Photo by Alp Ancel on Unsplash

Peer-to-Peer Development Platform

Rad!

Radicle is an interesting collaboration tool that offers users full control of their data [1]. Even if one of the platform's instances goes down because of data or network issues, any repository can be easily retrieved from another instance of the platform. The project is built according to the "local-first" Git repository principle, and data or code can be shared with others over the peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol. All repository metadata, including comments, discussions, and patches, is handled like code and is available for cross-sharing, as well. In addition to the web application, the project provides a desktop client and a console application.

P2P Code Hosting

The most popular code hosting platforms, GitHub and GitLab, are centralized. Their code is available on the website and can be accessed from a browser, console, or desktop application. However, they do not provide deep integration with each other. In contrast, Radicle promotes its peer-to-peer feature as one of the most important aspects of its architecture. The most popular P2P protocol is BitTorrent – a really good solution for distributing digital data, with one part of the P2P network (seeders) sharing data with another part (leechers).

Popular content, such as the top Linux distribution images, can be downloaded by thousands of clients simultaneously. Radicle has weaponized this technology (in a good way) for source code and communication between its instances. The "seeding" concept is widely used here. The Radicle protocol is used for instance communication, repository discovery, and replication. If a repository doesn't exist on an instance, it can be seeded from another instance.

The strongest advantages of Radicle are:

• Non-code data migration. Software development in general is full of social activities: collaboration with