Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arubis | Hacker News Reader

[Radicle](https://radicle.dev/) gets a wee bit closer. It’s selfhostable and federated. You’ll have a hard time finding something with the same social gravity well as GitHub; it remains to be seen whether that’s a separable element or if it needs to ship as part of the forge itself.

View on HN

I’ve been testing Radicle and it’s more focused on the distributed protocol for federating git repos, I.e. the data plane. The social / coordination control-plane angle is really thin, following users and repos goes by opaque IDs, etc.

It could be a better solution for agents that don’t bounce off such mundane complexity. It could be better for private repo federation (eg private collective or agent swarm.)

I’m interested in Tangled for the OSS/community aspect, it seems to have an advantage there with the richer identity layer for humans.

Issue and PR content are not social artifacts, they belong in the repo or at least its hosting instance. Likes and activity feed are the sort of thing that belongs in the social layer.

Issues and PR content are absolutely social artifacts, as they communicate information to others, whether opened by the repo owner or not. In fact, other people can interact with them, and are supposed to do so, which makes them even more inherently social.

The more important thing about issues & PRs is that they explain why the code is the way that it is. Knowing why the code is the way it is, is almost the entire reason we have a repository to begin with. They belong to the code, not some social graph.

Yes, code is largely about communication as well - with others as well as our future selves. That doesn’t mean it’s a social media experience. There are lots of ways to communicate that aren’t that.

This was a really intriguing project that became Google abandonware.

https://github.com/google/git-appraise

The idea is to use git-notes for issues & PRs, because git is already distributed by design and these elements of SDLC centralized our usage.

Interesting point, I was thinking more about the latter, but you are right that issues and PRs are the more important piece.

It does look like Tangled currently does those in a weird way, ties to the issue owner rather than repo - but here’s a proposal to fix: https://leaflet.pub/p/did%3Aplc%3Axasnlahkri4ewmbuzly2rlc5/3...

Doing some weird distributed join across all your committer’s PDSs seems a bit weird, and the semantics of cross-referencing issues seems gnarly in that world.

I think I’d be OK to model a PR as a tweet, it’s more owned by the sender. But issues seem like they should be owned by the repo for sure.

Can I interact with and discover any federated instance without having to know it exists?

My experience with Bluesky Vs Mastodon really showed that the friction of federation in the latter can really kill the experience for me. I think we need something like Signal is to WhatsApp but for GitHub and my impression is that the ATProto world is the only one with the potential to deliver this.

This looks like a much more sensible design for code repos: all the artifacts live in the repo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com