granted that Mac OS is included in the Unix family, right?)

If not straight-up support for MS Windows, then maybe an MSYS2 port?

----

To give some background: I'm not in charge of decisions like service vendor selection, and we are talking about a quasi-government organization with substantial open-source code base that is currently hosted on Github. I.e. sometimes I might have a chance to pitch a particular idea, but it's not up to me if the idea is accepted. They are quite motivated to make their work as resilient to private vendor policies as possible as well as try to "do good" in other ways (i.e. sustainability, breadth of the outreach etc. -- a typical European gov. org :) So, Github is... obviously in conflict with such policies.

While there are other gov. agencies tasked with archiving or networking support, they seem to be woefully incompetent and / or outdated, as well as often falling for the vendor-laid traps (eg. the archiving service went all-in after DataBricks not even realizing it's a commercial closed-source product). So, I wouldn't have high hopes for the org. to be able to leverage a self-hosted solution. That's why a distributed solution looks great.

However, they wouldn't be able to use a tool that doesn't work on major popular PC systems.

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

Hey there. Yes, Windows support is something we'd like to have, but focusing on less OSes is helping us ship faster. In principle, there shouldn't be any issue in porting to Windows, but since no one on the team runs Windows it would have been hard to ensure things are working smoothly. If there is demand though, we will certainly start allocating time towards it.

Radicle does work on macOS as well.

k8svet3• 2 years ago

Does this v3 iteration mean that if I pull Radicle from nixpkgs right now that I might be a major version behind?

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

I am a nix noob, but we are now using flake[0], I don't know if that helps!

[0] https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/seed.radicle.xyz/rad:z3gqcJUoA...

andrew_• 2 years ago

My eyes! The goggles do nothing! [1] Please bring on some design and UX folks. The contrast literally strains the eyes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWFF7ecArBk

johnhenry• 2 years ago

I'm curious if you (or anyone) had a chance to use Mango (https://github.com/axic/mango) before it was abandoned?

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

I do remember Mango! I didn't actually try it out, but we had experimented with Ethereum and IPFS in the past, and it wasn't a great fit for a code collab platform due to performance and cost.

gwd• 2 years ago

Looks really interesting! Some of us are allergic to "curl | bash" though; would you consider creating a homebrew package?

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

Understandably! We are working on packages for Linux and macOS.

doctorpangloss2• 2 years ago

There are lots of potential intellectually stimulating research projects. Why code repositories instead of like, a video game? Why not harness the same manic energy into something that already existed? Like the kind of person who can be sincerely passionate about source code repositories, why can't that kind of person then be passionate about literally anything?

alchemist1e92• 2 years ago

I’m confused. What does this comment mean?

taminka• 2 years ago

i really like the website and application design, bc so many oss projects often completely falter w/ visual design, and while this is a superficial thing, beautiful design makes me want to interact w/ a project more :)

also, i'm curious, what kind of adoption were you anticipating (some time ago and now) and did the result align with it?

pabs3• 2 years ago

Are you planning on adding native support for this to git?

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

No plans to do so - firstly we’d have to rewrite it in C, and second it would be a big amount of code for the Git project to merge.

paul_h• 2 years ago

Your gossip protocol isn't the gossip protocol of Hashgraph/Hedera https://hedera.com/learning/hedera-hashgraph/what-is-gossip-..., is it?

mikepapadim• 2 years ago

How is this related to the $RAD coin?

bordumb3• 2 years ago

From a technical standpoint, Radicle (P2P git protocol) is not related to $RAD.

$RAD is the token of the organization that has been funding Radicle over the years.

saurik6• 2 years ago

If the RAD token has nothing to do with their product, why does it have value? Did/do they have some other product that uses the token?

throwaway2200336• 2 years ago

I hear about Radicle every time crypto market goes up. Is anybody seriously using it ?

This got down-voted so fast! :)

Serious question though: how much budget was spent on Radicle, how many people did work on it, and who is using it ?

k__• 2 years ago

Fair question.

I'm working in the crypto industry and I had the same impression.

Last time I heard about Radicle was the last bull market. Then it was silent in the bear, which is kinda strange, since everyone is always saying, bear markets are for building and Radicle certainly is a builder tool.

bawolff8• 2 years ago

I wish people would define precisely what they mean by "peer to peer" (or more commonly, "distributed"). Its such an ambigious term now it can mean anything when used as a buzzword.

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

I haven't seen the term misused very often - the way it is defined in Radicle and most other peeer-to-peer systems is how Wikipedia defines it[0]; specifically this part: "Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network".

So a peer to peer system is one where all participants are "equally privileged in the network". This usually means they all run the same software as well.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer

bawolff8• 2 years ago

I mean, that definition doesn't fit with supernodes ("seed" nodes in your design) but that is a nitpick.

I guess im mostly just wondering what are the properties you are trying to accomplish. Like there is talk of publicly seeding repositories that are self-certifying, but also using noise protocol for encryption, so what is the security model? Who are you trying to keep stuff secret from? It is all very confusing what the project actually aims to do.

Mostly all i'm saying is the project could use a paragraph that explains what the concrete goals of the project are. Without buzzwords.

pachico• 2 years ago

What are the most common use cases this provides a solution for?

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

In the long term, this is intended as an alternative to collaboration platforms like GitHub and GitLab for people/organizations who want full control of their data and user experience, without compromising on the social aspect of these platforms.

The first three paragraphs of the guide has a longer motivation: https://docs.radicle.xyz/guides/user

kosolam• 2 years ago

Feedback: consider adapting the docs for mobile view Feedback 2: a short tldr about the short term use cases would be great :-)

shackra2• 2 years ago

any plans for adding localization to the UI?

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

We're a small team, but if there is enough demand for it, then yes.

greatNespresso• 2 years ago

Congrats on launching ! Reminds me of another similar project, nest.pijul.com but using pijul instead of git

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

Thanks, we haven't officially launched though!

Pijul is a great project indeed :)

2color• 2 years ago

It's been fascinating watching Radicle evolve over the –what seems to be– last 5 years.

I attended the workshop at Protocol Berg 2023 and think they built something really powerful and novel.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect is that even the collaborative aspect of the protocol is local-first which means you can submit patches and issues without internet and that your team isn't on HN every time GitHub is having problems.

taxmeifyoucan• 2 years ago

Nice to meet a fellow Protocol Berg enjoyer in HN!

shackra2• 2 years ago

is there any plans to support this use case: offering repositories only to a set of nodes? I can imagine people wanting to collaborate in private but not wanting to be on Github.

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

Yes, these are what Radicle calls "private" repositories. They are invisible to the rest of the network, and only shared amongst trusted peers. Note that they are not encrypted at rest, which means they cannot be stored on intermediary nodes that are not part of the truste set.

singularity2001• 2 years ago

The best approach to building a GitHub Alternative would be to build a GitHub for Data (merge SQL changes etc) and then extend that to GitHub for Code and later to GitHub Alternative for anything.

saurik6• 2 years ago

From their documentation:

It’s important to only publish repositories you own or are a maintainer of, and to communicate with the other maintainers so that they don’t initialize redundant repository identities.

Based on my experience with people taking my code and shoving it onto GitHub--as well as separately in my demoralizing general experience of putting random little "please for the love of all that is holy don't do X as it will cause problems for other users" notices in the documentation or even as interstitial UI (!!) of my products and watching everyone immediately do exactly that thing as no one reads or thinks (or even cares)--a large number of people aren't going to honor this request in the documentation... and, frankly a large number of people aren't even going to see this in the first place as the home page tells you how to push code but you only find this "important" request in the "user guide" that people definitely do not bother to read.

It thereby seems quite concerning that, apparently?!, this system is designed in a way where doing what feels like a very reasonable thing to do--just pushing whatever open source code you are working on, based on the instructions on the home page--is going to interact with something about this protocol and how things are stored that something important enough to have this separated boxed "important" statement in the documentation is going to get cluttered and maybe even confusing over time :(.

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

I don't think there's anything "special" here. You have the same problem currently where finding the canonical location of a repository is done via some out-of-band social network or website.

On GitHub, you also can look at the stars to give you extra confidence, and on Radicle the equivalent is the seed count for a given repository.

saurik6• 2 years ago

Then why does the documentation say this is "important"? GitHub certainly does not have a notice anywhere saying "it's important to only publish repositories you own or are a maintainer of" (...well, I guess it could be buried deep in some user guide I never read, lol).

posix86• 2 years ago

Isn't the github way of doing things: You add a copyright notice to your code, identifying your repository as the source, and changing the copyright is illegal? That would be applicable to this as well.

IshKebab2• 2 years ago

putting random little "please for the love of all that is holy don't do X as it will cause problems for other users" notices in the documentation or even as interstitial UI (!!) of my products and watching everyone immediately do exactly that thing as no one reads or thinks (or even cares)--a large number of people aren't going to honor this request in the documentation

Kind of off topic, but you shouldn't get annoyed at people for ignoring your notices and not reading the docs. It's an extremely logical thing to do. Think about it - how many notices do you see in a typical day of computing? Probably dozens. How many tools to you use? Also dozens. Now imagine how long it would take if you read all of those notices, and exhaustively read the documentation for every tool. Too fucking long!

It's much better to use heuristics and not read. For example if you close a document and you've made unsaved changes to it, you know the dialog is going to be "Do you want to discard it?". There's no point reading it.

This is a good thing!!

So the conclusion is that you should design your software with the knowledge that people behave this way. It is usually possible to do so. If you give a concrete example I can probably suggest a better solution than "asking and hoping they read it".

saurik6• 2 years ago

I spoke in the past tense, and already learned this lesson back 20 years ago; you can tell that I believe software can and should be coded to avoid such issues from the position I took with my comment: that it was concerning that the software would stop working not if but when people do not read this "important" notice. Although, maybe you didn't actually bother to read the rest of my comment, and so failed to appreciate my actual point, given how you just quoted something near the beginning which was mere evidence and focused on it with what feels a bit like an axe to grind ;P.

Which, though, leads me to something I will say in response to your reframing: while I do believe that one must build systems with the understanding that people will not read any of the documentation, we should still judge people for the behavior. I am pro commingled recycling, and yet I also believe that people who don't even try to read the signs on top of a series of trash bins are shirking a duty they have to not be a jerk, the same way we should be angry at people for not knowing local laws even if we put them on giant signs on the street as they'd rather just be lazy.

anthk2• 2 years ago

There should be a way to run git over i2p.

Also, git over yggdrasil should be easy because there are just ipv6 addresses. And, in the worst case, I think 6to4 tunnels would work.

mhitza• 2 years ago

There should be a way to run git over i2p.

https://geti2p.net/en/blog/post/2020/03/06/git-over-i2p see "Third: Set up your git client tunnel"

But like most things in the I2P ecosystem, not seamless.

anthk2• 2 years ago

As long as it runs with an i2pd service in the same easy way as irc/usenet or email, I'm sold.

cassianoleal• 2 years ago

Why does this website try to connect to localhost on http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/v1/node ?

angio• 2 years ago

If you run their service locally it displays the connected account and you can interact with the app.

polski-g• 2 years ago

Fairly arrogant to assume port 8080 is unused for other things on localhost.

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

Maybe that is where you would have your local copy of Radicle running?

gsaslis9• 2 years ago

local-first [1] software ;)

That is the default port for `radicle-httpd`: an HTTP API that would allow you to authenticate (using your public/private key pair, that is stored on your machine), so that you can perform actions on the web-based interface as a specific user, through your local radicle node.

[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

Zuiii• 2 years ago

Support peering over the Tor network like what briar does. That way, all peers can fall back to tor when they're behind restrictive firewalls.

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

We've designed Radicle with Tor support in mind, via Socks5 proxy!

Luker88• 2 years ago

This looks wonderful, I'll read more on details and follow the project!

Does this suffer from the code search problem, or are there plans to somehow introduce that?

The main problem of decentralized and federated code management projects is that I still go to github (not even gitlab) when I want to see what other people do, how they use a lib or something, and I can search issues, too.

So we obviously can't have each of our small servers serve code search requests from all the world's developers.

...a sync-and-search-only project is probably a job for someone like the EFF, or non-profit orgs that already have sufficient funding... has anyone heard any talks in that regard?

megamix2• 2 years ago

What about codeberg.org?

Hendrikto• 2 years ago

What about it? It‘s an almost completely different product.

Codeberg is like GitHub.com, GitLab.com, or sr.ht: a centralized hosted solution.

megamix2• 2 years ago

Ah I see, I've not worked with any, however I do become curious about anything labeled as "Github alternative".

I know this movement since Github started with their "doubtful code scanning" that people are looking towards alternatives.

Not the least: good job!

kkoyung• 2 years ago

The software behind Codeberg is Forgejo, which is a fork of Gitea. The team of Forgejo is working on a federation protocol based on ActivityPub. Once it is done, it will be able to exchange data with other Forgejo servers and any server supporting that protocol. So, we may expect that Codeberg will transform from centralized to federated.

sr.ht chooses another approach. You only need an email to submit codes, file issue, join discussion, etc. From perspective of source hosting, it is centralized. But, from perspective of project collaboration, it is decentralized.

themusicgod12• 2 years ago

codeberg are censors. People should be migrating elsewhere. https://codeberg.org/themusicgod1/codeberg-is-corrupted-dont...

alberth• 2 years ago

Genuine question ... isn't there an inherent latency issue with Peer-to-Peer?

and as such, it makes for a poor user experience on the web.

(when you're just downloading files over P2P, this isn't an issue or noticeable - but when you're interacting with a web site, it is)

EDIT: why the downvotes? I'm just asking a question.

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

It's a good question, I don't know why you're downvoted.

Because the synchronization protocol (backed by Git) is operating in the background, web frontends are always just querying local data, so it's actually quite fast. You can try browsing the linked repository and see for yourself.

throwaway2200336• 2 years ago

Even a slightly critical comment gets downvoted instantly in this thread, I wonder why ;)

ryscheng• 2 years ago

Congrats on the launch! I’ve been following this project and I’m really excited to see how much it has matured. For projects currently on GitHub, what’s the best way to migrate? Is there a mirror mode as we test it out?

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

Thanks! There is no mirroring built-in yet, though this is something we're looking into. It should theoretically be as simple as setting up a `cron` job that pulls from github and pushes to radicle every hour, eg.

  git pull github master
  git push rad master

miohtama2• 2 years ago

Good work!

The main value capture at Github is issue tracking, PR reviews and discussion. Maybe not today, but is there an automated way to migrate these over in the future?

gsaslis9• 2 years ago

In addition, in order to migrate your GitHub issues to Radicle (which the above doesn't cover), there's this command-line tool [1] that should get you most - if not all - of the way there.

Migrating GitHub Pull Requests (PRs) to Radicle Patches is somewhat more involved, but that should still be possible (even if it involves some loss of information along the way, due to potential schema mismatches) ...

[1] https://github.com/cytechmobile/radicle-github-migrate

OSI-Auflauf• 2 years ago

p2p, signing, local first, yadda yadda

curl | bash is the recommended way to install.

themusicgod12• 2 years ago

damn you're not joking

perihelions• 2 years ago

That's a neat name! If "seeding" is the word for distribution in a peer-to-peer network, then a "radicle" (not a "radical"!) must be named after:

- "In botany, the radicle is the first part of a seedling (a growing plant embryo) to emerge from the seed during the process of germination.[1]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radicle

philsnow• 2 years ago

Going to be pretty confusing between Radicle and Radicale ( https://radicale.org/v3.html )

rapnie2• 2 years ago

Much less so than Amazon and Amazon, Meta and meta, and Threads and threads.

falcor842• 2 years ago

a "radicle" (not a "radical"!)

I'll just mention that etymologically both "radical" and "radicle" come from the Latin "radix", meaning "root".

EchoReflection• 2 years ago

dang, seems like they missed out on not going for "radix"

nine_k3• 2 years ago

Indeed. Radicle is "tiny root", a noun, while "radical" is "pertaining to root, root-level, deepest possible", an adjective.

chefandy4• 2 years ago

Their monetization strategy is pretty critical for people who’d sink their time into the service and entrust it with the code for long-running projects. So… how do they plan on making money off of this? If they can’t or won’t say, what sort of projects do they imagine they’d attract in spite of that? (e.g. ephemeral ones? Data sets about current events?)

Downvoters: do you not think their monetization strategy is important to potential users? Surely their investors didn’t throw that money at them out of the goodness of their hearts, and surely it’s apparent how that could affect their users in the long run.

beardicus• 2 years ago

this is a very VC-brained comment to make on a peer-to-peer open source project. let's instead ask if there are any single points of failure to the protocol and service, and if so, are those sustainable regarding developer time, effort, and compensation?

chefandy4• 2 years ago

this is a very VC-brained comment to make on a peer-to-peer open source project. let's instead ask if there are any single points of failure to the protocol and service, and if so, are those sustainable regarding developer time, effort, and compensation?

Crunchbase said they raised at least 12m as a “fully decentralized code repository”. I’d say presenting your open source project without saying it’s VC-backed is the only “VC-Brained” thing happening here.

couchand• 2 years ago

Incredible. They throw some indie-sounding buzzwords out and that's enough to make the business model unimpeachable?

Over the past few decades we've seen many cynical capitalists riding the wave of "peer to peer open source" for personal gain. It's absolutely within scope to discuss how a company's business model may affect their ability to deliver on the supposed mission.

Klonoar• 2 years ago

You are commenting on the hype channel of one of the biggest VC firms in the world.

(there was a time _when that comment was the default type around here_, actually)

clot27• 2 years ago

My question isnt related to radical but P2P in these sense in general, Why should I store someone else's data and why should someone else store my data? doesnt it make it easy to access?

maninak2• 2 years ago

That's a great Q.

Radicle can support a federated model, where known major seeds are connected with multiple smaller clusters. Radicle supports also completely self-sustaining and disconnected clusters of nodes networked between themselves within that cluster. And of course any other network topography in between.

There's a promising active proposal to establish a dedicated new Radworks Organization tasked with solving the incentivization and reward problem for seeds. https://community.radworks.org/t/discussion-rgp-22-start-the...

Additionally, similar to how one can "star" a repo on GitHub, one can "seed" a repo on Radicle. "Starring" a repo is often a toast of support, akin to an emoji reaction, with little more effect other than that, but in Radicle "seeding" a project, goes beyond incrementing a vanity metric: it actively supports propagating that project across the Radicle network. The count of seedings per repo can also be used as a differentiator between original and "copy-cat" ones.

_flux4• 2 years ago

I wonder how discoverable (for normal people) these repositories are. It looks like https://app.radicle.xyz/robots.txt doesn't exist, so it seems like fair game for search engines, and indeed a search on Google and DDG for

    site:app.radicle.xyz

does give some results. Maybe not that high up yet if not using that site filter, perhaps the ranking will improve?

Tools for integrating CI support with this would also be nice to see. Ultimately a loop with

    while true; do wait_repo_update; git pull && ./run_ci.sh; done

but something nicer that you could only limit to pushes by trusted identities.

And then finally artifact storage. But maybe Radicle doesn't need to solve everything, in particular as a distributed network for sharing large binaries is going to get some undesirable uses pretty fast..

zlatan_todoric6• 2 years ago

We are actually working on a number of CI integrations and building our own native one, for our needs.

mdaniel2• 2 years ago

building our own native one, for our needs.

I realize I'm just some rando on the Internet, but I'm begging you please don't introduce Yet Another CI Job Specification ™

I'm sure you have your favorites, or maybe you hate them all equally and can just have a dartboard but (leaving aside the obvious xkcd joke) unless you're going to then publish a JSON Schema and/or VSCode and/or IJ plugin to edit whatever mysterious new thing you devise, it's going to be yet another thing where learning it only helps the learner with the Radicle ecosystem, and cannot leverage the existing knowledge

It doesn't even have to be yaml or json; there are quite a few projects which take the old(?) Jenkinsfile approach of having an actual programming language, some of them are even statically typed

I also do recognize the risk to your project of trying to fold in "someone else's" specification, but surely your innovation tokens are better spent on marketing and scm innovations, and not "how hard can it be" to cook a fresh CI job spec

I likely would have already written a much shorter comment to this effect, but having spent the past day slamming my face against the tire fire of AWS CodeBuild, the pain is very fresh from having to endure them thinking they're some awesome jokers who are going to revolutionize the CI space

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

It's a good point - I think "gateways" such as `app.radicle.xyz` will have to allow crawlers to index the full set of repositories on the network.

andrewfromx• 2 years ago

and I thought I was cool for knowing about https://codeberg.org/

circusfly• 2 years ago

1. Lower left, device isn't connected? What device?

2. Domain ends with the nonsensical .xyz, my email server would block all email traffic from them.

3. The default dark theme isn't readable by about 40% of the human population. It can be changed to a light theme, that's nice, but the light theme is some sort of puke light purple.

4. "Run the following command and follow the instructions to install Radicle and get started." I have to use your custom tool called "rad"?

No thanks. Even though GitHub is owned by Microsoft, I'd rather use it.

jprd• 2 years ago

Off-topic: This reminded me of NESticle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NESticle

PH95VuimJjqBqy• 2 years ago

well that's a name I didn't expect to see coming into this thread, lmao.

so many good memories of that software but for some reason I'm remembering a red theme.

LegibleCrimson5• 2 years ago

THANKS SHITMAN!

danielvaughn• 2 years ago

Pedantic, but this seems like a git alternative, not simply a GitHub alternative.

webstrand• 2 years ago

There appears to be a git remote helper in the repo, so this will work just fine with standard git.

Retr0id• 2 years ago

This could enable development of projects like forks of Yuzu, with reduced risk of DMCA interference.

fwip• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, it's developed by crypto-brained guys.

always2slow2• 2 years ago

Installation
The easiest way to install Radicle is by firing up your terminal and running the following command:
$ curl -sSf https://radicle.xyz/install | sh

Ah.. my high hopes were immediately dashed by the trash that is curl-bash. What a great signal for thoughtless development, if this project catches on I can't wait to watch the security train wreck unfold. Maybe someday we'll get an "Open-Source, Peer-to-Peer, GitHub Alternative" that doesn't start with the worst possible way to install something.

zlatan_todoric6• 2 years ago

Here you go [0] - the project hasn't launched yet and there are bits and pieces to be dealt with, the current focus is a bit somewhere else. You can also build from source [1] with Rust's cargo.

[0] https://files.radicle.xyz/latest/

[1] https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/seed.radicle.garden/rad:z3gqcJ...

always2slow2• 2 years ago

Thanks but... no thanks, you've missed my point entirely. Why would I want to run peer to peer software built by developers whose security stance starts with curl-bash? Would you curl-bash a webserver? an email server? No? Probably even worse for your source code repository then right?

_flux4• 2 years ago

A bit dramatic here, are we?

And after that's been handled, well, what's the difference to just providing the script but not the command to invoke it? Surely if one wants to review it, downloading the script to be run separately is quite straightforward. (Though I there was a method for detecting piped scripts versus downloaded ones, but I don't think it works for such small scripts.)

heybrendan• 2 years ago

This is an overreaction, almost to the point of absurdity.

Risks inherent to pipe installers are well understood by many. Using your logic, we should abandon Homebrew [1] (>38k stars on GitHub), PiHole [2] (>46k stars on GitHub), Chef [3], RVM [4], and countless other open source projects that use one-step automated installers (by piping to bash).

A more reasonable response would be to coordinate with the developers to update the docs to provide alternative installation methods (or better detail risks), rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[1] https://brew.sh/

[2] https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole

[3] https://docs.chef.io/chef_install_script/#run-the-install-sc...

[4] https://rvm.io/rvm/install

saurik6• 2 years ago

FWIW, Homebrew (no longer) deserves quite such ire as you will note that it explicitly does NOT pipe the result to a copy of bash: by downloading it first it and quoting it using a subshell it prevents the web server from being able to get interactive access.

EspressoGPT• 2 years ago

Download it or don't. Trust the maintainer or don't. Whether you trust the maintainer or not shouldn't be a matter of the installation method, not even with curl-bash.

tonymet2• 2 years ago

isn't git already the open source, p2p Github alternative? coders will do practically anything to avoid learning `git rebase` . ( don't read too deeply on this chaps)

LegibleCrimson5• 2 years ago

It is if you don't care about any of the other things that Git brings to the table.

I fail to see what `git rebase` has to do with issue trackers, project boards, wikis, repository notifications, or any of the other things that GitHub does. I use git forges as well as `git rebase`. Neither of these things precludes the other.

tonymet2• 2 years ago

GCM glorified commit messages

20after42• 2 years ago

I'm curious why dual license with both the MIT and Apache licenses.

This is not a criticism, and I could be wrong about this, but doesn't the mit license allow anyone to essentially bypass any extra responsibilities provided for in the Apache license? Specifically I'm thinking of the patent license grant provisions. I don't think the MIT license has anything to say about patents.

And if that is the case then why not just license it MIT?

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

Contributions to the repo have to abide to both licenses, derivative work gets to choose only one.

20after42• 2 years ago

That explains it perfectly, thank you!

contrarian12342• 2 years ago

A bit of a naiive general question, but why are these things not layered on top of existing technology?

You already have Bittorrent for distributing files P2P. We "just" need an extra layer for discovering new updates/patches so that files can dynamically update/grow. These two problems seem fundamentally decoupled. The "git forge" aspect seems to be another fundamentally separate layer on top of that

cloudhead38• 2 years ago

We tried. At first we built it on top of IPFS. It was much too slow. BitTorrent is interesting but we need a way to have mutability (repos change all the time). So we built the networking layer ourselves and the forge on top of that.

contrarian12342• 2 years ago

If you built a mutable bittorrent layer yourself (like ipfs but better), then why not make it its own separate thing?

If that's what you've managed to pull off, that's like a way bigger deal than a p2p gitforge (not that that isn't super cool in itself)

I guess architecturally why does it need to be coupled to git and a git forge?

hossbeast• 2 years ago

I really want to have the problems this solves.

Radicle: Open-Source, Peer-to-Peer, GitHub Alternative

Related Stories