I was not aware of Radicle; it's a truly peer-to-peer Git forge which aims to guarantee commits are signed by current maintainers (among, I suppose, other goals).

The article mentions an us and a you, but I feel like it would have been an useful occasion to explain why move (from where?) and why Radicle. Maybe this was already discussed elsewhere?

I suppose similar discussions regarding GitHub are happening today and could explain why this was posted to HN.

• dmos62

  today at 8:40 AM

  Radicle is pretty cool.

  > Radicle’s Collaborative Objects (COBs) provide Radicle’s social primitive. This enables features such as issues, discussions and code review to be implemented as Git objects. Developers can extend Radicle’s capabilities to build any kind of collaboration flow they see fit.

  • donatj

    today at 11:00 AM

    I know I'm not supposed to make jokes, this is not reddit, but you might even say it's pretty radical.

• lorenzleutgeb

  today at 8:41 AM

  For the reason of hbsd moving, see https://bsd.network/@HardenedBSD/116437657126172879

  • hobofan

    today at 9:37 AM

    So instead of their self-hosted Gitlab instance being hammered, now their self-hosted Radicle instance will be hammered (and if they are lucky some of the other seeders will tank some of the load)?

    I'm not sure that this will actually solve the problem. This seems more like a facade for a move they wanted to do anyways.

    • Skinney

      today at 11:46 AM

      The load will be spread across the network, but I guess the main benefit is that everything continues working even though HardenedBSDs official seed is down.

      Every user has their own node, and everyone's node talks to several seed nodes. Even if the official HardenedBSD seed is down, there's still going to be another node to sync with.

    • QuantumNomad_

      today at 10:43 AM

      > This seems more like a facade for a move they wanted to do anyways.

      Not even a facade really. They say this further down in the thread:

      > Given our previously communicated desire to migrate to #Radicle, this is a good motivating factor for moving in that direction.

    • sunshine-o

      today at 9:54 AM

      Yes they have been looking into decentralized technologies like mesh networking, reticulum, etc. for a while now.

      My guess is the model is let the Github mirror repo be hit by bots and just do the dev work on the Radicle node.

      - [0] https://hardenedbsd.org/article/shawn-webb/2024-09-23/harden...

In this scenario, how does p2p compare to ATProto? The downside of both is that you still need high available servers

• fc417fc802

  today at 8:43 AM

  I don't think so? In the case of p2p (including radicle) you can run multiple not-so-reliable nodes. Of course that won't work for serving up a web frontend but that's distinct from the git repo itself.

Is Radicle an alternative to Fossil?

• balou23

  today at 11:06 AM

  It seems to have similar ideas, but two big differences seem to be that 1. it's based on git 2. more focus on a truly decentralized p2p architecture

Radicle is a legit project that has been around for at least 5 years trying to solve a pretty hard problem.

With the awareness of the dangers of Github growing they could really start gaining traction but from what I understand they still have a big problem: you can host a node, the web UI and create repos, link it to your website but it will be hard for people to find your project and code. You are on the internet, but not on the visible one.

Radicle do have a search engine [0] but it won't return anything if you look for HardenedBSD. And maybe it is not Radicle role to provide the front door and code search infrastructure (I am pretty sure they to not have the money to support it).

So my guess is key to decentralized code forges, whether it is Radicle, Gitea or Forgego instances, really miss the search infrastructure today.

I am pretty sure HardenedBSD will keep mirrors on Github and Gitlab to stay "visible" to the broader Internet but what happen the day they have to leave because of some incompatibility with those corporations user agreement?

- [0] https://search.radicle.xyz/

This is what I am getting

> Could not connect to rad.hardenedbsd.org The node may be offline or the address may be incorrect. Select a different node to continue.

[dead]