Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub • Hacker News Board

Re: Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub

#191

Post by fabianhjr » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

whichquestion wrote: post #170

simias wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I see the point of building a complex platform with governance and whatnot. What I want is an easy way to publish my projects and for other people to contribute, I need something more like email (independent, self-hosted servers with a well defined protocol to communicate between them) than Facebook. I don't care about the governance of my git remote, or getting money out of it. I care about it being rel…

The best solution from my perspective for the community would be to have a standard that handles issues/prs and the like that could be taken from one code hosting solution to another. Just like how you can take your code with ease from one solution to the next by cloning. It’s the same idea that we already use for our code but applied to all the other bits that are necessary for maintaining projects. There are some p…

There is a project working on that over ActivityPub: https://forgefed.peers.community/

There are some established forges participating (like sourcehut)

Re: Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub

#192

Post by xla » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

geoah wrote: post #190

fungos wrote: post #180

I'm impressed and I see potential on this one. I tried different ones over time but most fail at on-boarding. This was seamless and really easy. In about 2 minutes I successfully shared my project and followed known projects. This means this mvp works and it let me craving for more, I want to use this! I want issues and PR support to prove this can effectively work as a github replacement to me. Now, the downside of…

hm, that is interesting, the fact that projects are public and advertised by default was not clear to me while going through the onboarding.

Thanks for flagging that, definitely something we are looking to improve in making it clear but also in how much control the user has over that.

Re: Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub

#193

Post by erichdongubler » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 7:25 PM UTC

geoah wrote: post #190

fungos wrote: post #180

I'm impressed and I see potential on this one. I tried different ones over time but most fail at on-boarding. This was seamless and really easy. In about 2 minutes I successfully shared my project and followed known projects. This means this mvp works and it let me craving for more, I want to use this! I want issues and PR support to prove this can effectively work as a github replacement to me. Now, the downside of…

hm, that is interesting, the fact that projects are public and advertised by default was not clear to me while going through the onboarding.

For reference: https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/understanding-radicle/faq/#can...

Re: Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub

#194

Post by fireattack » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 7:56 PM UTC

tpoacher wrote: post #63

fireattack wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the disadvantage is it doesn't even have a Windows client.

Surely that's an advantage. :p

I knew you're joking, but gatekeeping isn't what got GitHub this far.

Re: Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub

#195

Post by snvzz » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 8:15 PM UTC

Trying to read the website drove me away.

There's a time and a place for this sort of web design. I feel strongly that presenting some software to technical minded people is not.

Re: Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub

#196

Post by Taek » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 8:26 PM UTC

whichquestion wrote: post #170

simias wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I see the point of building a complex platform with governance and whatnot. What I want is an easy way to publish my projects and for other people to contribute, I need something more like email (independent, self-hosted servers with a well defined protocol to communicate between them) than Facebook. I don't care about the governance of my git remote, or getting money out of it. I care about it being rel…

The best solution from my perspective for the community would be to have a standard that handles issues/prs and the like that could be taken from one code hosting solution to another. Just like how you can take your code with ease from one solution to the next by cloning. It’s the same idea that we already use for our code but applied to all the other bits that are necessary for maintaining projects. There are some p…

We've been building a platform called Skynet which makes this possible. It has a user-oriented data model: all of the application code is run client-side, and all of the data is stored under the user's control.

That means that someone can create a new application at any time which has access to all of the data - because all of the data is accessed client-side and owned by clients in the first place.

This doesn't solve the standards problem, but on the other hand I think what would likely happen is the first project to become successful would also become more or less the standard, with other people building extensions to that data standard over time.

Re: Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub

#197

Post by Taek » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 8:29 PM UTC

berkes wrote: post #146

htrap wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that there is a real need for permanent Storage with respect to Open Source. Code breaks when old packages are unpublished or repositories deleted. Push once and fetch forever solves this. Also Centralized solutions are providing open source collaboration tools for free, storage for free, because of their revenue from enterprise customers. What happens when they decide to shut down? or change their policies? o…

Would IPFS or DAT not suffice there? How is 'another permanent storage, that is a piece of a larger project, better than one that has the sole purpose and focus?

The challenge with IPFS and DAT is that you have no guarantees around the data reliability. The DHT style of p2p sharing pretty much only works for popular content. Incentivized storage networks can onboard any type of data and guarantee high uptime.

It's also been my experience that IPFS has significant performance issues. If you use a professional gateway like ipfs.io or cloudflare it runs at good speeds but as soon as you switch to being fully peer-to-peer it's almost unusable.

I don't have much experience with DAT, it may not have the same performance issues.

disclaimer: I work on an incentivized storage network called Skynet

Re: Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub

#198

Post by Taek » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

lftherios wrote: post #124

htrap wrote: post #106

We are building https://gitopia.org - Permanent Data Storage provided by Arweave - Works from within git with the help of git-remote-helper `npm install -g git-remote-gitopia` so no need to learn new tooling - Built-in incentivization to token holders who also take part in the governance of Gitopia - Token holders share revenue made by the platform - You can mirror your GitHub repositories now using the Github Mirror…

Thank you for sharing your work and great to see more attempts on the same problem. I am one of the maintainers of the Radicle project. The main problem we encountered with similar systems that rely on blockchains / dht for storage is the problem of 'blockchain poisoning'. This is when someone deliberately adds illegal content to an append-only source in hopes to make the sole act of replicating the project legally p…

I think you could add moderation to a project like this much the same way you can add moderation to a centralized project. You don't need to be as heavy handed as "community voting", you could just have each client nominate a moderator who is able to append instructions to ignore content that the client would follow.

Under this model, every user (or project) can choose their own moderators, which means you don't have to worry about other parts of the community having different ideas for ideal moderation - each project/user can subscribe to the moderation feeds that they like, and ensure that they get a clean experience.

This type of moderation is actually an upgrade from centralized systems, because it is much easier to nominate new moderators if you don't like what the old moderators are doing.

Re: Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub

#199

Post by Taek » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 8:39 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #78

How and why is literally everything peer to peer in the tech community also somehow connected to ethereum?

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.

Re: Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub

#200

Post by Taek » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 8:40 PM UTC

b_fiive wrote: post #110

Aeolun wrote: post #78

How and why is literally everything peer to peer in the tech community also somehow connected to ethereum?

quick hand raise for the IPFS community, which is yes p2p, no blockchain. I'm working a "git for data" project atop IPFS and aren't hawking a coin. I'll readily admit there are very few yes-p2p and no-blockchain projects out there, but we exist

quick reminder: the team behind IPFS raised over $200 million selling tokens.