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Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

Is there nice interop with BitTorrent for those cases, similar to how Git Annex adds large binary support to git?

For example, if I use Radicle to version a machine learning project, can I use a Magnet link for multi-GB model files?

You can already use it with git-annex to store binaries using the git-annex-remote-git-aafs[1] special remote.

Although I would be careful and make sure you understand what it is doing to your branch namespace. Even though in the worst case it would not save any space over directly committing binaries, they are in orphan branches that can be pruned without rewriting history.

But even so, you can just use any number of git-annex special remotes to bypass using git for sharing files.

They may eventually add first-party support for git-annex. But nothing is stopping you from using it now.

[1]: https://github.com/domo141/git-annex-remote-git-aafs

Last commit is 5 years ago. That is a lot in dog years.

Any plans to add support for git-annex?

Random thought but what about calling it a subscription?

For example, allow users to be able to subscribe to specific repos or specific topics or specific people etc

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

Did it not? I would consider Bittorrent traffic to have a very high risk of being blocked or viewed as suspicious, and as a result almost never gets embedded in other use cases. Even the simple use case of using torrents to have peer-to-peer delivery of software updates has flopped.

It looks like there’s still an Arch Linux BitTorrent tracker; maybe I’m out of touch but I think this is not a very uncommon way of distributing distros (?).

Granted, you've found the one (and only?) notable exception to the "no legitimate torrent use cases" rule that I can think of. :)

And this has a legacy roughly as long as BitTorrent itself. The fact that BT never established a footing in other use cases (even those where you would think it would be a great solution) is telling.

Blizzard used BitTorrent for distributing full games, patches and trailers for years.

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader

I had forgotten about this, this is an interesting exception.

Windows Update also allows the user to opt in to use a non-bittorrent protocol for peer-to-peer delivery of updates to other Windows users. But of course, it's not true Bittorrent.

That’s fair, I never got into torrenting for illegal purposes but even I had the feeling that we were acting as the thinnest veneer of legitimacy when torrenting distros, haha.

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)

How would you know which nodes to block?

Any node with "problematic" behaviour can be blocked.

But please note that you can also choose a "block everyone, follow just the good ones" (i.e. a selective) seeding policy [1]).

[1] - https://docs.radicle.xyz/guides/seeder#a-selective-seeding-p...

so it's the same as cloning a repo locally, auto updating it, and exposing a mirror to the world?

how will this not devolve into freeNet fiasco when popular repos start to go wild on content?

edit: i see from the finance thread you will likely take on maven/npm/etc with crowd hosting+funding so I'm now more curious how cheap it will be for bad actors to push intentional malicious content, since now it's mostly about cost of having consensus over the mirrors

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