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Posted by ibobev 1/23/2026

Radicle: The Sovereign Forge(radicle.xyz)
286 points | 144 commentspage 2
rirze 1/23/2026|
Been using radicle with jj for a little bit now-- just a toy project with only myself contributing and it's neat.

Hopefully it will scale well and be ergonomic for collaboration.

toastal 3 days ago||
I would be much happier if folks were trying to do with something revolutionary in terms of VCSs instead of always being yet more Git tooling.
__MatrixMan__ 1/23/2026||
I believe that one day, the bad guys are gonna level up such that centralized forges can't withstand corruption and we're gonna be real glad that people have been working on things like this all along.
ilaksh 1/23/2026||
Can radicle seeds run over IPV6? Seems like since IPV6 doesn't have NAT it should be a big advantage for p2p and as it becomes more available the need for everyone to set up port forwarding or get a VPS to seed should go down.

ISPs will try to block use of IPV6 for serving content, but eventually I think users will win because ultimately it should be a right to share information.

lorenzleutgeb 1/23/2026|
Yes. Radicle also makes it easy to run behind Tor, see https://radicle.xyz/guides/user#4-embracing-the-onion and there are people that use it via Yggdrasil, see https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/services.html#radicle-no...
jrm4 1/23/2026||
Interesting. I've been critical on "decentralized" for other types of communication (e.g. ATProto/Bluesky) because it seems to forget that "forgetting is sometimes good."

But this seems excellent for code, a thing that (to the extent you can or should be) is mostly apolitical.

endiangroup 1/23/2026|
AD: We're looking ad introducing 'forgetting' as a feature, there may be a mutually beneficial way of signalling to permissive seeds when content is no longer relevant or stale or actively been flagged for removal.
rurban 1/23/2026||
> Data integrity is guaranteed by Git.

> Synchronization is handled by Git.

> Causal dependencies can be modeled as commit parent-child relationships.

And there we have the problem. Git does not guarantee these things. Git is no CRDT. A proper replication protocol would, but git not. Git requires manual intervention to resolve coflicts. You end up with hourly conflicts, which need to be resolved manually, or not. Leading to inconsistencies all over when two people merge and resolve conflicts differently. Let not people merge, the system must handle this automatically. As in all online collaboration tools. Like Google Wave eg. If CRDT or as with databases PAXOS or single owner.

lorenzleutgeb 1/23/2026|
Where are you quoting from?

Radicle implements so called "collaborative objects" (think: issues, patches, anything that multiple users collaborate on; except the source code itself) as CRDTs: https://radicle.xyz/guides/protocol#collaborative-objects

rurban 1/23/2026||
Next paragraph. The conflicts are not resolved. Or just use the non-solution as in git (or wikis). Leave it to human manpower.
lorenzleutgeb 1/23/2026||
For the source code in the repository, conflicts must be merged by users (or their tools, like `mergiraf`), just like with any other Git repo containing source code.

What might confuse you is the mention that a collaborative object may opt in to ask the user to resolve a conflict. Well, in this case, strictly speaking, it's not a CRDT anymore of course. But none of the collaborative objects commonly used in Radicle use this escape hatch.

It is clear that Git itself does not give you CRDTs, but Radicle implemented CRDTs on top of Git, which is entirely possible. This is also what's explained in the Protocol Guide. I don't understand what's the misunderstanding here, sorry.

rurban 1/24/2026||
Not just the source is laden with conflicts. Also all other data. One rejects a PR, another merges it, the next still waits on a disapproval. This cannot work without CRDT. It's worse than source
acedTrex 1/23/2026||
Damn the UI feels great, actually kind of eerie
wantlotsofcurry 1/23/2026||
Radicle, Tangled, etc are the future of forges!
HexDecOctBin 1/23/2026|
What is the revenue model for Tangled? This is why ATProto stuff worries me, the AppView is expensive to host and no one has created a paid service yet to achieve sustainability.
phoronixrly 1/23/2026||
I don't see any revenue streams, just VC funding. Which raises all kinds of red flags.
mxuribe 1/23/2026||
Is it weird that one of the features that i look for in forge is the ability to star/bookmark a repo? But, since this is decentralized, makes sense that there is no central place to "house" said bookmark...So I'd either have to bookmark a repo using my browsers native, regular bookmarks....or in the future there could be feature to share, save/store said signal like the way ActivityPub, AT proto., etc.. handle it.
lorenzleutgeb 1/23/2026||
In the Radicle ecosystem, quite a few people like the idea to "seed" repos that they want to support. It means that you download the repo, and also announce to other nodes that you have it available to share. Thus, you are not only incrementing some counter in a central database, but you are actually contributing to the replication of the project on the network.

The number of seeds then is a similar indicator as the number of stars.

Of course, you can also just keep a list of repository IDs.

mxuribe 1/23/2026||
Kinda like legacy git cloning, but then of course sharing back not just with a signal (e.g. star, likes, etc.), but also actual contribution via replication of said source code...I love it!
iamnothere 1/23/2026||
As alternative git forges become more common, it might make sense to build a social bookmarking site for repos that can roll up repos from Radicle, Codeberg, Sourcehut, individual Gitlab instances, etc. Maybe it could include cross-platform search, alerting, and other tools.

This might address some of the trust and discovery questions posed elsewhere in the discussion.

mxuribe 1/23/2026||
I sure hope something like said bookmarking sites come to pass! Though, if such functionality gets incorporated into existing activitypub stacks (and not as separate tools), that works too! :-)
mistercheph 1/23/2026|
Awesome work! Just curious, has anyone worked on a tool for migrating github "collaborations"/ social artifacts to radicle, I'm confident this will be solved eventually as existing projects with treasured social artifacts on GH migrate, just curious about the current state.
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