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Comment by ghc | Hacker News Reader

Is there really nothing like BitTorrent for git, or have we just not heard about it because of GitHub's network effects? It feels like this problem was solved long ago for binaries.

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There is! https://radicle.dev :)

From today:

HardenedBSD Is Now Officially on Radicle

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47944864

Oh, that's pretty cool! Now I can't decide whether that approach or one based on AT is better...

Pick whichever. We <3 the Radicle team and they're admittedly solving a much harder problem (gossiping git!) and rather elegantly at that.

Yeah I’ve met the Radicle people a couple times. I’ve never given it a thorough review but, for their goals, their designs have always seemed strong, and they’re pleasant people to chat with.

The main difference was atproto wanted to tackle scale, so we went with a servers & aggregation model. Radicle is going for device-to-device networking as a primary goal.

Do you think it will be possible to use them together? Having some sort of unified distributed system is intriguing to me. (e.g. can the Radical foundation and AT-proto foundation integrate, even?)

the fact that you, as the creator of a "competitor", post this as-is without a "At $co, we…" run-on is a good look

There is also ForgeFed/vervis

gittorrents were talked about and built at least 15 if not 20 years ago.

the issue isn't mirroring of data, this is a solved problem. everything else that a forge does is a problem - issue tracking, PRs, reviews, CI/CD, authn, authz, secrets, audit trails, ...

BitTorrent also enabled search engines to be built easily, which created discoverability. Unfortunately it's a much harder problem for git repos, especially when competing with GitHub search.

Radicle may be what you're after

Git is already distributed by itself. The management-part is what's missing (mergerequests, permissions, issues..), and it's disputable whether this is really necessary, or just a nice to have.

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