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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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...
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.
Why not? You can create issues with the GitHub API (and the CLI); it's not hard to imagine a tool which would "sync" issues from a local database or some such. The reason it doesn't exist is probably because there's not a lot of demand for it.
Come to think of it, it wouldn't even be that difficult to sync this database to someone else, too. Although to be honest this doesn't seem all that useful to me.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't understand how people think this is damning with no further context, especially on a forum presumably full of technical people. Virtually all of that (>9MB) are its gifs.
9MB of dozens of analytics.js files? Sure, awful.
9MB of gifs and <1000KB of html/css on a landing page? Who cares.
Btw, for lack of a kinder word off the top of my head, your rant about some images on the landing page is very juvenile. The tone of "hmm, it would be a shame if your design choices made me assume you were technically incompetent and a waste of my time :/" is really toxic.
Everyone here would understand what you mean if you just said the landing page was over the top for you. Fine. OP would know that a bold design to be divisive. And frankly some self-awareness on your part would help temper your reaction here instead of dramatizing it and sounding wounded.
Similarly, claiming that a project interested you but you couldn't even get past a landing page because it had some gifs is really just your loss, not anybody else's. Once again, had you just said "I wish there was a more informative page" (which is certainly a fair ask), someone could have linked you to https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/what-is-radicle.html.
I know that now it seems like I'm the one overreacting, but your comment has some tropes of really bad communication habits that we tend to think are just part of internet discourse, but they aren't doing you justice.
I care. Wasting other people's resources is bad manners and contributes to a culture where waste is acceptable.
> waste of my time :/" is really toxic.
It was honest feedback. If others feel the same way the product marketing team is making a potentially serious mistake. Give me info, not anime android animations. It wasn't toxic.
> but you couldn't even get past a landing page because it had some gifs is really just your loss, not anybody else's.
If other people feel the same way, it very definitely stops being my problem and becomes the product's problem as people get turned off it. That was a core point you missed.
> but your comment ... but they aren't doing you justice
Thanks (genuinely) but I stand by this. It said what was wrong (IMO). it said what I wanted (again IMO), it was honest if blunt feedback the marketeers could use to decide if my point had merit (if they can admit they might have been wrong).
We differ but I appreciate your constructive feedback.
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.
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.
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.
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, ...)
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 :)
I think page design standards need drastic changes, but to be honest I thought this page was broken the first couple of times I visited. I'm still not convinced there isn't some broken elements involved in its appearance.
That being said, I'm all for distributed systems so I hope for the best with this (without meaning to imply anything about it one way or another relative to other similar things that have been developed).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know about git-send-email. But you still need some kind of website for project info and code (unless you only wanna give out your code on request via email) and a patch/bug tracker if you want your project to be approachable. Larger projects and business users might also want CI.
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.
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/
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.
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
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'?
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.)
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.
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.
this is naïve. 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.
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.
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.
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.
> and pay out everyones' bonus checks at the end of the year
Yes. This is understated. Poor(financially) developers need to make money with lowest resistance(cost). Then, when you have enough for yourself and family, you can help or join rebels to fight for whatever you think is right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.investopedia.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.
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.
Somebody still needs to agree to hosting your data. Incentivizing peers to host your encrypted data is not a solved problem. IPFS is trying to bootstrap some cryptocurrency to fix that but they seems to be taking their sweet time with that.
So, ultimately, you always end up with somebody providing the convenience of not throwing your data away for a fee. Github and Gitlab seem to be the popular options for that. Gitlab is actually open source and you can self host it if you want and many do. But the reason they have a nice valuation is that they have lots of customers that prefer them to do it.
Given that it's MIT Licensed, you can even do that and offer it as a service probably (Amazon, there's a nice idea for you :-) ).
> IPFS is trying to bootstrap some cryptocurrency to fix that but they seems to be taking their sweet time with that
AFAIK, Filecoin is live now, and seems you can use it now for getting peers to host your IPFS data.
But, I'm also unsure that incentivizing peers with actual money is the best and/or only solution. BitTorrent works today for free, many peers are seeding content just to be seeders. DC++ worked yesterday, where people shared data just to share data.
While probably offering money for storing data will get more people onboard to store others data, it doesn't seem to be the only solution we have at hand to get free sharing of data.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadhttps://radicale.org/3.0.html
The team behind it seems super responsive and engaged.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
But GitHub does not mirror the issues/PRs from anyone, so it's a very one-sided connection.
This is exactly what radicle does.
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.
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?
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.
What about push? How many projects can't wait 15 minutes until Github or other service resumes normal service?
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/6/29/21306674/git...
[1]: https://github.blog/2018-10-30-oct21-post-incident-analysis/
Sure sounds nice though, hope it turns out. Hope they are considering a web frontend for the network as well.
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/
Is... is that a problem with GitHub that stops you from doing that?
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).
Come to think of it, it wouldn't even be that difficult to sync this database to someone else, too. Although to be honest this doesn't seem all that useful to me.
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.
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?
Radicle attempts to take back control (just like running your own instance), but without giving up network effects.
I can’t see the point for projects that don’t run this risk though.
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.
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.
[0]: https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri
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.
I don't understand how people think this is damning with no further context, especially on a forum presumably full of technical people. Virtually all of that (>9MB) are its gifs.
9MB of dozens of analytics.js files? Sure, awful.
9MB of gifs and <1000KB of html/css on a landing page? Who cares.
Btw, for lack of a kinder word off the top of my head, your rant about some images on the landing page is very juvenile. The tone of "hmm, it would be a shame if your design choices made me assume you were technically incompetent and a waste of my time :/" is really toxic.
Everyone here would understand what you mean if you just said the landing page was over the top for you. Fine. OP would know that a bold design to be divisive. And frankly some self-awareness on your part would help temper your reaction here instead of dramatizing it and sounding wounded.
Similarly, claiming that a project interested you but you couldn't even get past a landing page because it had some gifs is really just your loss, not anybody else's. Once again, had you just said "I wish there was a more informative page" (which is certainly a fair ask), someone could have linked you to https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/what-is-radicle.html.
I know that now it seems like I'm the one overreacting, but your comment has some tropes of really bad communication habits that we tend to think are just part of internet discourse, but they aren't doing you justice.
I care. Wasting other people's resources is bad manners and contributes to a culture where waste is acceptable.
> waste of my time :/" is really toxic.
It was honest feedback. If others feel the same way the product marketing team is making a potentially serious mistake. Give me info, not anime android animations. It wasn't toxic.
> but you couldn't even get past a landing page because it had some gifs is really just your loss, not anybody else's.
If other people feel the same way, it very definitely stops being my problem and becomes the product's problem as people get turned off it. That was a core point you missed.
> could have linked you to https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/what-is-radicle.html.
Why in your view was this not on the front page at the top?
(edit, and see this link & earlier reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25321788)
> but your comment ... but they aren't doing you justice
Thanks (genuinely) but I stand by this. It said what was wrong (IMO). it said what I wanted (again IMO), it was honest if blunt feedback the marketeers could use to decide if my point had merit (if they can admit they might have been wrong).
We differ but I appreciate your constructive feedback.
https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/what-is-radicle.html
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.
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.
I bet there are _some_ early web software pages that would resemble this page.
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 :)
That being said, I'm all for distributed systems so I hope for the best with this (without meaning to imply anything about it one way or another relative to other similar things that have been developed).
I can only digest the content properly if I stand a couple of meters away
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.
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-send-email
Git was designed for patches (diffs) to be sent in email. That’s how many people used it before GitHub.
I am wondering if it can host private repository as well, or is it just meant to host public repositories?
> 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.
https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software
- 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.
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'?
You think it would be better if we gated access to a valuable technology behind something that excludes people without money to spend?
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
I hope Radicle gets a lot of funding and tons of adoption.
[0] https://github.com/sit-fyi
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.
1: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. This is understated. Poor(financially) developers need to make money with lowest resistance(cost). Then, when you have enough for yourself and family, you can help or join rebels to fight for whatever you think is right.
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.
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.
In this particular case Radicle came out of OScoin (or is the new incarnation of it?) and was funded by BlueYard.
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...
I'll readily admit there are very few yes-p2p and no-blockchain projects out there, but we exist
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.investopedia.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/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion...
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.
So, ultimately, you always end up with somebody providing the convenience of not throwing your data away for a fee. Github and Gitlab seem to be the popular options for that. Gitlab is actually open source and you can self host it if you want and many do. But the reason they have a nice valuation is that they have lots of customers that prefer them to do it.
Given that it's MIT Licensed, you can even do that and offer it as a service probably (Amazon, there's a nice idea for you :-) ).
AFAIK, Filecoin is live now, and seems you can use it now for getting peers to host your IPFS data.
But, I'm also unsure that incentivizing peers with actual money is the best and/or only solution. BitTorrent works today for free, many peers are seeding content just to be seeders. DC++ worked yesterday, where people shared data just to share data.
While probably offering money for storing data will get more people onboard to store others data, it doesn't seem to be the only solution we have at hand to get free sharing of data.