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Comment by jbstack | Hacker News Reader

Suggestion: improve the opening summary paragraph:

"Radicle is an open source, peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git. Unlike centralized code hosting platforms, there is no single entity controlling the network. Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner, and users are in full control of their data and workflow."

From this, I can't tell how it's any different to just plain self-hosted Git. A well written introduction should tell the reader immediately what the software actually does. If it's meant to be an alternative to something like gitea / forgejo then say that, with a brief summary of features that build on top of Git.

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Reading the intro, I feel like I got a good hint about what this is. It sounded like "local first git for teams, without the hell of sharing patches via email".

I don't know what gitea or forgejo are, so comparisons wouldn't help me.

I can tell you. Forgejo is a git server (i.e. you can push to a remove that lives in a different machine) plus a web GUI that allows to list repos, list commits within a repo, navigate commits and files within a commit.

The license is Free and Copyleft.

You still have to run it on a server somewhere, which Nintendo can get shut down.

Nintendo can't shutdown your git server if it's running on a Raspberry Pi in your pantry, or a NAS appliance in your home office/basement.

As a matter of fact, Forgejo/Gitea are excellent choices for automatic mirroring of any Git repos you fear may be shutdown by DMCA shenanigans.

But if people can't find it, then they can't download the code or contribute to the project. And if people can find it, then there is no need to physically wrest your device out of your home: they'll just get your domain name taken away or your ISP to block the connections (at best, if not entirely shut you down).

That’s why you host over Tor with an .onion domain. Immune to takedowns.

Correct. Just ask the Silk Road guy…

Right. Radicle would be one way to connect all these Raspberry Pis in many pantries together, and have them replicate each others repos. It also enables others to send patches, without first having to create an account on that Raspberry Pi in your pantry. And in case your Raspberry Pi is offline, others will just as happily serve your project, with cryptographic assurance that it wasn't modified.

Don't get me wrong. Power to you and your Raspberry Pi! Radicle invites you to join a network of people that solve the same problem as you do, and pool resources.

I wasn't shitting on Radicle - I think centralized Git is antithetical to the D in DVCS.

In what way is git antithetical to being distributed? Github, sure, but git itself seems fine.

The key word here is "centralized".

Oops, you're right I don't know how I missed that word when reading it

They can get you arrested, and you wouldn't be their first.

Just like the MPAA is having people arrested for torrenting films?

It doesn't scale well unless there's a centralized entity you can go after that controls distribution.

Nintendo (or whoever) will shutdown whatever users visit to download the thing they want gone. From a skim through the user guide, Radicle seems to only handle the dev/backend side of things and Nintendo wouldn't care that much about it. After all there are already several git mirrors of Yuzu, what was lost was the official "download this" page and the centralized Github bits (issues, etc), though other projects could like handle this bit just fine either as addons (Forgejo) or natively (like the Fossil SCM).

Ultimately what you'd do is distribute Yuzu with torrents, less convenient but can't be shut down.

Then the obvious choice is to also distribute the code with torrents, which is what Radicle is (at least spiritually) - plus it has the most essential forge features (PRs and issues).

And Nintendo is merely a convenient example that would have a chance of affecting you directly. Just like .onion these projects protect many different kinds of freedoms beyond what EFF would likely defend (sadly, that goes for the immoral stuff too). Chinese citizens collaborating on anticensorship software, for example.

The other day someone here coined JTPP - "Just the prompt, please", expressing preference for reading the prompt instead of the e-mail/article it produced. The reasons for that are rather obvious, but I think it applies to marketing copy in general.

With that in mind, I wonder what the original idea behind this project was - the "prompt" that someone got in their mind, which got them excited enough to build this. Reading the "original prompt" might make it easier to figure the product out. Marketing copy is "how we can make what we have look more alluring to people". The "original prompt" is directly answering "what we actually aspired to build".

P2P Github

"make a thing that works like github but doesn't need github or email"

I wrote that as a joke but now that I'm reading it... even a terrible prompt might be useful.

Changed "make a thing" to "describe a tool" and got a raft of text back that I couldn't be bothered to think about, because it's not my space. This jumped out though:

"## Existing things that almost do this (but don’t go far enough)

* Radicle – closest philosophically [...]"

So it seems to me that you succinctly described Radicle - at least well enough for an LLM to recognize it.

In case anyone is reading this and is merely looking for "local first git for teams, without the hell of sharing patches via email", the solution to this is to establish an empty repository (git init --bare --shared=group) in any mountable shared storage you have, and then setting that repository as the remote for your local branches.

The existing summary is great. It uses git in the first sentence. Meanwhile forjo's landing page seems to be activly avoiding the words git and source control leaving it a cryptic mess.

AD: Feel free to take a stab at an alternative, we're an open source project and we accept and welcome discussions but patches more so! What would read better in your opinion?

> What would read better in your opinion?

You're asking someone else to describe what your project is doing?

The lack of good description isn't unique, I've bee skipping more and more of those lately, but asking others to tell the developers what they've developed is new in my book.

Sometimes when you’re close to something it’s very hard to describe it because you’ve been looking at it from all angles for so long that when someone else approaches it from a different direction it’s hard to see what blind spots they might have. It’s not crazy to ask people for input and it’s not crazy to say “we’re open to patches if you just want to do it yourself”.

For me personally I was (and still am a bit) unclear on what being “based on git” means. Can I just rebase with abandon? Is there a concept of force push? Can I safely use lazy-git, tig, commit-patch, and other git utilities? Or is it more integrated and i have to use the rad cli to avoid corrupting the git repo? What about the issues? If I write some software and publish it with radicle, is there a way for plain git client to clone the repo without installing radicle (and without keeping a plain git mirror somewhere)?

it reads fine to me

no, it's a distributed peer-to-peer alternative to something like github. it has all the features like a locally hosted forgejo/gitea/gitlab, but it also is built on a distributed and fault-tolerant peer-to-peer network for hosting public projects.

I looked at the page and my understanding was that this is a decentralized github. Teams can collaborate without a company getting access to the code?

Unless something's changed since last I checked it out, it's git "on the blockchain." Including its own RAD-coin token.

Edit: removed snarky line.

A lot has changed. But also you must've checked it quite some time ago. It's not on the blockchain anymore since the "heartwood" iteration, which was announced 2023-04-18. Please take some time to re-inform yourself, even just in this HN thread (search for "RAD ", the whitespace is significant).

Glad to hear it.

I don't know about previous versions, but afaik since the release of the current heartwood implementation it is neither based on a blockchain nor does it include any "crypto" stuff. If it did, I probably wouldn't be using it.

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