HardenedBSD Is Now Officially on Radicle(hardenedbsd.org) |
HardenedBSD Is Now Officially on Radicle(hardenedbsd.org) |
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.
> 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.
There is no an explanation of what Radicle is/does in the announcement.
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.
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?
This could also be an indexer that runs locally, although I don’t know how you would find unreplicated peers for indexing. I wonder if they have considered DHT or similar for announcement.
Edit: looks like they ruled out DHT in the context of advertising repositories because they want replication to be opt-in, likely to avoid replicating objectionable material, but I still think it’s a good idea for advertising nodes more generally. The curious could then use the list of nodes for indexing.
There seems to be no way to get this kind of information from the radicle.network link in this article. Clicking the logo in the top left takes you to a page that just says "A public node run by the Radicle team", which is totally uninformative.
> Could not connect to rad.hardenedbsd.org The node may be offline or the address may be incorrect. Select a different node to continue.
Also, my understanding is that ATProto is relatively centralized in practice, wheras in radicle every node is sort of equal.
In today's society, there is no much if anything trully peer-to-peer.
They are either trying to make AI PRs harder to happen or idk
I've personally never discovered projects through Github.
The social connectivity and discoverability in github is a big reason many people use it. Can't say how many, but it is.
Even though I moved some of my personal repos to Codeberg I believe there needs to be a centralised way of searching in open source code.
Why would it be? =]
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.
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.
IPFS in theory has a similar model, but in practice I've mostly found that if the original seeder goes away, at least part of a dataset becomes inaccessible.
If anything is good for the bittorrent model, it's git/source control. Movies and images get moved to different drives or deleted, movies become far less worthy of keeping after being watched, and images may have never been useful to the person mirroring them anyway; just a favor they were doing for a site they like. Source code sits, and source code continues to be used. If I understand correctly, Radicle works as your local git server, too.
The question is whether people will dedicate a little bit of bandwidth to seeding, but I don't think it's a serious question. It's a cheap and easy thing to do if you want to help FOSS, and it's obviously a good and a nice thing to do. It's not like you're seeding stuff that you don't know what it is, or why it is useful.
And, again, they can keep a seed up indefinitely. But they don't need to have either great uptime or great bandwidth.
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...