Love to see it. Unlike tangled.org this is local-first and has a solid story around private repos. I’m bullish on distributed forges in general, but I’m all for experimentation in figuring out exactly what that looks like.
I wish they would make local-only deployment easier. For example, lets take 3 machines and try to setup Radicle to work only on those, without joining the common Radicle network. Like on-premises GitLab, but decentralized, without the need of the server. It requires quite some serious scripting and usecase not covered in the documentation.
AD: Feel free to post on our Zulip [^1] about your experiences of agentic workflow if you haven't already! Some of the team are interested in developing the agentic workflow experience.
I'd like to see radicle replace crates.io. I can't get over Rust's dependency on github/Microsoft, and I can't get over the lack of namespacing.
All you would need is cargo compatibility, and a trusted namespace that kept up with the metadata of the current contents of crates.io, right?
edit: I really, really like rust, and love basically all of their choices about the language, but I can't stand the feeling that I'm being tricked into an ecosystem dependent on one of the worst behaved companies in the world, and I can't stand that a lot of rust projects smell like GPL-washing.
That being said, git is GPL and radicle is MIT, so it feels like the same thing, but Github also ain't git. I prefer MIT to MS; if radicle gets important enough and decides to rubpull, there will inevitably be a Free fork anyway.
Does radicle have some way of storing binaries outside of the source tree? I know cargo compiles from source by default, but AFAIK it can (and does) download binaries as well.
AD: Theres a project `artifact-cob` [^1] that enables some of the functionality you are looking for. You can host artifacts off-network and make 'releases' that point to them.
The more I have been using git and building my own tooling and services around it for usage, I have figured out that something like radicle feels like the right/better solution, definitely better than what github is atm.
There are rough edges and the seeding thing is a bit mehhh. And honestly there are a bunch of things I would do differently but I like the spirit of things.
Not sure where the authors of the project stand, but it's fun to see them make progress.
Prioritize discoverability, and self hosting on my own domain, with more customization for the protocol and ui/ux aspects.
Basically allow people to deploy something closer to gitea on a webserver initially, which has all the basic protocol features and sharing aspects implemented.
Currently the focus seems to have been very much on just the seeding & p2p part which honestly is good but not very useful for me as a developer/user who wants to work on a collaborative project.
Prioritizing P2P makes sense, but the UX/DX of radicle is not intuitive to put it mildly.
I went to the explorer radicle.network and my own as well and I still had no idea how to create an issue or submit a patch or login to an account or anything of that sort.
I opened the cli and figured out how to do all that, but then I created another node on my web server and now I have no idea how to connect to it, then I figured out how to do that, now how do I share my node without sharing it publicly, figured that out.
Cool now we are at the starting point, so every time I need to work on a project i will have to clone it, but why can't I create stuff in webui.
Maybe there is a setting I can't seem to find it yet.
But the jumping through hoops is mindbending. For a solution that could replace github for me and my friends who maintain a few public projects that wants small contributions from large number of folks as we try and maintain the local "tech" clubs.
Getting low information folks to use within 10 mins, is the bar that I have set for any platform I can use to replace github.
Radicle isn't that yet! anyways.
But I like the direction, putting contributors, access list, issues and prs in the repo is a brilliant idea, maybe put agent plans in it too, agent sessions as well maybe...
I would go as far as to say, something like a radicle network is better than every other alternative, but the UX is just not there yet.
This just describes a watcher service that kicks jobs off on an external CI system and logs the results? Not much more detail than that.
Gitlab and Github have pages and pages going over the domain language used to configure the job triggers. Jobs can trigger other jobs either in response to completion or as a dependency etc etc.
I would say these radicle-ci designs as they are now are actually quite rudimentary. That's perfectly fine for an early project but at this point I think you have to say that they won't have a CI system ready for quite some time.
> What is Radicle? How is it different from Git/GitHub?
> Radicle is a peer-to-peer code collaboration platform (“forge”) built on Git. Unlike centralized platforms like GitHub, there is no single entity controlling the network or user data. Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner. Radicle is an alternative for people and organizations who want full control of their data and user experience, without compromising on the social aspects of collaboration platforms.
(Quote from their FAQ).
This isn't even trying to answer the titular question... None of them, actually.
So, what is Radicle? A platform built on Git? What does this mean? A platform for what? What is it for?
Why Git/GitHub are used as if they were the same category of things? There's not even an attempt at answering the "how is this different from Git?" question. What does it offer that Git doesn't? Wtf is "forge"?
Radicle is an alternative... to what? I believe I have full control of my data in my Git repository... why do I need an alternative with even more control? How will I have even more control?
* * *
Maybe whatever this software does is actually useful or even good, but the documentation can't be worse.
I agree it's not immediately clear how it works, although I think I understand the role it's intending to fill.
If you're not familiar with the distinction between git and github it could be even more confusing.
As soon as I hear decentralized I have lots of questions about the underlying protocols. Their protocol page helps a little but also uses terms I'm not familiar with like "gossip protocol".
It would be nice for there to be a page that motivates the project a bit more, ie. explaining the technical problems they are attempting to solve before enumerating the components of the complex system they've built.
Love to see it. Unlike tangled.org this is local-first and has a solid story around private repos. I’m bullish on distributed forges in general, but I’m all for experimentation in figuring out exactly what that looks like.
I wish they would make local-only deployment easier. For example, lets take 3 machines and try to setup Radicle to work only on those, without joining the common Radicle network. Like on-premises GitLab, but decentralized, without the need of the server. It requires quite some serious scripting and usecase not covered in the documentation.
AD: We've just been discussing this! There's an open RIP [^1] that we will be supplying feedback for soon.
[^1]: https://radicle.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/369876-RIPs/to...
A containerised deployment would (understatement warning!) be useful.
I noticed that they moved to a different domain last month: https://radicle.dev/2026/04/23/domain-move
.xyz and similar domains are often blocked by ISPs due to higher than usual rates of spam from domains using that TLD.
Makes sense. Usually if you want a 99 cent registration, .xyz is whats available.
Radicle is really underrated, especially when working with agents. I find it a joy to use for my agentic workflows.
If there's purely an agentic forge one day, it's likely going to be a distributed one, with cryptographic identities and signed artifacts by default.
AD: Feel free to post on our Zulip [^1] about your experiences of agentic workflow if you haven't already! Some of the team are interested in developing the agentic workflow experience.
[^1]: https://radicle.zulipchat.com/
I am surprised you don't use RustChat[1]
[1] https://rustchat.io/
Doesn't even come close to Zulip in terms of features.
"AD" ?
His initials
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What makes it a joy to use with agents?
radicle is awesome and Just Works from what I've tried of it
I'd like to see radicle replace crates.io. I can't get over Rust's dependency on github/Microsoft, and I can't get over the lack of namespacing.
All you would need is cargo compatibility, and a trusted namespace that kept up with the metadata of the current contents of crates.io, right?
edit: I really, really like rust, and love basically all of their choices about the language, but I can't stand the feeling that I'm being tricked into an ecosystem dependent on one of the worst behaved companies in the world, and I can't stand that a lot of rust projects smell like GPL-washing.
That being said, git is GPL and radicle is MIT, so it feels like the same thing, but Github also ain't git. I prefer MIT to MS; if radicle gets important enough and decides to rubpull, there will inevitably be a Free fork anyway.
Does radicle have some way of storing binaries outside of the source tree? I know cargo compiles from source by default, but AFAIK it can (and does) download binaries as well.
AD: Theres a project `artifact-cob` [^1] that enables some of the functionality you are looking for. You can host artifacts off-network and make 'releases' that point to them.
[^1]: https://radicle.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/369274-General...
The more I have been using git and building my own tooling and services around it for usage, I have figured out that something like radicle feels like the right/better solution, definitely better than what github is atm.
There are rough edges and the seeding thing is a bit mehhh. And honestly there are a bunch of things I would do differently but I like the spirit of things.
Not sure where the authors of the project stand, but it's fun to see them make progress.
AD: We're definitely interested in hearing about the rough edges and opinions! Feel free to post on our Zulip [^1] if you haven't already :).
[^1]: https://radicle.zulipchat.com/
What are the things you would do differently?
Prioritize discoverability, and self hosting on my own domain, with more customization for the protocol and ui/ux aspects.
Basically allow people to deploy something closer to gitea on a webserver initially, which has all the basic protocol features and sharing aspects implemented.
Currently the focus seems to have been very much on just the seeding & p2p part which honestly is good but not very useful for me as a developer/user who wants to work on a collaborative project.
Prioritizing P2P makes sense, but the UX/DX of radicle is not intuitive to put it mildly.
I went to the explorer radicle.network and my own as well and I still had no idea how to create an issue or submit a patch or login to an account or anything of that sort.
I opened the cli and figured out how to do all that, but then I created another node on my web server and now I have no idea how to connect to it, then I figured out how to do that, now how do I share my node without sharing it publicly, figured that out.
Cool now we are at the starting point, so every time I need to work on a project i will have to clone it, but why can't I create stuff in webui.
Maybe there is a setting I can't seem to find it yet.
But the jumping through hoops is mindbending. For a solution that could replace github for me and my friends who maintain a few public projects that wants small contributions from large number of folks as we try and maintain the local "tech" clubs.
Getting low information folks to use within 10 mins, is the bar that I have set for any platform I can use to replace github.
Radicle isn't that yet! anyways.
But I like the direction, putting contributors, access list, issues and prs in the repo is a brilliant idea, maybe put agent plans in it too, agent sessions as well maybe...
I would go as far as to say, something like a radicle network is better than every other alternative, but the UX is just not there yet.
How well does it hold up under load? What are the CI and PR stories?
Their CI take is early but promising: https://radicle-ci.liw.fi/
This just describes a watcher service that kicks jobs off on an external CI system and logs the results? Not much more detail than that.
Gitlab and Github have pages and pages going over the domain language used to configure the job triggers. Jobs can trigger other jobs either in response to completion or as a dependency etc etc.
I would say these radicle-ci designs as they are now are actually quite rudimentary. That's perfectly fine for an early project but at this point I think you have to say that they won't have a CI system ready for quite some time.
I don't understand why you'd want them to built another CI system. Just for the sake of it?
Feels like using a free Jenkins gets you everything you want. Doesn't need more than a container or Java either.
That's also perfectly fine if that's what it is. I would just phrase that as "They don't have CI but they provide hooks."
I like this idea a lot! I need to find people to try it with, though, which is not so easy with GH being so popular :-(
Some nitpicks:
* What is with the forced serif font on the website?
* Does this support other version control systems? Like mercurial, SVN, pijul, etc.?
AD: The website is currently being redesigned, I suspect we'll have it up in the next few weeks.
No it doesn't currently support other VCS's but we have planned for that possibility in future!
VCS agnosticism would be a selling point.
How would that work? Radicle is deeply tied to git. It stores all its info as git objects.
That's why architecture matters.
Would it? Realistically, what support could they add that would make it a selling point? Mercurial?
Jujutsu + stacked PRs.
I read that it works well with jujutsu
I tried to understand what this does...
> What is Radicle? How is it different from Git/GitHub?
> Radicle is a peer-to-peer code collaboration platform (“forge”) built on Git. Unlike centralized platforms like GitHub, there is no single entity controlling the network or user data. Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner. Radicle is an alternative for people and organizations who want full control of their data and user experience, without compromising on the social aspects of collaboration platforms.
(Quote from their FAQ).
This isn't even trying to answer the titular question... None of them, actually.
So, what is Radicle? A platform built on Git? What does this mean? A platform for what? What is it for?
Why Git/GitHub are used as if they were the same category of things? There's not even an attempt at answering the "how is this different from Git?" question. What does it offer that Git doesn't? Wtf is "forge"?
Radicle is an alternative... to what? I believe I have full control of my data in my Git repository... why do I need an alternative with even more control? How will I have even more control?
* * *
Maybe whatever this software does is actually useful or even good, but the documentation can't be worse.
I agree it's not immediately clear how it works, although I think I understand the role it's intending to fill.
If you're not familiar with the distinction between git and github it could be even more confusing.
As soon as I hear decentralized I have lots of questions about the underlying protocols. Their protocol page helps a little but also uses terms I'm not familiar with like "gossip protocol".
It would be nice for there to be a page that motivates the project a bit more, ie. explaining the technical problems they are attempting to solve before enumerating the components of the complex system they've built.
> So, what is Radicle?
> Radicle is a peer-to-peer code collaboration platform (“forge”) built on Git.
-----
> Why Git/GitHub are used as if they were the same category of things?
They are not. Github is a centralized collaboration platform built on git, and radicle is a peer-to-peer collaboration platform built on git.
-----
> Wtf is "forge"?
A word some people started using for the class of Github/Bitbucket(RIP) or even Fossil-type things, as FOSS alternatives began to multiply.
-----
> Radicle is an alternative... to what?
To Github, or other "forges."
The first I remember using it was SourceForge (1999).