Radicle: Peer-to-Peer Collaboration with Git (2024)
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
lwn.netTechstory
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P2PGitDecentralized Collaboration
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P2P
Git
Decentralized Collaboration
The Radicle project aims to create a peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub, with a discussion centered around its potential, features, and comparisons to other decentralized version control systems.
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Oct 1, 2025 at 4:41 AM EDT
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Oct 1, 2025 at 1:33 PM EDT
9h after posting
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ID: 45435608Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 7:35:46 PM
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Redicale seems much more decentralised. Rather than making it easy to run your own server it eliminates the server altogether. A more radical approach :).
it would probably be easier to build something like Radicale on top of Fossil because all that is missing is a way of finding to peers, and connecting to them without a server (e.g. from dynamic IPs, behind NAT etc.).
Is it actually? I never got the impression SQLite was a smaller project, but I'd confess to not knowing much about how it is organized.
SQLite is developed by 3 people. They don't accept outside contributions.
Ah well
Personally, what dev related motivation I had to move to Linux disappeared when wsl got decent.
That said, 90% of my work is still in windows proper, so any universal tool like git related needs to support it to be any use.
And if not me, anyone else you're collaborating with.
I think they're just using FUSE to make it work but don't quote me on that part.
If you operate fully inside of WSL (either via X11 or in a terminal) it's a pretty good experience.
Sure, not doubting that, I'm also a developer, and use Windows. But not because I want to, which I feel is a pretty common position to be in, at least around me.
I’ve been thinking about git collaboration slightly differently from the rest of the code forges. I think git collaboration could be easier for a huge chunk of use cases.
I don’t see why we necessarily need code forges for collaboration. We just need something a little better than emailing patches around.
It’s why I’ve been building a pastebin super charged for git collaboration. It’s still very much a wip but for anyone curious: https://pr.pico.sh
Rust has a Microsoft dependency in crates.io. We all have a Microsoft dependency with github.
edit: iirc, they're extreme CoC warriors and crypto-connected, so that's going to limit the reach of the project.
Hey mate, these are just tools but I love the energy I suppose.
Pretty sure that you can hack something like this though
Just checked and saw this https://github.com/moriturus/ktra
Now its been a long time since I last checked at radicle but if they are using checksum as the thing then you can definitely hack through something with ktra which pulls the content from radicle nodes and gives it back I suppose
not sure what you mean by namespaced p2p thing mate, at best maybe we could have something like nostr in an ideal world where we sort things through on time and sort of but that is really finnicky, I have worked on something similar but that would involve crypto which I or you also don't want to involve it seems.
The best idea could be a sort of lookup table that can be operated by rust foundation etc. which just links names to their hashes etc., iirc nix can definitely do something similar with nix flakes in the sense that they also follow the hash based approach but don't take my word for it as I am not sure and nix is also not the point of this discussion.
If this is something that you are really passionate about, maybe you should give it a go! Have a nice day!
It seems like it could be a really nice backend sync engine for offline first apps, aside from the lack of official support for Android.
https://radicle.xyz/
Some various discussions:
Radicle 1.0 – A local-first, P2P alternative to GitHub
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41509713
Jujutsu and Radicle
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44900455