Radicle: Open-Source, Peer-to-Peer, GitHub Alternative
https://radicle.xyz/
@opensource
This doesn’t pass the smell test.
- Instructs to pipe the output of
curlinsh - Assumes that
shisbash[1] - “Community” behind it is apparently originating in Berlin, and is now a “nonprofit foundation in Switzerland”, but has no publicly disclosed legal structure anymore.
- “Community” behind it uses discord, but not revolt, matrix, simplex or others.
- “Community” behind it uses twitter, but not mastodon.
- Cryptobros.
sh <(curl -sSf https://url.redacted/script)↩︎
Installing by piping from curl is pretty common and not a red flag in and of itself. Even Rust is installed this way. If you don’t trust the URL, you also shouldn’t trust any binary installers downloaded from that website.
Can you elaborate?
I was under the impression that there was some kind of consensus around rust being one of the safest languages to use. However, I’ve seen comments about rust being bad pop up in a few threads lately but they never explain why they think so.
For anyone who wonders, this is related to cryptocurrencies
The company running the project is heavily involved with cryptocurrency. https://radworks.org/
They seem to be running their own “DAO” as well. https://www.tally.xyz/gov/radworks
What’s that got to do with radicle though? I can’t find a single mention of crypto in the radicle project 🤔
@pcouy Don’t confuse crypto with cryptography; I don’t see anything about cryptocurrencies here
The most important questions about any p2p service:
- why would anyone store my data?
- why would I store someone else’s data?
- how can i be sure that someone else’s data is not CSAM: i found the answer you can select what repos to sync
It seems to me it’s IPFS again, but now for git repos. And it has the same problems as IPFS
I believe the thinking should be the other way around.
No one wants to store your code, and you shouldn’t store anybody’s code either. But suppose you have a group of people who want to collaborate on (or just mirror) a codebase, so they already decided to store it on their machines. This project gives them a decentralized tool to coordinate their efforts, and their code/issues/patches will be stored and accessible as long as they are interested in it.
Like, the tool doesn’t give you a reason to use it, but if you have a reason then here is a tool to help you.
Why is CSAM the only traffic you object to? When you run torrent clients and such how do you filter out CSAM peers from the DHT?
There were other similar initiatives where everything is encrypted, so you cannot be sure what others store on your node. For torrent you can select what torrent you download and share.
I was thinking about Storj, where you get “money” for hosting other people’s content in a similar p2p fashion. For Storj the answer to the first 2 questions are money, but you can’t answer the third, because encryption. (“Money” is not real money but some strange crypto, but that’s not important now.)
CSAM is just the worst possible example, it’s forbidden in most countries of the world, and no sane people should be ok storing it. The main thing is, if you host other people’s content, can you know what is the content, do you have some word if you want to host it or not.
You do not have a choice what your machine passes on from your peers via the DHT
Here’s another response I got from someone from radicle regarding this.
That’s a great Q.
Radicle can support a federated model, where known major seeds are connected with multiple smaller clusters. >Radicle supports also completely self-sustaining and disconnected clusters of nodes networked between themselves >within that cluster. And of course any other network topography in between.
There’s a promising active proposal to establish a dedicated new Radworks Organization tasked with solving the >incentivization and reward problem for seeds. https://community.radworks.org/t/discussion-rgp-22-start-the…
Additionally, similar to how one can “star” a repo on GitHub, one can “seed” a repo on Radicle. “Starring” a repo is >often a toast of support, akin to an emoji reaction, with little more effect other than that, but in Radicle “seeding” a >project, goes beyond incrementing a vanity metric: it actively supports propagating that project across the Radicle >network. The count of seedings per repo can also be used as a differentiator between original and “copy-cat” ones.
I thought it’s the CalDav and CardDav server.
Yeah. I wish folks would do a simple web search before picking names. Radicale has been around for years; it even has a domain, radicale.org .
Serious question: What is the point?
Just push into half a dozen mirrors and you are pretty censorship resident without the crypto voodoo put on top of git.
Github has one huge value: Discoverability of a project. This is even worse than hiding your project in one of the smaller forges… nobody can remember the mess of letters you need for this.
Do you think it’s good that the majority of code is hosted on a proprietary service? Do you think it’s good that that service is centralised? Do you think it’s good that if you want to provide an alternative to that service, you create another island with a different ecosystem that cannot communicate with the other island?
No, I would prefer a world where not everything is concentrated on github, but that is the world we have to work with:-)
But how does this address any of the problems you brought up?
Do you think a project will be more discoverable when you say: “Clone foo/bar from github” or when you say “install this strange crypto-BS, then clone rad:xyhdhsjsjshhhfuejthhh just like you normally would”?
Apart from discoverability you get a known workflow for contributors, a CI and a bug tracker. Coincidently those make it hard for projects to switch away from github… how does this address any of that? “Use this workflow, which is even wierder than any of the other github alternatives!” and “just set up a server yourself”?
Sorry, this is just yet another crypto-bro solution in search of a problem. Technically interesting, I’m give you that, but useless.
No, I would prefer a world where not everything is concentrated on github, but that is the world we have to work with:-)
Then how do you not see the point of a distributed sourceforge?
But how does this address any of the problems you brought up?
Have you read the webpage? radicle is opensource, it’s distributed and thus many interconnected islands, just like the fediverse. Why are you on the fediverse and not on reddit?
Do you think a project will be more discoverable when you say: “Clone foo/bar from github” or when you say “install this strange crypto-BS, then clone rad:xyhdhsjsjshhhfuejthhh just like you normally would”?
Again, have you even opened the webpage?
Sorry, this is just yet another crypto-bro solution in search of a problem.
So github is not a problem? And regarding crypto, show me where in the code it forces you to use crypto. Show me the rad command that inhibits you from doing a normal git operation by bringing up crypto.
Git is a DISTRIBUTED version control repo. You can fork to different services from Github. https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/git-forks-and-upstreams
And Github has a REALLY extensive API to interact with from other servers too (even issues and such).
Peer to Peer stuff sounds awesome, except it’s only as reliable as the nodes. And, Github is hosted on many servers, with a huge amount of redundancy. It’s basically a privatised P2P system where each server is reliable, instead of a bunch of unreliable public hosts which might not have backing from a large corporation.
And whilst we’re talking about reliability, even centralised stuff like Sourceforge is hosting code from 20 years ago. Whereas, it is difficult to load a torrent from 2 years ago lol
OK, track your issues in git with access from others on a web interface. Let somebody make a merge request to your project on github from gitlab, gitea, or straight up from your local git repo without a github account.
@onlinepersona @hunger have you tried hosting your own git repo? I never thought I’d live to see git, of all things, being considered “proprietary service”. Also Hunger suggested using more than one server, which means it’s not completely centralized.
There’s really no meed for p2p crypto magic here, git just works
git is open source. Github as in the repository hosting service is owned by Microsoft, a company for whom the phrase “for profit” isn’t severe enough a description.
I’m not sure if you’re making a bad faith argument or genuinely didn’t understand I was referencing github.
Also, where is the crypto magic? The website doesn’t mention crypto at all…
