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Comment by noelwelsh

3 months ago

Can anyone describe how this differs from Tangled (https://tangled.org/)? Both seem very interesting, but I'm not deep enough into either to understand how they differ.

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noelwelsh

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0x3o3  3 months ago

Radicle is architecturally local-first: you run your own node, sync repositories from a P2P gossip network, and then everything—browsing code, creating issues, reviewing patches—happens against your local data store. There's no round-trip to a server. Issues and patches are stored as signed Git objects (COBs) that replicate with the repo itself. The network is only involved when you choose to sync. This makes it extremely performant for day-to-day work and fully functional offline.

Tangled to my understanding is federated in theory but centralized in practice. It relies on "knots" (servers that host Git repos) and a central AppView at tangled.sh that aggregates the network. Issues and social artifacts live on Personal Data Servers, not locally. While you can self-host a knot, the default experience routes through Tangled's managed infrastructure. The architecture is fundamentally client-server: your operations go over the network to wherever your data lives.

  • fc417fc802  3 months ago

    That implementation sounds really awesome but it raises a few questions for me (that I didn't immediately see when skimming the landing page although I realize answers might be in the docs somewhere).

    I found the answer to one of them (how automatic pinning works) which I'll paste here because others are likely to wonder as well. Related, I assume there's a way to block overly large files if you run a seed node?

    > They can vary in their seeding policies, from public seed nodes that openly seed all repositories to community seed nodes that selectively seed repositories from a group of trusted peers.

    Suppose I'm A and I collaborate with B, C, ... Z. If I file an issue locally and sync to C, am I able to see if and when that propagates through the network to everyone else? I guess what I'm wondering about is what the latency, reliability, and end user understandability are like when using this to collaborate in practice. Like if I file an issue on GitHub I know that it's globally visible immediately. How does that work here?

    • lorenzleutgeb  3 months ago

      Currently, with Radicle still under active development, we already reach convergence times that are negligible for async collaboration (like working on code or issues). Working on a well-seeded repo, my changes sync to ~10 nodes within a tenth of a second and with ~80 nodes within 3 seconds.

      This is obviously not fast enough for sync collaboration, like writing on a virtual whiteboard together, but that's also not what Radicle is designed for. Also, if you share larger files (e.g. you attach a screenshot to your issue) the above times might not be a good estimation anymore, but that's the exception for now.

      It's really strange to see that people assume that peer to peer networks somehow must be slow. In my experience, since everything runs locally, working with Radicle feels way more snappy than any web interface, which has lots of latency on every so-odd click.

      As the network scales, it'll of course take some care to keep the speed up, but that's known and there are a few models to take inspiration from.

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lorenzleutgeb  3 months ago

Tangled is built on top of the AT Protocol, and "mediates" between what they call "knots". Git servers. Their strength is to use AT Protocol to make communication across multiple Git servers work smoothly.

Radicle is completely peer to peer. There are no such things as servers and clients, only nodes. However, there are quite a few nodes that then act as HTTP servers to offer convenient access via the browser.

  • phoronixrly  3 months ago

    Also, Tangled is VC-funded. I cannot find information about Radicle, but considering the authorship is not advertised on their website, and that P2P is not easily monetizable, I would bet it is not VC-funded.

    All in all, seems like an awesome project and instantly more trustworthy and rugpull-resistant than Tangled.

    • creativeair2049  3 months ago

      > instantly more trustworthy

      quite ironic, radicle seems to have raised 7m$ from "radworks", some sort of crypto foundation.

      that being said, why is it being not monetizable a good thing? their website says radicle has been in development for 4 years already. without more money in the bank, how would they continue to build the thing?

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