Radicle: The Sovereign Forge

Posted by ibobev 9 hours ago

Radicle: The Sovereign Forge(radicle.xyz)

231 points | 114 commentspage 2

rirze 6 hours ago|

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.

mxuribe 3 hours ago||

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.

iamnothere 3 hours ago||

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 2 hours ago||

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! :-)

lorenzleutgeb 3 hours ago||

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 2 hours ago||

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!

eigenspace 8 hours ago||

Anyone familiar with both projects that can give a comparison with the work happening on Forgejo (i.e. Forgefed protocal)?

lorenzleutgeb 7 hours ago|

Radicle is peer to peer. There are no "instances" or "servers" you interact with. The process that runs on your machine to synchronize changes across the network is the same as you would run on a server somewhere else. This is the core difference in network topology.

What Forgejo are working on is to have their servers/instances communicate with each other via ActivityPub (IIRC). Think about it more like GitHub : Forgejo :: Twitter : Mastodon and possibly Filesharing : BitTorrent :: Software Development : Radicle.

With Forgejo, every instance has its own database of user accounts, and controls who may log in or not (and so on). This is not the case with Radicle. Since there is no such authority, user accounts are self-certifying.

For repositories, since there is no "standard location" like "the server", Radicle has developed a way to abstract from the user namespaces of the maintainers of a repo, to a canonical namespace. This is how references are lifted from individuals to a project. Not by having a copy on some particular server with access control. Of course, Radicle also has access control, but it is tied to the self-certifying identities, not to some server.

__MatrixMan__ 3 hours ago||

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 7 hours ago||

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 7 hours ago|

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...

wantlotsofcurry 8 hours ago||

Radicle, Tangled, etc are the future of forges!

HexDecOctBin 7 hours ago|

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 7 hours ago||

I don't see any revenue streams, just VC funding. Which raises all kinds of red flags.

acedTrex 7 hours ago||

Damn the UI feels great, actually kind of eerie

jrm4 7 hours ago||

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 7 hours ago|

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.

k__ 7 hours ago||

Is Radworks/$RAD still a thing?

lorenzleutgeb 7 hours ago|

First, to make this clear: The Radicle network is not dependent on any blockchain technology, you can use it without holding any cryptocurrency/token. You do not need a wallet. You just need to generate an Ed25519 keypair for yourself.

Radworks and RAD are still a thing, and the last vote (https://community.radworks.org/t/3698 and https://community.radworks.org/t/3703) was to fund Radworks App (https://radworks.org/app), Drips (https://www.drips.network/), Radicle Garden (https://radicle.garden/).

Radicle development is funded by the Better Internet Foundation (https://betterinternet.foundation/), previously called "Radicle Foundation".

RAD "tokenomics" are discussed here: https://community.radworks.org/t/3645/

k__ 6 hours ago||

Thanks!

We cooperated with Radicle a few years ago, when they wer big in crypto. However, suddenly I saw posts here that were well received and noticed there wasn't any mention of $RAD on the radicle page anymore.

More comments...