Radicle Desktop: a graphical user interface for the Radicle peer-to-peer code forge
49 points by rudolfs
49 points by rudolfs
Be aware, this comes out of the cryptocurrency corner, with all of the issues associated with that.
They’re not bad actors. They could have done scam coin stuff, but they dialed back to focus on distribution. Great how far they got without having to rely on blockchain. But blockchain would provide some incentives, if needed, for people to seed repos or for immutability of user or repo profile related imo.
But blockchain would provide some incentives, if needed, for people to seed repos or for immutability of user or repo profile related imo.
Here we get into the aforementioned frequently discussed issues. Since cryptocurrency is at best a zero-sum game, people receiving “incentives” means you must pay for them. That currency must be scarce to function as payment, which means it must be vulnerable to speculation. The capacity of the network is finite (and in the case of a blockchain ridiculously low, that is the cost of decentralizion), so capacity must be sold to the highest bidder. Careful not to clone at the wrong time, your git clone might cost thousands of dollars because someone is trying to mint some rare git NFTs! Better wait a few hours.
Immutability of user profiles, is that really desirable? People change names, change email addresses, employers and much more and are still the same person. People lose hard drives and keys, have all of their computers impounded by police and are still the same person. People accidentally push secrets and other mistakes they want to revert. What is the benefit in having a model of society that is even stricter than reality.
It’s not zero-sum intrinsically. It’s like say every real estate or stock and bond, or any goods or service, transaction is zero sum. Not lose money to make money. When an asset is priced in a native blockchain token, that price doesn’t take away from anything. You could trade anything for the token, but people happen to use fiat currencies (where supply increases).
Agreed, if the underlying thing has no value, but markets in the short term is a voting machine and long-term a weighing machine. Based on value of the underlying asset. If there is no value, the price eventually goes to zero as a market cannot sustain long term on speculation. And also agree about everything you say about how easily it is to lose keys.
Just saying a token can have real value. And there is no evidence of Bitcoin having its ledger tampered with (no one is 100% sure of balance sheet of central banks on other hand as they don’t submit to audits or corporations manipulating or having non-transparent unverifiable or corrupted databases). There is a use case that is of value (immutability, granted risk of key loss), is all I’m saying but agree in spirit about the current said state: so far the only wide use case other than hoarding is betting markets - very sad.
I do not disagree with your comment, but the remark saying
so capacity must be sold to the highest bidder
is technically wrong – there is no protocol level requirement that the block space needs to be sold to the highest bidder. There is a fringe set of examples of users who don’t do this and even more radically don’t include any transactions at all (but more likely due to technical errors). But you are right like 99% time. In the future, if you would address the technical detail when it comes to block space auction behavior, you could be coincidentally technically right and make even stronger case for your point!
Whatever the mechanism for allocating block space is, it will be gamed.
Doubly so, if one can make real money by doing that.
Social problems can‘t be solved with technology.
It’s worse than not solving social problems, you’re creating social problems by insisting on artificial scarcity for no reason.
Valid point, this comes up whenever Radicle gets on the front pages. However the project itself is git based, doesn’t have any crypto (blockchain) dependencies and is FOSS, so if the project goes in the wrong direction, one could just fork it, or just understand it as research on what’s possible in the realms of p2p code forges. But I get the aversion to anything that’s crypto, speaking only for myself, I tend to share the same stance, on the other hand the funding allows me to work on this full-time. https://radicle.xyz/faq#monetization--funding
Is there some specific issue with radicle that comes from that association? With the comment as such, I could similarly conjure up plausible explanation why that was the case; the cypherpunk movement is adjacent to the developer community of people working on the double-spend problem, so for initial traction you might make the wrong decision to frame your project related to this developer community, which is relatively large when it comes to people caring about pseudoanonymity. I say the decision is wrong, because the assumption is that the set of developers who actually care is more disjoint than you think. This is somewhat supported by the fact that now there’s a TOR integration, so there’s a new attempt at the framing. What I am trying to say that there is a chance your frustrations are likely shared by the radicle developers.
They really aren’t pushing for that much crypto. It’s there for a specific reason and with some well meant use cases like participation/bounty payments. (Good idea even if I disagree it’s possible / wanted in practice) The team got a serious payout from their coins so unless they’re unreasonably spending they should be set for years. On the other hand as a voting token RAD is useless and mostly held by speculators - I have no idea if the team realised that will happen or just got taken for a ride. As far as I can tell, the talk was always about the project and there was never a push for a pump and dump - at least in public and dev channels. (I was very slightly involved with that project.)
Either way what I’m saying is - it was always a goal to be able to use this without crypto and it’s a feature on top.
I like the NixOS instructions! Run the app directly from a seeded Git repo:
nix run 'git+https://seed.radicle.xyz/z4D5UCArafTzTQpDZNQRuqswh3ury.git?rev=dab7b4455e897c2dd1fa3e9711654880c4f90237'
I’m very excited about this project. Been following for years. Getting close to using it, as I can just mirror to codeberg or GitHub for the average user.
Perhaps if ‘following’ a repo turns out to be sorta social media rewarding or I suppose even just practical for bookmarking projects you come across, like with GitHub, they can incentivize availability. If I’m not mistaken, when you follow you also host the repo and make it available via gossip protocol. The more the merrier.
I don’t know much about the pull request interface, but the more useable it is for managing issues and PRs, the more viable from a network effect standpoint I believe.
Yea, our “follow” is essentially seeding. You signal to the network that something is valued by seeding a repo thereby increasing its availability.
On GitHub, users rarely “follow” but often “star”. If following doesn’t provide the needed seeding capacity network wide, is it possible for Radicle to use “star” to indicate some degree of willingness to seed? Perhaps a few commit level depths instead of a fuller commitment with “follow”.
Also, starring is probably the main reason why GitHub network effect is so large. Maintainers don’t want to give up the social credit of the star system on GitHub. A project with a lot stars would hesitate moving to another code host. Added bonus, Radicle could distribute the star system for repos! Would be nice if a window of a couple years were you integrate the GitHub stars so people can take the count with them. Not sure how you’d corroborate star count though.
Are projects really considering to migrating due to a value of a popularity contest button on a social media forge? That should be like the lowest priority. Integrating with it seems like copying the bad parts.
At the extreme, fair point. But stars in practice help to distinguish legit from typesquatted projects, one of many metrics to gauge maturity of the project, and a way for maintainers to measure interest level (“does community value and keep at it”) etc. Recognizing and saying ‘good job’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
A better distinguisher is good code rather than popularity contests—or are JavaScript & Python projects truly superior to all others? Putting a star is a good as pressing ‘like’ on pressing-matters video or liking a post when usually a donation of your time or money or direct action to the cause is orders of magnitude more valuable… it’s not nothing but pretty close to it—& just as much as many would turn their noses up towards those chasing clout & internet points on other social media, this social media is pretty much the same.
Also, starring is probably the main reason why GitHub network effect is so large.
That seems extremely unlikely to me. Stars are a almost-meaningless and often-gamed measure much less relevant than all the other network effects Github has (which pretty much all come back to “ ‘everyone’ has an account setup” and “ ‘everyone’ already knows how to use it”)
I think radicle is interesting if you’d like to share say a blog post you want people to be able to collaborate on while plausibly denying yourself from attribution. You could have the post accessible in TOR with the source being in radicle via TOR nodes. You could then share the radicle link to the repo the same way my blog shares a Nix build command at the footer.