Comment by sunshine-o
1 day ago
Radicle is a legit project that has been around for at least 5 years trying to solve a pretty hard problem.
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?
Seems like a good opportunity for someone to build a project gateway for discovering projects on Radicle, cross-project code and issue search, etc.
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.
Wouldn't people discover HardenedBSD via google and then find the link to the code via the website?
I've personally never discovered projects through Github.
Many people do use GitHub for this. There are even Android app stores hinged around searching and installing release APKs.
The social connectivity and discoverability in github is a big reason many people use it. Can't say how many, but it is.
I don't think I've ever searched for anything on github. I always follow a link.
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I recently had to onboard multiple computer vision datasets each with their own conventions to store camera parameters, depth maps etc. Searching for open source repositories on GitHub that implement data loading for these datasets was extremely helpful. In fact, these days I use code search on GitHub more often than Google search.
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.
> maybe it is not Radicle role to provide the front door and code search infrastructure
Why would it be? =]