[HN Gopher] Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub
___________________________________________________________________
Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub
Author : dweberz
Score : 645 points
Date : 2020-12-05 09:13 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (radicle.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (radicle.xyz)
| LeicaLatte wrote:
| Very cool!
| fungos wrote:
| I'm impressed and I see potential on this one. I tried different
| ones over time but most fail at on-boarding. This was seamless
| and really easy. In about 2 minutes I successfully shared my
| project and followed known projects. This means this mvp _works_
| and it let me craving for more, I want to use this! I want issues
| and PR support to prove this can effectively work as a github
| replacement to me.
|
| Now, the downside of this mvp is that there is no project
| discovery in the client itself. We need to go search for projects
| in a browser, in this page http://seedling.radicle.xyz/ which is
| a bit confusing. Considering the client itself is electron, it
| could at least, open this page for us somewhere. Or, we could at
| least have a less "noisy" seedling page focused on search and I
| would not even know it wasn't part of the client itself.
|
| Overall, awesome project. I really hope it will grow and add the
| missing essential features. If I could vote, with priority these
| would be:
|
| - project discovery integrated in the client - issues support -
| pr support - multiple identities
|
| Anyway, great job!
| cloudhead wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! The priorities you mention are very
| close to our own, and we have already started working on some
| of them. We will definitely be integrating discovery more
| closely into the app in the long run.
| philips wrote:
| Oh wow. This seedling website needs to be suggested as the next
| step after creating your device id, etc.
| geoah wrote:
| hm, that is interesting, the fact that projects are public and
| advertised by default was not clear to me while going through
| the onboarding.
| erichdongubler wrote:
| For reference: https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/understanding-
| radicle/faq/#can...
| xla wrote:
| Thanks for flagging that, definitely something we are looking
| to improve in making it clear but also in how much control
| the user has over that.
| nikitaga wrote:
| What a nice funky design. That front page has a soul, unlike
| almost everything else I see nowadays.
| viraptor wrote:
| There's a post about the design here:
| https://radicle.community/t/the-journey-to-radicles-new-bran...
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| The main site page is just awful. It's amateurish,
| image/animation heavy to no value, almost negligable
| information. They may have something good but the site's just
| obscuring it.
| viraptor wrote:
| I think it does a good job listing project ideas / features
| / roadmap and is a pleasant step away from the bland
| corporate brands. Love the esthetic. You just can't satisfy
| everyone.
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| The front page alone is 9MB.
|
| Edit: perhaps more importantly, I have to gain a feeling
| for the product, to work out whether it's worth the
| perhaps nontrivial time evaluating it.
|
| If I'm presented with this what it indicates to me,
| rightly or not, is that the product is image-led, the
| project is perhaps childish if the website is (clips from
| ghost in the shell?), fails to understand technical load
| (the website's bloated, what does it say about technical
| competence of the company) and whatever.
|
| I don't care about corporate blandness, I need solid
| info, directly in front of me, and not having my eyes
| pulled away by flicker.
|
| I could be completely getting the value of this project
| wrong but first impressions suggest I may well be wasting
| my time with it.
| nulbyte wrote:
| I like the sketch of the first design presented there. It
| seems to fit with the product. Unfortunately, the cult-route
| they went with produced a busy page with lots of animation
| that distracts the reader. Also, overlapping headings with
| animations and changing colors immensely reduces readability.
|
| If it weren't overly animated and the headings were legible,
| this design might actually be pleasantly nostalgic. But in
| its present state, it makes me wish for old radicle, when it
| was built on ipfs and had no GUI. The overt use of animation
| is exactly how I tend to think of unnecesary GUIs.
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| this is just me, but I'm honestly way more interested in this
| design post than I am about the product itself.
|
| love the design - it's honestly something I've never seen
| before (at least, not in the context of software). I love how
| it rejects the tired old aesthetic of the "software tool
| front page" and goes in a totally different direction while
| still getting the point across.
| messo wrote:
| I agree, it stirs up feelings of the web that was, but in a
| modern and functional way. (mobile view)
| d0100 wrote:
| Nice design, but I couldn't understand anything. I have a 21'
| screen and it way to wide. Our peripheral vision was made for
| motion, if you want human attention, put it in the center!
|
| I can only digest the content properly if I stand a couple of
| meters away
| bigbubba wrote:
| I like the GITS gif, but the page in general feels like a fever
| dream to me.
| madoublet wrote:
| Very cool design. Matches well with the name. In my mind,
| Radicle invokes the design of the 90s (skids, grunge, hip-hop).
| This isn't quite that but it still works.
| fungos wrote:
| At first I thought it was broken as I opened in mobile and it
| was very confusing. Otherwise, on desktop it looks funky, but
| fine - not awesome but not bad.
| theferalrobot wrote:
| Totally agree, design today takes itself way too seriously to
| the point that it all looks like it came from the same
| corporate hell hole. This is a breath of fresh air.
| yunohn wrote:
| Especially for a FOSS project! Usually they tend to go with a
| default theme with the most drab design. As an engineer, I
| sympathize with the effort needed to make it look good though.
| thiht wrote:
| I came here to say just the opposite. The first thing I did
| when seeing the frontpage was to leave. It just felt
| overcrowded, unreadable and aggressive to me.
|
| It's fun to see how different our opinions can be about this
| kind of things, I really didn't expect it in this case but here
| we go :)
| ljm wrote:
| I didn't like it at first, but it's grown on me since. It
| makes a bold statement and feels unique.
| enriquto wrote:
| way offtopic, but can you point to a couple examples of
| websites that "have a soul" according to your personal
| criterion?
| arafsheikh wrote:
| Not OP, but I feel Wikipedia "has a soul". The design
| doesn't get in the way, is consistent and the information
| density is just right.
| studius wrote:
| the site design is cool. hosting it on GitHub is ironic,
| though. could it instead just be hosted via radicle? (mirrored
| to GitLab, GitHub, BitBucket, SourceForge, Savannah, ...)
| theelous3 wrote:
| Reminds me of the better aspects of brutalist web design:
| https://brutalistwebsites.com/ mixed with some actual
| formatting.
| simias wrote:
| I've installed the "upstream" client but I must say that I'm a
| bit confused. I imported a couple of git repositories that ended
| up on http://seedling.radicle.xyz/, so I thought I did it right,
| but then if I try to add projects from that very page it keeps
| searching and never finds anything (they're stuck in "keep
| looking" mode).
|
| Also I don't see how you can create issues. Is it not implemented
| yet?
|
| It's an interesting project but it feels like very early alpha-
| grade to me. The client gives very little feedback on what's
| happening and what you can do.
| xla wrote:
| This is really helpful feedback. Especially the part about not
| getting enough feedback during operations. And yes social
| features like issues and PRs have not been the focus in this
| release, as we focused on replication. If you are looking for
| more help you can join the community matrix and we take it from
| there: https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/using-radicle/join-the-
| communi...
| simias wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback on my feedback. My recommendation
| would be to make a very simple tutorial (maybe even a video)
| walking the user through checkouting a remote project,
| publishing their own and start hacking while explaining the
| core concepts. The docs are pretty good from what I see, but
| when you're just starting and you don't know what you're
| looking for it's a bit overwhelming I thought.
| erk__ wrote:
| It seems that it is sadly only built for AppImage and MacOS
| neither of work on any of my current machines. Though I guess
| it just means that I have to figure out how to build it myself.
| [deleted]
| fastglass wrote:
| it would be super interesting to know how private would work
| cloudhead wrote:
| Privacy by necessity will use end-to-end encryption, as
| artifacts will end up being propagated on the network. This
| isn't however so easy for long-lived artifacts (eg. what
| happens if your key is compromised sometime in the future), and
| we will need things such as forward secrecy.
| lucb1e wrote:
| It's not 1989 anymore, we have proper cryptosystems now. I
| don't have a worked example but elsewhere in the thread
| someone, it sounded like a dev, mentioned it's being worked on.
| You can encrypt for certain public keys and then only those
| people can decrypt the contents.
| dsign wrote:
| We kind of need this yesterday... what's the point of having a
| decentralized git if the issues are centralized at Github?
| (which, not to make too fine a point of it, is owned by
| Microsoft). Even if you host your own Gitlab, there is always
| that day when the hard drive of the server fails and the ops have
| to spend a weekend restoring backups while changing hosting
| company because who crashes the hard-drive of an expensive VPS
| anyway...
|
| I hope Radicle gets a lot of funding and tons of adoption.
| bob1029 wrote:
| We use Github and we are not that interested in the
| decentralized aspects of git itself.
|
| The low-friction UX and integration of issues/PRs/code makes it
| lightyears easier to ramp new developers than if I had to sit
| down and also explain Jira & Jenkins to them. The fact that git
| is centralized or decentralized crosses our minds precisely
| zero times per week.
|
| In the absolute worst case where Microsoft somehow loses
| everyones' issue/PR/project data (assuming non-enterprise cloud
| hosted account), we could still rebuild with whoever has the
| latest master copy on their local. Presumably, one of our
| developers must have made the latest commit so this should work
| out always. We have a process where we include the issue
| numbers in our commits, so it would be possible to reconstruct
| a large portion of these with inference across commit history.
| Personally, I trust Microsoft to safeguard our business data
| more than I trust our 7 person team w/ a $2000/m AWS budget.
|
| Ultimately, I think the objective of making all things around
| your source control technology look & talk like your source
| control technology is a huge mistake. Issues and code are
| completely orthogonal things that intersect in very narrow
| ways. These intersections are hugely valuable, but we are not
| interested in aligning the planes of functionality.
| indymike wrote:
| Disclaimer: I love Github. From a commercial development
| standpoint (ie. my day job), it's fantastic.
|
| BUT: What a lot of developers, myself included, feel like is
| the source control in git is great. The project management
| tools (issues, actions, etc...) require centralization of
| certain processes, that for some projects (open and closed
| source), don't fit well. Sometimes the 'how it works' is a
| bad fit. Other times, it's where it has to be to work. For
| example, running CI on a container on Azure from actions. Yes
| you can move where it runs. But for some projects, localhost
| is where that should happen. I'm really happy to see people
| working on this, because it will be just as transformative as
| git and Github has been.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I argue that centralization of certain processes is the
| entire point. How the hell are you going to manage a
| complex software project if everyone has a different
| version of the issues pertaining to it? Simply seeing an
| issue comment instantly update in GitHub as I am scrolling
| through has saved me tons of aggregate hours in wasted time
| on changing requirements.
| indymike wrote:
| First, I'm not arguing :-), just sharing. If I'm using
| fossil, I just do. Fossil is built by the people behind
| sqlite, and issues, wikis, etc... all of the pm stuff is
| baked in. Tickets that are referenced in check-ins are
| synced. This improves on github: if another dev has
| worked on a ticket and their branch hasn't merged yet,
| the ticket update is visible. Fossil also allows for
| heirarchal management structures, and so on.
| Incidentally, fossil's timeline is incredible.
|
| Not saying that fossil is going to replace git/github.
| Probably not, but there are ways to solve simple
| information management problems that don't require a
| centralized, subscription service. By eliminating that,
| you open the door to much innovation... In the meantime,
| I've got a pull request or two to review over on Github.
| gfody wrote:
| i think fossil has the better architecture and it would
| probably take off if the baked in webapp were as polished
| as github. somebody should fork fossil and make a github
| clone.
| p5a0u9l wrote:
| this is naive. the problems being addressed do exist,
| independent of whether this particular solution will work.
| that's great that the status quo is working for you, but it's
| silly to then assert that progress cannot be made.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Well maybe our "naive" approach might be worth
| investigating. Because we put so little time into
| ridiculous missions like "distributed issues because git is
| also distributed", we are able to focus more on the
| product, customers, and processes. You know, things that
| actually drive business value and pay out everyones' bonus
| checks at the end of the year.
|
| We have actually considered doing a complete in-house
| implementation of the things that GitHub handles, because
| we do already have an in-house management system that
| integrates with GitHub's API. But, we realized that we
| would then be in the business of maintaining what is
| effectively the GitHub product for a market size of 1
| customer.
| goseeastarwar wrote:
| The nerds (I say that will all due respect) will fight
| your stance on this until the end of time, but of course
| you're correct. There have been discussions of
| distributed GitHub since the day the website launched,
| but the concept will never take off. 99.99% of developers
| understand the tools are a means to an end, not the thing
| worth focusing on.
| p5a0u9l wrote:
| i'm saying it's ok to be pragmatic and fully accept that
| you are Microsoft's target demographic. they're solving
| the annoying bits so you can focus on what's important to
| you.
|
| but, that's not the end of the story. there may likely be
| gains found with new innovations.
|
| companies like github are not incentivized to
| revolutionize "what works". they're incentivized to get
| you to rely increasingly on their services. and as long
| as that works for you, great!
|
| i'm just saying, don't discount efforts made to make
| github obsolete.
| fn1 wrote:
| Can't you just serialize all issues into the repository and
| then write scripts/hooks to sync them in/out of textfiles in
| the repo?
| m4rtink wrote:
| Pagure does something like that: https://pagure.io/pagure
|
| All the issues, wiki, PR review are stored in Git as well.
| You still need a Pagure instance (that you can self host if
| you want) to provide the web ui, but you can easily just
| clone the repo and put it to a different instance, keeping
| all your metadata.
| masklinn wrote:
| This was attempted multiple times in the past. None
| succeeded, in large parts because at a fundamental level
| issues are a synchronisation point, making issues part of the
| repository adds overhead and complexity but doesn't really
| give you anything, and furthermore it increases complexity
| for reporters.
| dm3 wrote:
| I know of an attempt to implement an approach to track issues
| and code in a decentralized manner with SIT[0].
| Unfortunatlely the project seems to be dead.
|
| [0] https://github.com/sit-fyi
| hamaluik wrote:
| I've used git-bug[1] successfully in the past for something
| similar but more ergonomic.
|
| 1: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug
| Frost1x wrote:
| I always find it comically ironic how the industry basically
| centralized a version management system (git) that was
| inherently designed to be decentralized. "Git is so great!
| Let's add these higher level project management features but
| let's do it in a centralized model!"
| neurobashing wrote:
| the industry aggressively seeks centralization. One browser
| always ends up taking huge amounts of market share. A small
| number of sites end up being hubs for large amounts of
| activity. We then spend forever trying to put the toothpaste
| back in the tube - federated social networks and chat, stuff
| like this.
| ehejsbbejsk wrote:
| Physical infrastructure itself needs to be federal. I believe
| that's the most economical solution. But it could be
| virtually decentralized.
| mistercow wrote:
| I don't think that's any more ironic than it is to point out
| that LLVM is backend agnostic, yet we always end up hooking
| it up to backends that lock the end result to a specific
| architecture. It's not ironic; it's the advantage of the
| design.
|
| In git's case, its decentralized nature ends up being an
| advantage because it decouples centralization from the VCS
| itself, which has allowed the centralized aspects of code and
| project management to evolve independently and be tuned to
| specific use cases.
| dangoor wrote:
| I think the centralization comes from convenience. Building a
| good, decentralized UX is a lot harder than making a
| centralized one (evidence: almost every attempt at P2P
| networks.)
| blargmaster42_8 wrote:
| Drop the crypto scam angle pleas
| flas9sd wrote:
| at the end of the LPC2019 talk "Reflections on kernel development
| process, quality and testing" by Dmitry Vyukov there's a slide
| with some Radicle examples. The following slide he links to a
| post by Konstantin Ryabitsev "Patches carved into developer
| sigchains" that shows Securescuttlebut on IPFS as an alternative
| to Email as decentralized system (search for git-ssb).
| 18af219e wrote:
| Interesting idea, but 'peer-to-peer'? Is water wet?
| jakry wrote:
| Is this based on Matrix?
| cloudhead wrote:
| It isn't, no. It's based on a protocol we've developed called
| Radicle Link, which provides a gossip layer on top of git.
| nnn1234 wrote:
| like other folks who have said this before, the question is who
| is this for and what is it that github doesnt provide but radicle
| does?
|
| I can have git installed on my device, work locally and instead
| of pointing to github, have a scuttlebutt like updates for PRs
|
| Question is who wants this? and what does this do to open source
| code?
| geranim0 wrote:
| youtube-dl?
| a-dub wrote:
| i think this is technically interesting, but i'm curious in
| practice what it gives project maintainers over hosting their own
| gitlab instance or similar...
| viraptor wrote:
| I've got a number of tiny projects. Realistically if they're
| not hosted on GitHub, they won't get contributions. "Setup
| another login on my gitlab instance" would close to ensure
| nobody collaborates on it. This allows me to both disconnect
| them from a centralised service and remove the "you need a
| separate identity" step.
| pferde wrote:
| Oh come on. It's not like making an account is overly
| difficult or demanding. You are not required to send two
| forms of ID or a blood sample by mail.
|
| Anyone who really wants to contribute to the project (and
| scratch their itch) will not have a problem with entering a
| username, password, and perhaps use a validation link from an
| e-mail. It might discourage people with just fleeting
| interest.
|
| And as a hypothetical FOSS project maintainer, I know I'd
| rather have one of the first kind of contributor than ten of
| the second kind. Especially if the alternative is to be
| beholden to the likes of Microsoft.
|
| Of course, the best solution would be something like
| ForgeFed, but I can't see that meaningfully taking off
| (there's no way Github will ever adopt it). I'd love to be
| wrong, though.
| viraptor wrote:
| The step is not difficult. The step exists and that's
| enough. Search through HN comments and see how many people
| see creating a new account as annoying.
|
| And I understand it - If I have a one line fix but the
| relevant system requires a new account, I don't bother. If
| it's a significant fix, but the project requires extra
| signed document (CLA?), they're getting a description in an
| issue instead.
|
| There's a reason for a recent trend where new services let
| you jump right in and start using them. Then require amount
| creation only when you do something significant.
|
| And for a small project that potential drive-by fix is
| valuable. It's not like I get to throw away most people to
| select the best ones. I get one potential fix a year -
| either it's a seamless experience or they disappear.
| cloudhead wrote:
| Good question. I know of a few projects hosting their own
| GitLab instance, the problem is that this requires me to create
| a new account/identity for each of these instances. This is a
| far cry from what GitHub brought, which was a single "place"
| and social network where you could browse and contribute to all
| projects with the same account.
|
| Radicle attempts to take back control (just like running your
| own instance), but without giving up network effects.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I guess for projects that run a risk of being shut down by RIAA
| or a government, this removes that single point of failure
| rather than moving it?
|
| I can't see the point for projects that don't run this risk
| though.
| [deleted]
| jeanlucas wrote:
| If it's free forever I'll give four years and check it.up again
| t0astbread wrote:
| It's P2P, so "free forever" isn't unrealistic.
| rarestoma wrote:
| cool! I really love the design!
| jwmoz wrote:
| That design is amazing.
| hanklazard wrote:
| Would you consider linking a white paper off the homepage? (If
| there is one, I'm not finding it). I like the sound of this
| project but I really would like to understand it more fully.
| lftherios wrote:
| docs here https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/what-is-radicle.html
| isaacimagine wrote:
| Tried out radicle a while back with a recent project - it's
| really cool!
| tyrion wrote:
| This seems really cool!
|
| I am wondering if it can host private repository as well, or is
| it just meant to host public repositories?
| xla wrote:
| For now the focus is on public collaboration on public
| projects. Features for private/encrypted repos are definitely
| on the roadmap.
| casi wrote:
| This looks fun, will give it a go. The inbuilt funding sounds
| interesting, is that like bounties on issues? Or more like
| Patreon sponsorships?
| cloudhead wrote:
| More like the latter. The first funding feature we are
| launching will allow you to set a monthly budget and have it
| split amongst a set of users/maintainers of your choosing.
| dijit wrote:
| Not to be confused with Radicale; an Open-Source CalDAV and
| CardDAV Server
|
| https://radicale.org/3.0.html
| cloudhead wrote:
| The shameless plug we all needed
| kiwidrew wrote:
| I read the title of this link and thought "Hmm, Radicale...
| not quite sure how a CalDAV server can be a Github
| alternative".
| enedil wrote:
| Shameless plugs are when you talk about your product
| specifically, while this just mentioned _some_ product of
| this name.
| Aeolun wrote:
| How and why is literally everything peer to peer in the tech
| community also somehow connected to ethereum?
| b_fiive wrote:
| quick hand raise for the IPFS community, which is yes p2p, no
| blockchain. I'm working a "git for data" project atop IPFS and
| aren't hawking a coin.
|
| I'll readily admit there are _very_ few yes-p2p and no-
| blockchain projects out there, but we exist
| JJJollyjim wrote:
| In fairness, filecoin is linked on the IPFS homepage (though
| it is less prominent than I remember)
| Taek wrote:
| quick reminder: the team behind IPFS raised over $200 million
| selling tokens.
| simias wrote:
| My first reaction when I read "peer-to-peer" in the title was
| "cool" followed immediately with "oh it's going to push some
| cryptocurrency crap, isn't it?"
|
| But honestly after reading the page it look fine to me. Oddly
| enough they seem to use cryptocurrencies as... currency. They
| don't bullshit you by saying that you're going to store your
| code on the blockchain.
|
| Besides, while I long ago became tired of the cryptocurrency
| crowd reinventing squared wheels every other month, the problem
| of rewarding open source developers is still very much an open
| issue, so I'm willing to give it a chance, even if I'm not
| holding my breath.
|
| This seems like a cool project frankly, at least on paper, I
| don't think it's fair to discard it just because it bundles
| some optional Ethereum support.
|
| Actually after downloading the upstream client my only
| complaint so far is that it's yet an other bloated Electron
| app, but such is life in 2020...
| OJFord wrote:
| Also I actually think it could be used pretty effectively -
| not saying it does this today or would ever - but it _could_
| let you offer a bounty for 'whoever submits a PR that closes
| this issue; that the maintainer accepts; that is not reverted
| within 30 days' in a trusted but decentralised way.
| studius wrote:
| Without an external entity assisting with proof-of-stake like
| Kraken, etc., Bitcoin (the system) is dependent on not just
| peers connecting to each other to have merry time with
| financial transactions, but on something called proof-of-work
| (https://www.kraken.com/en-us/learn/proof-of-work-vs-proof-
| of...).
|
| That proof-of-work in the Bitcoin system itself (without use of
| an external entity to handle proof-of-stake) is today largely
| handled by workhorses like those getting cheap electricity from
| thermal vents in Iceland (https://www.wired.com/story/iceland-
| bitcoin-mining-gallery/) verifying more and more transactions
| for less and less benefit. They're reliant on Moore's law and
| cheaper and cheaper energy, with more and more trust overhead
| processing by validating transactions, which doesn't
| necessarily scale, creating a need for proof-of-stake entities
| to substitute.
|
| Etherium (the system) contains within it proof of stake, but
| external entities (e.g. Kraken, etc.) can still validate proof
| of stake, if desired. Personally, I'm unsure if Etherium's
| proof of stake on its own is enough, because I think blockchain
| can be compromised
| (https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/19/239592/once-
| hail...).
|
| So, that's essentially why they choose Etherium (proof of
| stake).
|
| Global equity and inequity revolves around those that
| essentially "hold" the value (proof of stake), and banks hold
| the money in our current financial system, largely based on USD
| (https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/11/popular-
| curre...). Large banks have the ability to basically "re-use"
| debt multiple times, creating debt from debt (via Fractional
| Reserve Banking) as well as other means (https://www.investoped
| ia.com/articles/investing/081415/under...). Wherever you are
| and whatever chaste you're in, if you can sell your potential
| for paying a bank back, they can create money out of debt for
| you. Yes, this devalues the currency, but if you do well with
| it, you come out on top, you give back in interest, and the
| overall value is greater than the inflation of the currency,
| and outsiders investing in those companies can be important. If
| investment, etc. fails or the market fails, that system fails.
| Otherwise, it kind of works ok.
|
| The proof-of-stake entities will hopefully continue to generate
| value similar from nothing/debt to help those that can help
| others until this world is done and we move on.
|
| Of course, if there were no money and we all just did work for
| each other, I think that could work also. While money was still
| made from work, there is some element of communal living /
| working for each other in Christianity (https://www.reddit.com/
| r/AskBibleScholars/comments/ah5850/di... https://www.pbs.org/wg
| bh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/maps...).
|
| But, 1960s hippie communes tended to get corrupted by drugs,
| relationship problems, abuse, etc.
| (https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/03/us/excesses-blamed-for-
| de...) And countries that adopted Communism and Socialism have
| tended to include leaders that really mistreated their
| population or performed other atrocities, or it just didn't
| work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Soviet_
| Uni... https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/asia-and-the-
| pacific/ch...
| https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/three-
| nati...).
|
| I'm not an expert in these things, so let me know what I'm not
| understanding.
| cloudhead wrote:
| Because you want a way to move money around eventually. Eg. How
| do you do GitHub sponsors p2p?
| hobofan wrote:
| Because the cryptocurrency hype funds/funded most of those
| projects and/or the prospect of adding a cryptocurrency to the
| projects causes VCs to fund those projects.
|
| In this particular case Radicle came out of OScoin (or is the
| new incarnation of it?) and was funded by BlueYard.
| amself wrote:
| Right. I was surprised to see they chose to implement social
| coding after integrating with Ethereum, but it makes sense
| considering all the hype.
| lftherios wrote:
| we are actually working on both problems in parallel. it's
| just that the skillset required and complexity is very
| different.
| ffpip wrote:
| Peer to peer AI Machine learning with blockchain on AWS cloud.
| Taek wrote:
| Ethereum (and blockchain tech in general) genuinely open new
| doors to development and make it possible to do things that
| were not possible before. Especially now that we're several
| years further along, the tooling is a lot better and the design
| space is significantly more thoroughly explored.
|
| Yes, there's a lot of shady activity, a lot of scams, a lot of
| broken technology, and a lot of people with visions they can't
| deliver upon, but the same was true in the early days of the
| Internet and blockchain is starting to move past the 'dotcom
| bubble' phase and onto 'this tech is actually useful' phase.
|
| It's not there yet, most of the tech is still nascent, but it's
| a lot less nascent than it was in 2017, and there are more
| people working on it than ever.
| LockAndLol wrote:
| Is there a CLI? I can't download yet another Electron app and
| waste 90MB on another Chromium instance.
| cloudhead wrote:
| I feel you. A CLI is on our roadmap, as well as moving to a
| lighter-weight app container[0]
|
| [0]: https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Looks cool. Has anyone actually used it?
| viraptor wrote:
| Just kicking the tires. The beta was released just a couple of
| days ago. The very basic features seem to work just fine, and
| the rest is an obvious WIP.
|
| The team behind it seems super responsive and engaged.
| NoelJacob wrote:
| Gooyz, Windows?
| nrvn wrote:
| I would like to see a comparison with Sourcehut.
| rational_indian wrote:
| Isn't git peer-to-peer already? Why would anyone need this?
| Taek wrote:
| GitHub's primary value add to the world isn't that it's a web
| interface to git. It's also a social network, an issue tracker,
| a workflow management system, a code review tool, a wiki-
| builder, a frontend for your CI, and plenty more.
|
| If github disappears tomorrow, all the code will be safe and
| decentralized already, yes, but most of the workflow of the
| software world would be significantly stunted for a good while,
| because everyone would need to migrate to something else (like
| GitLab) and then take the time to rebuild all of the data and
| flow that is on Github but isn't captured within the actual git
| repository.
| xla wrote:
| This comment is spot on, people who jump to the conversation
| with the argument that Git is already decentralised don't
| understand where the most value is captured when it comes to
| collaboration. It's the social artifact, issues, PRs, etc.
| And the cost of migrating the community of a
| project/organisation and their social artifacts is a massive
| cost, carrying the risk of splitting the community and or
| stifling any other progress to stay relevant.
| cloudhead wrote:
| Have you used GitHub? It adds a bunch of functionality on top
| of git.
| varbhat wrote:
| I don't understand how using Radicle will free my code as they
| say in the site.
|
| So,how is using Radicle better than:
|
| 1. main repo on https://github.com
|
| 2. mirror repo on https://repo.or.cz
|
| 3. mirror repo on https://codeberg.org
|
| 4. local backup on my device and hard-disk.
|
| peer-to-peer is beautiful concept but note that git is already
| distributed VCS. you can have many remotes and mirrors. Just that
| p2p is not necessary here in git and using Radicle doesn't free
| my Code.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| GitHub is more than just a git host.
|
| It has an issue tracker, pull request manager, manages releases
| and users,... All this cannot be replicated with a simple "git
| clone".
|
| What Radicle seems to do is to offer some sort of social
| network on top of git. The novelty here is not the
| decentralized nature of git, in fact it is what radicle relies
| on to make its social network decentralized.
| LockAndLol wrote:
| So you need 3 accounts on 3 different services to achieve what
| radicle does.
|
| OK, let's say you use your Github account for all of them
| instead, now you have centralized your accounts and if you're
| another youtube-dl, Popcorn-Time or just happen to be unlucky
| enough have the nationality of a country that the USA likes to
| hate against, that account is gone.
|
| As for updating all those mirrors, how do you do that? `git
| push --all` ? `git push --mirror` ? Is git configured to so
| automatically? Or are you going to configure push hooks on one
| of those services?
|
| What about your issue/ticket and PR/MR management? Where will
| that be? Are you going to use an in-git solution like
| https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug, somehow sync everything
| using custom scripts or wait for
| https://forgefed.peers.community/ to be finalized and
| implemented by all code hosts?
|
| How are you going to collaborate with others?
|
| How are you going to introduce newcomers to all these options?
|
| Do you know of a tool that solves most (or all) of those
| issues?
| Proven wrote:
| In order to keep it simple I'll just use Github, sit out
| their downtime and spend no time to educate users because
| everyone knows how to use it or can find answers in seconds.
|
| This use is the same as for other distributed services - own
| your data, resist censorship, increase resilience, bla bla,
| but in reality there's 5 cases (out of 5 million) where this
| mattered. This would work better without crypto and
| decentralization B.S. but how to compete with a service and
| the deep pockets of Gitlab and Github...
|
| Put simply, if you care about your project, you won't bother
| with this stuff because you lose users and contributors (as
| long as Github and Gitlab censorship is limited as it
| currently is).
|
| Right now your total addressable market is like 5 projects
| deemed illegal in the US.
| half-kh-hacker wrote:
| If your main repo lives on GitHub, your (primary) issue
| tracking is tied to GitHub.
| varbhat wrote:
| Actually, it's not fault of git. Workflow of git takes place
| through email and patches.
|
| But,github wanted to make this process easier for the
| people,hence they included issues,fork and PR model. It was
| easily done with intuitive interface without necessity of
| email for workflow, but if you have asked me, i would have
| issues,wiki,etc. integrated within repo just like Fossil VCS.
|
| p2p is cool but not solution to this . gitea/gitlab/etc.
| already provide importing of issues with repos and if
| not,they must provide that feature.
| xwvvvvwx wrote:
| > if you have asked me, i would have issues,wiki,etc.
| integrated within repo just like Fossil VCS.
|
| This is exactly what radicle does.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| > Actually, it's not fault of git. Workflow of git takes
| place through email and patches.
|
| This invokes the "it's not a bug, it's a feature"
| mechanism. E.g. Fossil has no problem integrating issues,
| merge requests, and wiki pages _inside_ its repositories.
| varbhat wrote:
| Actually, Gitlab and Gitea allows mirror of Github repos
| with Issues/wiki/PR etc. So, having issues in Github is
| not at all problem.
|
| I just gave you example of Fossil VCS which has
| issues,PR,etc. baked into VCS itself.
|
| Actually,what Radicle is doing is to extend git with p2p
| and not inventing new VCS with issues,etc. baked in.
|
| What i am telling is that p2p doesn't solve this unclear
| problem and p2p isn't much beneficial to git.
|
| And will there be enough peers to guarantee availability
| of repo ?
| viraptor wrote:
| > Actually, Gitlab and Gitea allows mirror of Github
| repos with Issues/wiki/PR etc.
|
| But GitHub does not mirror the issues/PRs from anyone, so
| it's a very one-sided connection.
| varbhat wrote:
| That's problem of GitHub.
| viraptor wrote:
| Yes, but that's a problem for the users which GitHub has
| every incentive to never solve. It is a problem of github
| and projects like radicle are a solution.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| And, by extension, all of its users.
| cloudhead wrote:
| So when GitHub is down, how do users know to pull from your
| mirrors? How about push?
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Notes in the readme? How long are you expecting one of the
| biggest websites in the world to be down?
| cloudhead wrote:
| A couple of hours[0]? One entire day[1]?
|
| [0]: https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/6/29/213066
| 74/git...
|
| [1]: https://github.blog/2018-10-30-oct21-post-incident-
| analysis/
| FpUser wrote:
| For some people like forever. Developers can be banned
| because their country/area happen to fall under US
| sanctions.
| berkes wrote:
| Or because a German law firm (ab)uses a US copyright
| directive that Github, a US company has to follow?
| Proven wrote:
| When you repo is on Radicle your users cannot find it to
| begin with.
|
| What about push? How many projects can't wait 15 minutes
| until Github or other service resumes normal service?
| meibo wrote:
| Why do I have to give them my email to even download the client?
| Is this a product or not?
|
| Sure sounds nice though, hope it turns out. Hope they are
| considering a web frontend for the network as well.
| dweberz wrote:
| you don't need to give your email to download the client no.
| rudolfs wrote:
| https://radicle.xyz/downloads.html
| viraptor wrote:
| Not sure why they started the what practice, but you can
| see the download link in the website repo:
| https://github.com/radicle-
| dev/radicle.xyz/pull/145/files#di...
|
| Specifically: mac https://releases.radicle.xyz/radicle-
| upstream-0.1.4.dmg Linux
| https://releases.radicle.xyz/radicle-
| upstream-0.1.4.AppImage
|
| Release bucket listing https://releases.radicle.xyz/
| adsweedler wrote:
| "Work securely offline"
|
| Is... is that a problem with GitHub that stops you from doing
| that?
| dutchmartin wrote:
| Well, reading issues is something you cannot when you are
| offline from github. Unless you downloaded them beforehand of
| course.
| cloudhead wrote:
| The design of GitHub means that your canonical upstream is only
| accessible through the internet, and so are your issues, PRs
| etc. If you're offline, you can't access it, and if GitHub is
| down, same story.
|
| Radicle, on the other hand, keeps all of this replicated
| locally, so push/pull works offline, and the code/social
| artifacts are replicated asynchronously, when you are online,
| but you don't need to be online to work with your project(s).
| arp242 wrote:
| GitHub has a pretty extensive API; it's not hard to write a
| simple script to clone all that data if you want to, or
| publish it somewhere else. I'd be surprised if there aren't
| already a dozen of those scripts floating around already.
| cloudhead wrote:
| That's not the same. You're talking about copying the data
| locally, but this still doesn't let you create issues for
| eg. offline.
| alkonaut wrote:
| How does push/pull work off line? That sounds impossible.
| Just scheduling a push doesn't actually push anything. That's
| like commuting to my local GitHub repo and having a scheduled
| push/pull every 10 minutes then?
| xla wrote:
| The reason you can push/pull works offline is that the
| database of radicle lives on your machine. Once you are
| online it will gossip with other peers to exchange updates
| of projects. This means that your workflow stays the same
| no matter connectivity and eventual the network
| convergences to communicate all relevant data. If you are
| interested in the details check out the docs:
| https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/understanding-radicle/why-
| radi...
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| You need internet for pull and push. I think(hoping) that they
| meant within a LAN it could work without internet.
| rsa25519 wrote:
| (I'm not shooting the messenger here) If so, that would mean
| pushing/pulling within the LAN only... which Git supports
| already
| toyg wrote:
| If Github is unreachable, you don't have a bugtracker, wiki
| etc. - you are working "blind".
| cloudhead wrote:
| You can't push within LAN and then have that automatically
| available when online to the wider network, unless you have
| some form of continuous replication to some public-facing
| host. This is what Radicle does for you.
| cloudhead wrote:
| No, the full feature-set is available offline. You can browse
| your repos and any other repo you replicated, and push/pull.
| What offline means is simply that your changes won't
| immediately be replicated to peers. But the full app
| experience (Read and write) works offline.
| fireattack wrote:
| This doesn't look like "alternative to GitHub" to me; you don't
| need to download any client to use GitHub and having a nice web
| interface is one of the most defining feature of GitHub.
| thruflo22 wrote:
| GitHub is a "social coding" platform that provides
| collaboration features (access control, issues, etc) on top of
| Git.
|
| This is a social coding tool that provides collaboration
| features on top of Git.
|
| It provides a desktop app because it's peer to peer. That's an
| advantage over a web UI for developers looking to avoid a
| dependency on a centralised third party.
|
| You are free to continue to play in walled gardens but this is
| very much an alternative to that.
| fireattack wrote:
| Well the disadvantage is it doesn't even have a Windows
| client.
| viraptor wrote:
| This is a first announced beta release. It doesn't have a
| few planned features. I'm sure windows build will happen at
| some point too.
| tpoacher wrote:
| Surely that's an advantage. :p
| fireattack wrote:
| I knew you're joking, but gatekeeping isn't what got
| GitHub this far.
| dessant wrote:
| Awesome project, though the perpetuation of open source software
| needing to be free is regrettable.
|
| > Software as it should be.
|
| > Free forever
|
| Mostly all popular projects need some form of funding, and
| setting the expectaction of a free lunch forever for new users is
| not healthy. Btw, do you remember who used the tagline "It's free
| and always will be"? It was Facebook.
| xla wrote:
| Important to note that "Free" here doesn't refer to "for free".
| You rpoint about funding of popular projects was at the heart
| of radicle from the beginning. We believe that FOSS as backbone
| of the digital infrastructure needs to be sustainable, which
| includes the resources/funds to maintain it and keep it free
| and open. If you wanna find out more about the philosophy we
| follow, here is the original research and premise:
| http://oscoin.io/
| merelydev wrote:
| I think it is Free as in Freedom.
| saberd wrote:
| So free as in open source, why is this called free and not
| open then?
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| Free is a term used by the community for decades, literally
| in the name of the Free Software Foundation. I guess you
| could argue that their need to explain what free means
| indicates it was a bad choice to use, but it is pretty
| standard now.
|
| https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software
| dessant wrote:
| That's possible, but they also mention "Completely open
| source" in the same list, and that would make "Free as in
| Freedom" redundant.
| zeusflight wrote:
| I don't know what 'free' means for the project, but open
| source and 'free as in freedom' are not redundant these
| days. While open source is legally indistinguishable from
| free software, time has proven that open source software
| can be designed in non-free ways. Examples:
|
| - Bloating codebase so much that it can't be audited,
| extended or forked easily
|
| - Tightly controlling the development
|
| - Open shims for opaque blobs
|
| - Hiding documentation and troubleshooting information
|
| Freedom is more about intent than definitions.
| samatman wrote:
| The unfortunate conflation of libre and gratis in the English
| language is... not a new observation on your part.
| Taek wrote:
| I've been back and forth with members of the open source
| community a few times on this, and it seems like a battle that
| isn't going to be won. Software that has a price tag attached
| to it is unlikely to be accepted as open source, from what I
| can tell.
|
| Which makes me wonder: should we come up with a new
| name/classification for software that is 'free as in freedom'
| but not 'free as in beer'?
| htrap wrote:
| We are building https://gitopia.org
|
| - Permanent Data Storage provided by Arweave
|
| - Works from within git with the help of git-remote-helper `npm
| install -g git-remote-gitopia` so no need to learn new tooling
|
| - Built-in incentivization to token holders who also take part in
| the governance of Gitopia
|
| - Token holders share revenue made by the platform
|
| - You can mirror your GitHub repositories now using the Github
| Mirror Action. Follow step by step from here
| -https://thetechtrap.com/posts/push-your-code-to-gitopia/
|
| - We are now working on the governance and collaboration
| workflows that will enable transparency in open source
| development and provide the stakeholders to have a say in the
| direction of the project.
|
| You can reach out to us on
|
| https://twitter.com/gitopiaOrg
|
| https://discord.gg/mVpQVW3vKE
| olah_1 wrote:
| > - Permanent Data Storage provided by Arweave
|
| This kind of thing always makes me sweat. Are deletes at all
| possible? What if someone accidentally pushes keys to the repo?
| On regular github, at least you can nuke the whole repo and
| start over if need be.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| Those keys absolutely need to be rotated, regardless of
| whether you delete the commit or repo after accidentally
| pushing them.
|
| At which point you may as well leave them there...
| olah_1 wrote:
| I agree, but is it possible to delete at all on ARWeave?
| Let's say someone accidentally puts their full name and
| address in a repo.
| labawi wrote:
| Keys probably aren't the best example. What about PII,
| accidentally committed "test" data, documents, nudes,
| whatever..
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| If repos are public, then you must assume that once
| something is pushed then someone has copied it.
|
| You may get lucky and remove/hide it fast enough, or
| think you did...
|
| This is an with Github today, all public repos are being
| watched by bots reviewing all commits for accidentally-
| pushed credentials.
|
| The only solution is to not use a public repo.
| olah_1 wrote:
| You're not answering the question. Is it possible to
| delete or not?
|
| On GitHub yes someone might be watching, but deletes are
| still possible.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| I don't know. You can always clean the Git history &
| force-push it, but the developers would have to explain
| if there's any backups or archive kept anywhere...
| htrap wrote:
| Since data is stored permanently on Arweave, there's no
| way to remove it from the blockchain. However, you could
| force push your repo which would remove your concerned
| commit from Gitopia repository view.
| htrap wrote:
| Link to git-remote-gitopia source hosted on Gitopia:
|
| https://gitopia.org/#/z_TqsbmVJOKzpuQH4YrYXv_Q0DrkwDwc0UqapR...
| lftherios wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your work and great to see more attempts
| on the same problem. I am one of the maintainers of the Radicle
| project.
|
| The main problem we encountered with similar systems that rely
| on blockchains / dht for storage is the problem of 'blockchain
| poisoning'.
|
| This is when someone deliberately adds illegal content to an
| append-only source in hopes to make the sole act of replicating
| the project legally problematic, as correctly pointed out by
| Konstantin Ryabitsev of the Linux foundation with regards to a
| previous version of Radicle that was relying on IPFS. see
| https://radicle.community/t/the-radicle-social-model/317
| Taek wrote:
| I think you could add moderation to a project like this much
| the same way you can add moderation to a centralized project.
| You don't need to be as heavy handed as "community voting",
| you could just have each client nominate a moderator who is
| able to append instructions to ignore content that the client
| would follow.
|
| Under this model, every user (or project) can choose their
| own moderators, which means you don't have to worry about
| other parts of the community having different ideas for ideal
| moderation - each project/user can subscribe to the
| moderation feeds that they like, and ensure that they get a
| clean experience.
|
| This type of moderation is actually an upgrade from
| centralized systems, because it is much easier to nominate
| new moderators if you don't like what the old moderators are
| doing.
| htrap wrote:
| Considering the illegal content is added by someone who has
| access to the repository. The right way to address that would
| be via community voting, which then can decide to hide it
| from the platform since the data is permanent on Arweave.
| This governance workflow will enable the community to make
| such content policies.
| enw wrote:
| I just want to publish some code.
|
| Now I need to worry about blockchains and tokens and
| voting?
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Hey FYI your landing page gave me this error, Firefox ESR
| 78.5.0. Right now it's a big blank screen with no content.
|
| {...}
|
| code: "EACCES"
|
| errno: 13
|
| message: "Error: EACCES: Permission denied."
|
| path: undefined
|
| stack: "n@https://gitopia.org/main.js:277:55609\non/<@https://g
| itopia....
|
| syscall: ""
|
| <prototype>: Object { constructor: n(t, n, r), toString:
| toString(), toJSON: toJSON() , ... } main.js:339:94885 c
| https://gitopia.org/main.js:339 configure
| https://gitopia.org/main.js:277 store
| https://gitopia.org/main.js:277 on
| https://gitopia.org/main.js:277
| htrap wrote:
| Thanks for flagging this. We'll look into it. Meanwhile you
| can try from a different browser.
| ape4 wrote:
| The "push" icon looks like he's pulling
| okokok___ wrote:
| what blockchain are you using?
| okokok___ wrote:
| nvm found it. It's something I've never heard of called
| `arweave`
| simias wrote:
| I'm not sure I see the point of building a complex platform
| with governance and whatnot. What I want is an easy way to
| publish my projects and for other people to contribute, I need
| something more like email (independent, self-hosted servers
| with a well defined protocol to communicate between them) than
| Facebook.
|
| I don't care about the governance of my git remote, or getting
| money out of it. I care about it being reliable, fast and
| simple. If I'm unhappy with it I want to be easily able to
| switch to a different host, or create my own.
|
| Frankly I would be perfectly fine with the current situation
| where you have a bunch of effectively centralized code hosting
| solutions (github, gitlab, bitbucket etc...) if you could
| trivially move your project from one to an other. For the code
| it's easy, git is built that way. For issues, PRs and the like
| it's trickier.
|
| For me that's the problem that needs solving, I don't need an
| ultra complicated blockchain-powered solution where people can
| vote for the font of the UI with cryptotokens.
|
| At a glance, and if I understand it correctly, Radicle seems
| more pragmatic in that way. Cryptocurrency is used for donation
| and securing entries in the global namespace in a decentralized
| way, the rest is just a bunch of standalone servers. Then you
| can decide to host your code on an existing instance or spawn
| your own. A bit like how Mastodon works for instance.
| whichquestion wrote:
| The best solution from my perspective for the community would
| be to have a standard that handles issues/prs and the like
| that could be taken from one code hosting solution to
| another. Just like how you can take your code with ease from
| one solution to the next by cloning.
|
| It's the same idea that we already use for our code but
| applied to all the other bits that are necessary for
| maintaining projects.
|
| There are some pretty obvious problems with actually
| implementing this, however. One of which comes down to
| getting all the existing code hosting solutions to agree on a
| standard. As they could simply create ancillary standards to
| differentiate thenselves. Not to mention all the work
| involved in implementing this when most people are accepting
| of what we have now (until it bites them somehow).
| Taek wrote:
| We've been building a platform called Skynet which makes
| this possible. It has a user-oriented data model: all of
| the application code is run client-side, and all of the
| data is stored under the user's control.
|
| That means that someone can create a new application at any
| time which has access to all of the data - because all of
| the data is accessed client-side and owned by clients in
| the first place.
|
| This doesn't solve the standards problem, but on the other
| hand I think what would likely happen is the first project
| to become successful would also become more or less the
| standard, with other people building extensions to that
| data standard over time.
| fabianhjr wrote:
| There is a project working on that over ActivityPub:
| https://forgefed.peers.community/
|
| There are some established forges participating (like
| sourcehut)
| htrap wrote:
| I feel that there is a real need for permanent Storage with
| respect to Open Source.
|
| Code breaks when old packages are unpublished or repositories
| deleted. Push once and fetch forever solves this.
|
| Also Centralized solutions are providing open source
| collaboration tools for free, storage for free, because of
| their revenue from enterprise customers.
|
| What happens when they decide to shut down? or change their
| policies? or just comply with wrongful takedown notices?
| berkes wrote:
| Would IPFS or DAT not suffice there? How is 'another
| permanent storage, that is a piece of a larger project,
| better than one that has the sole purpose and focus?
| Taek wrote:
| The challenge with IPFS and DAT is that you have no
| guarantees around the data reliability. The DHT style of
| p2p sharing pretty much only works for popular content.
| Incentivized storage networks can onboard any type of
| data and guarantee high uptime.
|
| It's also been my experience that IPFS has significant
| performance issues. If you use a professional gateway
| like ipfs.io or cloudflare it runs at good speeds but as
| soon as you switch to being fully peer-to-peer it's
| almost unusable.
|
| I don't have much experience with DAT, it may not have
| the same performance issues.
|
| disclaimer: I work on an incentivized storage network
| called Skynet
| simias wrote:
| With git it's rare for a project that's actually in use to
| go completely memory-holed, every contributor effectively
| having a local copy of the resource.
|
| Using git (generally github) repositories for dependency
| management is, IMO, a hack and so it's not surprising that
| it often breaks. I like the way buildroot handles it (I'm
| sure they're not the only ones, but that's the one project
| I'm most familiar with):
|
| - The buildroot buildbot fetches third party packages
| dependencies and archive them.
|
| - When you build your buildroot image locally, it attempts
| to fetch from the third party directly. If the file doesn't
| exist anymore, it falls back onto the buildroot cache
| instead.
|
| You could also easily add your own caching layer in there
| if you wanted too. I think that's distributed computing at
| its best: simple and robust, with a clear and easily
| understandable architecture. No blockchain-based proof-of-
| stake distributed storage, just a series of wget. And of
| course since everything is authenticated with a strong hash
| it's always perfectly safe.
| StavrosK wrote:
| How about hosting your own Gitea instance? It works quite
| well.
| adkadskhj wrote:
| I think that works - but what GP mentioned is where it
| fails:
|
| > Frankly I would be perfectly fine with the current
| situation where you have a bunch of effectively centralized
| code hosting solutions (github, gitlab, bitbucket etc...)
| if you could trivially move your project from one to an
| other. For the code it's easy, git is built that way. For
| issues, PRs and the like it's trickier.
|
| Maybe there's a nice way to Gitea distribute this
| information among Gitea instances, though it doesn't seem
| advertised as such - as this would basically make Gitea
| some neat Federated tool i think.
|
| Ultimately i'd like Git[ea|whatever] to be just a frontend
| for a database that behaves like Git. In the way same way
| that Github's Source Viewing is just a frontend for Git.
| You don't worry about moving your Source data between
| Github and Gitlab, so why are we worrying about universal
| data like Bug tickets, Feature tracking, etc.
|
| I'm a massive fan of systems that behave like Git and
| Scuttlebutt. Which is to say, they're dumb - simple. Git
| can be pushed and pulled from basically everything. There's
| no complex suite of nodes around the world that are
| expected or assumed to operate for any Git functionality.
| In the same way Scuttlebutt - which offers P2P layers, is
| similarly dumb _(though less so, unfortunately)_ when
| compared to more complex P2P offerings like IPFS.
|
| In my ideal world we'd have a database to pair with Git
| that would have some very basic schemas to complement Git.
| Possibly even baked into Git. Such that when you move from
| Github to Gitlab to Gitea - everything truly essential
| comes with. Some things might change, like your CI if it
| was bound to Github - but still. Losing some things vs
| losing everything.
|
| I personally am less concerned about using Github/etc. Ie
| i'm not dying for someone to give me a new Github. I'm
| seeking a way to reduce lockin.
|
| NOTE: I'm working on a distributed database that fits my
| needs on my above design goals. Really it's just Git + some
| additional data structures which allow for more data types
| being stored, such as binary and structured data to build
| foundations for SQL layers and etc. It's not intended for
| general use, but i'd love to see someone pick up the idea
| and run with it. "Git for Data" has been done a couple
| times, NomsDB and DoltDB namely, but they still felt like
| they weren't Git-like in that they wanted to centralize -
| probably for SaaS reasons.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Would recommend OneDev.
|
| https://onedev.io
| bachmeier wrote:
| They need to remove some clutter from that landing page.
| badgerivy wrote:
| Just read between the lines.
| xipho wrote:
| > I need something more like email (independent, self-hosted
| servers with a well defined protocol to communicate between
| them)
|
| The problem with email servers is you need a special type of
| sys admin to maintain them properly, they are not for the
| light at heart when used anywhere beyond the most trivial
| case. Any server that grows to some well-used size has a
| myriad of problems (getting outright blacklisted, etc).
| djsumdog wrote:
| Well, that's e-mail. Modern federated systems don't have a
| different server for sending and one for receiving.
| ActivyPub implementations are usually a single application
| with a database (like Pleroma) or a single app plus
| db/reddis/elasticsearch(optional) like Mastodon. Mastodon
| has official Docker containers, and it's not difficult to
| build one for Pleroma.
|
| So you can make something "like e-mail" that isn't as bad
| as SMTP/IMAP/SPF/DKIM/etc... I've been considering hosting
| my own Gogs or Gitlab or one of the other locally hosted
| git platforms. I'd like to see something that allows
| pull/merge requests between them (you'd need some spam
| prevention of course; maybe require a message and a follow
| before people are allowed to push an request to your
| server).
|
| This project ... doesn't seem like it does that at all.
| It's a desktop application .. with no real web view into
| your projects. I feel like it's missing a component, a
| service run in a docker container that you can program with
| your Device ID and push your public repos to for others to
| see.
| StavrosK wrote:
| The analogy broke down before that, you don't have
| reputation problems hosting a Gitea instance.
| vicek22 wrote:
| You might be interested in
| https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug. It stores issues
| directly in the git repository so the whole issue tracker is
| as distributed as the rest of your code. I can't speak to the
| UX though.
| dastx wrote:
| This seems pretty cool, is there a demo of the Web UI?
| withPurpose9973 wrote:
| No thanks.
|
| Setting up git repos on a local machine is easy enough.
|
| Sorry/not sorry web-heads, but distributed ephemeral everything
| on a magical network no one can intuit is going backwards.
|
| Importing yet another pie in the sky idea is a non-starter. It's
| humans doing human wanky nonsense. Not much of a revolution at
| this point.
| sdan wrote:
| It's weird to think P2P is becoming all the craze for "privacy"
| while it's the backbone of the internet: it is p2p. It's just
| nowadays its more of P2(big cloud servers)2p; which could be a
| good thing depending on who you ask and your usecases.
| sktrdie wrote:
| I always thought maintaining servers was silly since BitTorrent
| already proved we can achieve higher bandwidth throughput using
| lots of clients communicating together.
|
| But p2p is more about the network connectivity than whether the
| node is an Amazon server or a mobile phone. The normal Web for
| instance does not build on this network nodes capabilities. We
| need more apps that build these kind of collaborative and self-
| sustainable networks
| skohan wrote:
| I mean it works in the use-case where you have a single file
| version everyone is hosting, but it gets a lot more
| complicated when you're talking about dynamic content doesn't
| it? For instance how would you synchronize all the content on
| a hacker news thread between all the clients?
| gitweb wrote:
| Look into how the Linux Kernel and other projects do development.
| I think a larger issue is why do we need a platform like GitHub
| when SCM can be done through email?
| MartijnBraam wrote:
| This seems so unnecessary, replace the blockchain stuff with
| email and you have git as it was originally intended. no custom
| software needed.
| arp242 wrote:
| There are so many issues with email that I'm not even sure
| where to start, and they've been repeated many times in
| previous HN threads anyway. Suffice to say that clearly it
| doesn't work for a lot of people, because otherwise we'd all be
| using it.
| dweberz wrote:
| I believe you didn't even read the text. Ethereum is used to
| send money to maintainers. not sure how email does that...
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| To add to that: there are several major stablecoins on
| Ethereum: USDT, which is backed by BitFinex and has $12
| billion in circulation, USDC from Coinbase/Circle with $3
| billion in circulation, GUSD, from Gemini, BUSD from Binance
| with $700M in circulation, and DAI, which is decentralized
| and has $1 billion in circulation.
|
| These are all ERC20 tokens so easy to integrate into Radicle,
| and offer a way to allow developers to get paid peer-to-peer
| while completely avoiding the price volatility of typical
| cryptocurrencies.
| t0astbread wrote:
| How can email alone replace GitHub? Email with something like
| GitHub (like sourcehut) maybe but "no custom software"
| definitely not.
| snvzz wrote:
| Trying to read the website drove me away.
|
| There's a time and a place for this sort of web design. I feel
| strongly that presenting some software to technical minded people
| is not.
| ryanar wrote:
| I spent a lot of time watching the GIFs on repeat rather than
| reading the text on the web page. It is quirky, I like the style,
| but it is a distraction from the message.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I wonder if they started on an Ethereum 2.0 L2 implementation.
| Maybe it can actually be almost the same thing?
| cloudhead wrote:
| Almost the same thing as what?
| ilaksh wrote:
| As L1
| cloudhead wrote:
| Yeah, we will eventually move to L2 if it is able to
| deliver what L1 does at a cheaper cost. Currently this
| isn't the case, as only token transfers are possible on L2.
| NickRRau wrote:
| Is it possible to self host this and isolate it on your own p2p
| network? Would be really cool to handle the decentralized part on
| my own computers without needing to hook into the global p2p.
|
| Gonna keep an eye on it.
| xla wrote:
| That's absolutely possible. Everyone is empowered and
| encouraged to run their own seed nodes. Which would allow you
| to have an isolated network. Check the docs to find out how to
| run your own: https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/using-
| radicle/running-a-seed-n...
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