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Radicle is an open source, peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git

155 points| cimnine | 1 year ago |radicle.xyz

53 comments

order

mtndew4brkfst|1 year ago

Seems like a vehicle to try to start another coin network, like Tea.xyz, and it's just burying the lede:

See Drips on https://docs.radworks.org/#projects

I'd first heard of Radicle from this post: https://blog.orhun.dev/open-source-funding-with-ratatui/

AnarchismIsCool|1 year ago

With the frequency they're on here it feels like a guerilla marketing campaign. Everyone anyways points out they're a crypto scam and then they pop back up a month later and try again.

vaylian|1 year ago

How does Radicle handle the following situation?: A non-programmer user wants to submit a bug report. The user has previous experience with submitting bug reports on GitHub and they would not mind creating a new account to submit a bug report on Radicle. Can the user submit an issue on Radicle without running their own node?

vinnyhaps|1 year ago

At the moment there isn't any mechanism for that kind of drive-by action. The current mechanism for creating an issue requires that a Git reference is created (the COBs structure) for replicating by other nodes.

Perhaps in the future, a user could use a web interface for a Radicle node and they post it directly from their browser. Some questions about that would the verifiability of that action though. Definitely some food for thought here!

contrarian1234|1 year ago

Do non programmer submit bug reports on Github...? It must be a vanishingly small minority. I've only seen that at on Mozilla repos with their useless middle managers

mikl|1 year ago

They keep advertising this thing on here, but they never explain what the big benefit is.

Everyone can already self-host Gitea or Gitlab, and Git repos are super easy to clone, so what’s the point of all the peer to peer stuff?

ie. what real world problem is it supposed to solve?

vaylian|1 year ago

One of the problems of self-hosted forges is that spontaneous collaboration is cumbersome, because you need to keep track of your accounts across different self-hosted forges. Some people are working on https://forgefed.org/ to make this less of an issue, but Radicle is a different approach, where the entire repository ecosystem becomes distributed and people identify themselves with cryptographic identifiers to interact with the network as a whole instead of individual forges.

dotancohen|1 year ago

Git was already designed from the outset specifically to be peer to peer. The central server is the addition to that model, not the other way around. I have not looked into this project, but pitching whatever it is as P2P for Git just sounds like the devs learned about Git though GitHub and don't fully understand it.

vouaobrasil|1 year ago

According to their documentation "nodes can run on a personal computer without requiring a server". That sounds better than self-hosting to me, which requires the installation of various components like Apache, SQL, PHP, etc. Seems more like bittorrent for code, which sounds like it could actually be useful.

Ideally, we would have a solution to collaborate on projects peer-to-peer that handles some basic Github-style stuff without having to use Github at all.

CaptainOfCoit|1 year ago

Who are "they"? Submitter seems unrelated to Radicle. And what you mean "advertising"? It's a normal HN item, posted like all the others, upvoted to the frontpage like all the other frontpage items.

> ie. what real world problem is it supposed to solve?

Seems pretty clear from the submitted page.

Problem: centralized code hosting platforms [...] single entity(ies) controlling the network(s)

Solution: Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner, and users are in full control of their data and workflow.

Literally the first paragraph on the page.

saurik|1 year ago

Nothing that requires the user to keep knowing your new URL is ever going to be peer-to-peer: the domain name system is fundamentally and irretrievably a hierarchical system; the ramification of this, of course, being that it supports your well-known URL being attacked or censored and your only workaround is to try to rapidly change your URL constantly... but now, no one can find you consistently, and so you cannot collaborate with anyone over time.

forgotpwd16|1 year ago

>Everyone can already self-host Gitea or Gitlab

But self-hosting limits exposure, that Github.com/Gitlab.com provide.

>Git repos are super easy to clone

Git is meant to version your code, not issues, pull requests, etc.

https://radicle.xyz/guides/protocol#introduction

This provides comparison and reasoning.

baq|1 year ago

> what real world problem is it supposed to solve?

having to self-host anything?

Alifatisk|1 year ago

Guys, I know xyz domains are cheap to get but I highly suggest to not use them for anything serious. The XYZ TLD has a very bad reputation and will lead to situations where your domain gets flagged, emails from the domain appears in the spam folder etc.

FireInsight|1 year ago

I didn't know it was cheap or had bad rep—it just seemed cool to me and I thought about putting my personal site under that domain. Might have to reconsider.

miloignis|1 year ago

Honestly, that kinda makes me prefer XYZ for my personal stuff I'm not trying to get reach for, and that I don't want any corporate sheen on.

If you're trying to launch a product though, it's something to keep in mind.

nanomonkey|1 year ago

Feels like a rebranding of git-ssb (git on Secure Scuttlebutt), but with a coin offering?!

Anyways, a good introduction to git-ssb would be this document: https://github.com/hackergrrl/git-ssb-intro

hiatus|1 year ago

What makes you say this is related to SSB?