Radicle: Sovereign {code forge} built on Git

Unfortunate that they aren't using the AGPL license. It will allow SAAS companies to Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.

Indeed, this seems to be already planned. https://radicle.dev/faq "Radworks intends to offer services built on top of Radicle."

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 discovered Radicle back in 2020 (when their website looked incredible: https://web.archive.org/web/20201201030505/https://radicle.x...). I bounced off of it, in part due to being unable to effectively delete repositories. They used to have an FAQ about that—looks like it's gone now, though the public-private repository area is much more fleshed out (you can make a repo private, in which case no new updates will be publicized but the history will still exist). In truth, it's just profoundly difficult to effectively "delete" things in a decentralized system (see: Matrix, BitTorrent, et. al.). But definitely something to consider; people accidentally upload secrets, and want to have some recourse when that happens.

Still, time has passed and I have become more interested in GitHub alternatives (https://figbert.com/posts/ideating-tragit/). Will likely end up moving to Tangled. But first I need to add support over there for pushing over HTTPS...

I noticed that they moved to a different domain last month: https://radicle.dev/2026/04/23/domain-move

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.

How do these federated forges deal with spam? If merge requests and issues are federated, does that mean that anybody running a radicle node (or interacting with one) can open issues or merge requests on all the repositories that you've made public? Or is there a whitelist (or something fancier?) to allow interaction only with specified nodes?

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.

I have two questions:

1. Does Radicle also work over TOR? 2. Does Radicle support Git LFS and/or Git Annex?

Congrats!

Maybe I'm not the target audience for this, so pardon my ignorance when I ask what problem does this solve? Centralization and censorship?

radicle is awesome and Just Works from what I've tried of it

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.

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.

How well does it hold up under load? What are the CI and PR stories?

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.?

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.