Radicle: peer-to-peer collaboration with Git

Radicle: peer-to-peer collaboration with Git

Disclaimer: Radicle is very dear to me mostly because I worked full time on it for most of 2020. I have been following it since then but I am no longer active in the project.

I have two main gripes with it:

• it should use plain, eventually centrally hosted git repositories as backing store for "nodes": this would allow existing git projects stored anywhere (including github, gitlab and other forges) to join the Radicle network as valid node copies, even if they cannot speak the p2p gossip protocol, mostly eliminating the barrier to entry for new users
• it should have properly decoupled user and node identities from the start: any user might want to use multiple developer workstations and still keep their identity; not supporting this use case also raises the barrier to entry "too much" for most potential users

I really believe in the project goals, but when working inside the team I have not been able to steer the project in those two directions. I still consider this a personal failure of mine (or at least a big missed opportunity).

About directly supporting sharing repository contents using git repos hosted "anywhere", I proposed it but the idea went nowhere: the p2p protocol was too central to the "node" idea (with all the hosting issues and eventual firewall-piercing technical hurdles that it implies).

I also clearly stated that the overall tradeoffs between energy efficiency, costs and reliability with a totally distributed system are terrible. There are good reasons why most forges (starting from github) can give away reliable git storage space for free, and getting that pervasive level of adoption with a p2p system IMHO is between "too hard" and "plain impossible".

However, this idea was not understood and went nowhere.

About the second issue, decoupling personal user identity from node identity was literally the first thing I tried to do in the project, with technical proposals and pull requests. In this case the complications I was adding were "too large", and we ultimately decided we were not able to work together (for this and other reasons).

I am sorry to see that also this idea of mine did not make it (even if it is considered for post-1.0 work).

That said, the project is solid and provides something that is sorely needed, and I really like all the team members I have met at the time; working with them has been a wonderful experience despite the disagreements!

I am still convinced that the only way to mass adoption would be allowing plain github repos to participate in the network as "passive", "data-store" nodes.

But I still wish the project good luck with all my heart!