Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_other | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com