Radicle. The distributed code network. Presented by Eleftherios.

Okay. Uh, hi from me. Uh, my name is Alftherio. I am the co-founder of the Radical Project. Radical is a distributed code network.

Um, I'm going to talk a bit about the project, you know, like where it's at, what it attempts to do, you know, what's great about it, what's not great about it. I'm not going to give you a pitch. Uh and then uh we're going to do then I'm going to pass the ball to Daniel and we're going to uh show you some of the basic workflows and then something new that we working on around radical. [snorts] Um so yeah so okay so let's start with like what's radical. So uh radical is is a peer-to-peer network for uh code collaboration.

Uh it effectively extends git with a gossip protocol. Um, and one of the most distinct aspects of radical is that radical is, you know, truly distributed. Every user effectively runs a node. Uh, for for the ones of you that come from maybe blockchain ecosystems, don't think about these bulky nodes here. You can select, you know, like how what kind of repos are you interested in and then just replicate those only.

Uh but as you can see from this like really basic graph like every every repo contains not only its code but also it contains everything else that is relevant about code like things like issues uh patches and more things. Um so that's you know radical in a very very uh high level. Why do we care about that stuff? Uh so uh back in 2018 funny enough um so like both of the founders of the project you know we've been you know coding for a long time and then um at some point we realized that like okay like the world is turning to be a bit crazier than we thought and uh you know things on the geopolitical landscape were not looking promising. We started being really worried about you know like fragmentation of the internet among other things and then we started looking into um ideas of you know broader family of uh distributed federated peer-to-peer all of that is there anything exciting there funny enough you showed the progress of forge fed because a funny story I have from that is that I think in 2018 when we're thinking about working on that I was on a GitLab instance and there was already a project around uh I think activity pub at the time where they were you know like claiming that okay you know this is you know of interest to us and things will happen there long story short you know like 8 years later nothing has happened I think there's a really simple reason for that which is most of those enterprises their incentives are very different you know they're not like they make their money usually on the enterprise right and there's this disalignment that we see.

But our thinking is that you know you need free speech like basically code is speech and you know free speech needs free infrastructure. So the freedom to publish and collaborate shouldn't depend on how you look your nationality a platform account or you know a company's permission. Uh so we started um working on on radical and you know our answer is a true commons in the old school way as I said like you know every peer runs a node and they replicate effectively you know the the the projects uh that they interested in and they connect with peers that that that they interested in and our objective with you know with radical maybe that's one of the different things versus like every other thing that tries to effectively be a billion dollar company you know our objective is really to just provide resilient infrastructure that can last for a very long time. Um so brief history of the project we started working in 2018. Uh we released an alpha in 2019 based on IPFS.

So IPFS was getting a lot of traction at the time. This was not a great idea. Uh and then uh at some point in 2024 uh we basically shipped the finally the 1.0 of Radical with its own custom protocol. And then as of 2025 there's also a new generation of the maintainers that actually you know governs the protocol in in Radical actually.

Uh so who owns Radical? Everything we do is open source. Uh there's a Swiss nonprofit that actually holds a trademarks and all protocol and client work is fully maintainer. Uh there's no external influence outside of you know radical community members and users. Uh how is it funded?

So we received a grant from a a cryptocurrency related uh DAO called the Radworks DAO. Uh and then as of earlier uh this year there's also a paid offering that we call radical garden. You can go to radical.garden that effectively uh provides a additional node. This is not you know a service where you can go and you know just have like a an experience that you're not in control.

This is just buying additional availability, additional storage and then you know we have a number of things like CI and um you know private deployments in in in the work private networks meaning in that in in that case. Uh so okay so what's distinct about radical how is this different from every other force? First of all radical to my knowledge is the only local first uh forge out there. What's that mean that you know all code issues patches all collaboration history lives locally on your computer right? So, and um yeah,

what about Fossil?

Uh so, good point. Yeah. So, Fossil Yeah.

So, what about Fossil which has been around for over a decade.

Yeah.

And has the wicki the issues everything you can do offline?

Yeah. So, so Fossil to my knowledge like at least you know the last time I looked at it, it described itself more as a protocol, not as a forge itself like a like a forge assumes like a product as well around this some interfaces. So it's a it's a fair point though. Yeah, Fossil has been around, you know, for a while. So yes, technically, yeah, you're right.

So we're not the only ones, but like maybe the only one active. I don't know is Fossil active at these days. It is

for the development.

Yes, it's the version control system. The developers of SQLite world to develop SQ.

Okay. Amazing.

The esculite.org website is a fossil wiki basically.

Interesting. Okay. Thanks. Thanks for correcting me on this. I wasn't uh lia I think I Oh, sorry.

Yeah. Yeah. So, thanks for correcting me on this. Yeah, it wasn't on my attention recently. I haven't looked at this in a while.

I remember fossil I looked at I think around 2020 maybe like around the time. Uh so, yeah. So, but what's what's exciting about local first is um you know like a lot of people come to radical because you know GitHub sucks or GitHub is evil or whatever you know is like the thing that people uh you know care for. Usually they stay because of the performance that this enables. So it's like really nice to just work locally with you know all of your artifacts without having to wait for an external server for anything really.

And of course you know that allows you to work offline as well like which is another thing that uh yeah surprisingly is happening more and more now. Uh so that's the one thing. The second thing is of course radical is as I said truly peer-to-peer like I think you know this audience is I guess uh relatively um you know uh like developed on that but uh yeah tangled is um um so maybe let's look at from the other side actually. So GitHub everyone knows okay it's a centralized offering one company. Now there are new players within that that actually focusing on the agentic um workflow.

Ellen Musk has uh his now own forge called origin which is related to cursor u that is very focused on agents. Of course, there's codeberg here in Berlin as well. Uh, you know, still centralized, but of course, the different thing of codeberg is that it's run by an association. So, thing aligns incentives uh uh a little bit better with its members versus, you know, the the GitHub model. Then there's tangled and tangled the way I understand this and liy correct me like it's federated effectively like you know a repo always lives on a knot, a single knot.

There's no replication between them. Uh so you know that has certain consequences especially with regards to projects that are you know politically um you know um challenged maybe I should say uh but I don't know I want to ask you that question maybe we can discuss from the fire chat if tangled has seen a case of a big government basically wanting a project off its platform how have they handled this because that's one of the you know one of my questions then of course radical is on the extreme angle of like you know uh centralization you know it's peer-to-peer and I'll show you some stuff some stuff in a bit um fully. Uh so yeah so so uh the other thing that is of course um interesting about radical is that it's radical is highly available. Uh so um like I just run some stats before on the connected network. That's the other thing that every time we talk about radical like we never know the full view of the network, right?

Like we only see the connected side but there are a lot of islands in there that um you know we we can't account for but the average repository and the connected network is basically replicated uh across nine nodes. Um so um you know that's that's that's kind of nice and it becomes actually uh helpful for projects that looking for resiliency and I'll show you a a case a case after. Um the other thing that radical does out of the box is that uh in radical everything is cryptographically verifiable. So radical uses set 25519 keys everything from your code issues etc by design this is signed signed state um and um yeah and there now we're starting to extend that not just for the ob on the on the obvious things but also you know we have something related to artifacts that I think is relevant for um a lot of um new use cases. Uh so uh code boost the network this is again what we see on the connected side.

So radical has been getting uh like growing especially this year quite a lot. I think it's related to a bunch of different reasons but I think codeberg banning AI and cryptocurrency projects was something that brought a lot of attention to us. Uh so that's that's that's one reason but you know the experience also

what did you say?

So you don't bi

no we can't ban it. That's the thing [laughter] you know

I just said you can't you don't ban AI.

Yeah. you know and and yeah and my answer is that like you know even if we want to uh it's actually impossible to do because you know it's like a truly uh peer-to-peer network. Uh so yeah so there is around on the connected network around 16,000 projects. Uh there are also a lot in you know private repos. There's a big asterisk here that I'll discuss in a bit as we had security vulnerability with private repos.

Uh but yeah like that's another interesting thing on a on a daily basis there are like hundreds of nodes active uh like you know the last few weeks we've been seeing around 7 to 800 nodes on a daily basis uh around like like on the from the ones that we have clear net addresses I think we're seeing around 30 countries around the world on a weekly basis it's almost 2,000 so it is now like starts to be really you know like uh there's a lot of it's a you know, it's a it's a large peer-to-peer network and we're happy about that. Uh, so who uses Radical? Uh, so uh, one of the, you know, uh, well-known projects that do use Radical uh, exclusively is Harden BSD. So they moved from a self-hosted GitLab instance to Radical in 2026 and then they using GitHub as a mirror which I think is nice is the sweet spot. Uh, so that's one case.

Uh the other case which uh gave us a lot of publicity for the ones of you that know of bitat. So this is a case where this is this um messaging app uh that effectively the Indian government uh decided that doesn't like it anymore because it was being used in uh some student protests recently. So the developer basically put it on radical and now this project is being seated from more than 100 nodes which is awesome. Uh why I really love that because that's why we build radical for these specific use cases. Uh and finally this is the year that we're seeing a lot of um traction um around this this this use case as well.

And then the one that maybe you know um most people are not not aware of is but um basically the zig community zig is the biggest project on for j they actively considering moving to radol. They wrote this really interesting blog post about us which talks uh about radical from a very different angle which is who should pay for source code availability and they argue that this is something that is being heavily subsidized and no one has an answer no centralized for actually has an answer especially with what's happening on the agentic uh you know case where like now we have myriads of slope and non-slope uh being created uh so yeah they're looking into radical uh and yeah that's you quite of a big deal for us because that's a that's a that's a large community. Uh so yeah, so if you look at radical in the past, look at again things have come a really long way. Um there's a lot going on here. Uh JJ, we're going to talk about later.

So I'm just going to skip it. Um and now now let me tell you what is not great about Radical because there are a lot of things that actually still aren't great. Um so the first thing that if you're coming from something like GitHub, you're going to miss is multi-device support. you know, radical basically use, as I said, dead 25519 keys. These are, you know, self-certifying, right?

Like, you know, they, you know, they contained uh uh but uh we still don't have a solution for that. We have something in the works uh that we hope that we're going to get out this year, but you know, still like, you know, you have to name your like LS laptop and LS whatever, right? Like, so it's it is quite painful because these appear on the on the experience as distinct, you know, um identities. Unfortunately uh the other thing that isn't uh there yet is organization like if you were looking for the GitHub orgs like thing you know this isn't there yet you can hack your way around it and we have done this and a lot of people doing a lot of experimental stuff but there's no great experience around something like um um you know you as a team you want to you know move your repos manage permissions in a streamlined way that's not there yet. Uh so a lot of people doing stuff with agents and like you know there's nothing like uh agent orchestration yet.

Some people might like that some people might not like that but I had to state it. And then finally like in my opinion one of the biggest gaps of radical is still moderation. So uh in radical you do have the ability of course to block nodes that just do stuff that you don't like uh from your view but yet we don't have a way to share those lists. So it's not that like you know we're working together the maintenance of the project there's no standard way for us to just gossip uh those those things um and that's that's a big problem um actually especially given everything you know radical's positioning of being like the widest openest network out there. Uh now the thing uh that uh the other thing that has been really uh rough for us is that you know uh we actually for a while we were we thought that we were supporting private repos uh but uh the external library that um we're using for that had security vulnerability that was really disappointing and you know um yeah uh not great for all of us.

So at the moment we're not recommending private repositories uh until we basically have uh a fix for that. So okay so what comes next uh so we're working on uh a package that we call radical 2 uh that is basically replacing the you know uh transport that I just showed you that there was a vulnerability about with IRO uh for the ones of you that are familiar with that technology. Uh so that on the one side will enable us to have our transport finally actually be encrypted and uh the other thing it enables us to do is of course deal with issues of not um not traversal uh which you know uh have been an issue um and it they are a common issue within peer-to-peer networks. Um so that's the one thing that's coming multi-device support. We do have a really nice way we think to do this from here and we want to um support across all clients and I'm gonna Daniel will show you all the clients and we we're going to get more hands-on with that but that's coming hopefully before the end of the year.

Rad colors are coming too and then you know we're doing some automation as well specifically with regards to CI we do think that yes go ahead

do you have any planned solution for account recovery let's say you lose your private key

especially in an organizational context like someone

quits whatever or loses the laptop with the only copy of the key

yeah yeah this is like all the you know I bundle this within multi-device support. But yes, absolutely right. This is within that like there's a set of problems that we solve with multi-device which also supports of course you know key rotation and within especially a a an org that becomes as you said a lot more important. So yeah that's coming so please stick with us you know that should be there by the end of the year I hope. Um so yeah so and then the last thing that um we're doing is that we're realizing that the world of software engineering is changing a lot at the moment because of all the AI stuff.

Uh one of the things that um does um you know that has become a lot more important is availability of source code. It really feels that like right now no one knows you know if issues and PRs and all of those things how will they look like in the future but you know source code availability is uh extremely important and you know with thinking about that and um um reflecting on this we also think that you know artifact distribution with the properties of radical also is is important. So it would be awesome to have, you know, like uh um yeah, some of the some of the nice properties of of of availability, resilience, and all of those things actually apply to artifacts. And we have something to to show you in in a little bit. Uh so yeah, how can you people how can people support this project?

Most importantly, run a node and report issues. uh of course see the repo that you care about and then you know uh if you want to support the project right now the financially the simplest way is to just like you know buy a note from radical garden this is our own service this an additional node adds availability um and yeah helps us basically like get get more feedback on what we do uh with that now let's move to the demo uh I think that would be uh insightful