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[00:00:10] Demetrick Ferguson: Hey, everybody. 

[00:00:12] Demetrick Ferguson: You know what time it is. It's time for another one of those very amazing hashing it out interviews that we know you're loving. We see the numbers. We see the love. We appreciate the love. In fact, this is a good time. Like and subscribe. Do the internet things, but let's jump right into it. Today we are joined with Mr. Cloudhead from Radicle XYZ. Hello Mr. Cloudhead. How are you doing?

[00:00:35] Cloudhead: Hi. I'm doing great. Thanks.

[00:00:38] Demetrick Ferguson: That's good. So why don't you give us a small introduction or large, however you feel comfortable introducing

[00:00:44] Demetrick Ferguson: Yourself to our audience here at hashing it out. Yeah. What do you do? Where are you from? Like, let's get to know you.

[00:00:52] Cloudhead: Yeah, sure. So I co-founded the Radicle project about five years ago. I my background is in software, software engineering. A little bit in product as well. And I'm French originally been living in Switzerland. And yeah, I have a background in open source since yes, 2008 or so, I've been you know, publishing open source code online. And I I really like the values of the open source space the free software values. And so I've been slowly kind of you know building a portfolio there and getting involved in the space. And after a couple of experiences with different startups, I decided to move away from that. I had already published a bunch of projects that were that had, you know, gotten some attention. And so I had some experience with the space and in 2018 with my co-founder LA, who's not on the call, unfortunately we launched the project and You know the I can, I can go more into the, the actual details of Radicle, but that's kind of for me.

[00:02:43] Demetrick Ferguson: Thank you. That's almost 20 years of open source contribution.

[00:02:47] Demetrick Ferguson: Before we go into some of the details of that. Like what what is it about the open source values that you're attracted to? And you know, how can you help, you know, other contributors to open source projects,

[00:03:00] Demetrick Ferguson: Kind of, you know be more motivated, I guess, to contribute or you know, almost 20 years is a pretty long while. So what about those values that you most align with, and how does that, like, play a part in how you're contributing today?

[00:03:16] Cloudhead: Yeah. I think a big part of it was, was being able to invest in in tools and in software in such a way that I could kind of carry it for the rest of my life. Right. So with open source, if you decide to spend time learning something. Right text like code editor or, or an operating system or whatever you know, that that time. Is never going to be lost because you're going to be able to use that tool or that that operating system basically forever for as long as as you want. Right. And. I like I like that feeling. And especially I think. With with time, I started to. Well, with time, you tend to have less time, right? You know, you have more obligations and and so the, the, the time you spend on the computer or generally at work becomes really precious. And and I just wanted to like more and more I started to be conscientious of what I learned, what software I learned, what languages I learned, what tools, what libraries, whatever it is, what skills I developed. And And it became really important to to focus on, on things that I could carry with me. Right, that I could take with me wherever I went in life. Right? Whether it's you know, a skill like cooking that you can always make use of or programing. It was really important that this was something I had access to. And open source and free software generally gives you that it it gives you tools that you can you can use, you can modify if they stop working or they're unmaintained. You can do the work yourself. They can be taken over they can be copied freely, etc..

[00:05:19] Cloudhead: And so they're essentially yours in a way. They're they're everyone's right. They're really public goods in that sense. And I think that's that's what really. Attracted me to the space and especially kind of made me want to get more and more involved. Of course, there's also the the the values of freedom, freedom of speech. Which is very closely related because essentially you can you know, you can you can use these tools and you can express yourself through them. And you can you can build them in a completely free way. The doesn't matter what you're, you're using for what you're saying with them. They're essentially neutral. And that's something I think in the more recent years that I found really important, really valuable because the internet, even though it started neutral, I mean, I was I kind of grew up with the internet of the 90s, and it was it was really kind of a magical thing, right? Where everyone published their own personal website on their own domain. And you know, every website was unique. It was an expression of that person's whole self or one of their interests or something like that. And that started to go away. I think with the emergence of web two and the big platforms and they became the medium instead of the internet itself, and then they started to have fairly restrictive terms of services and policies, etc., and then they became Sometimes political or at least no longer completely neutral. Right. And this is where we're at right now. And so I think It's even more important now to have these neutral spaces. Neutral tools? Neutral mediums that we can use and to, to maintain this kind of magic of the internet.

[00:07:33] Dr. Corey Petty: I was browsing Reddit the other day. First off, I totally aligned with

[00:07:38] Dr. Corey Petty: A lot of what you just said and open source software and why it's important and the benefits it gives us and. Some of the difficulties we faced because we care about those benefits. But like I was browsing Reddit and I saw this funny comparison. It wasn't red. It was something else. We get the idea because someone was like, what's the difference between git and GitHub now? People who are listening to this type of podcast probably get that difference. You probably understand what git is, even though we'll get into some intricacies later. But the answer that I found most funny was like, get us to GitHub as porn as the Pornhub. So

[00:08:12] Dr. Corey Petty: Where's radicle in this in this in this scenario. Right. Because GitHub is a hosting platform for git or

[00:08:18] Dr. Corey Petty: Code that uses git. And Radicle is something similar, but it's it's different. How do you how do you. How do you fit in that analogy?

[00:08:29] Cloudhead: Yeah. And you'd be surprised that, you know, even even fairly savvy people will will ask this question or will kind of you know, we'll use the terms git and GitHub interchangeably. But yeah, it's it's a good question. So when I, when I think about it, actually, I think of Radicle almost more like git than GitHub. Simply not from a product perspective, but from a kind of a central perspective in terms of the s, like what is what is Radicle? In essence. And that's because again, in terms of neutrality, git is a neutral tool. Anyone can use it any way they want. And Radicle is the same thing. It's a, it's a tool that is open source that anyone can use. And that isn't a service provided by someone to you. Right? That's what distinguishes it, I think, from from a tool, right. Tool versus service, kind of. Or you could say protocol versus service is another way to think of it. So I think what was challenging with Radicle is to to build a GitHub like experience. Right. User experience while staying a tool that is free to use and does not involve any kind of terms of service, let's say. Right. So as a product, it's more like GitHub, but as a piece of software it's more like git. Does that kind of make sense?

[00:10:09] Jessie Broke: Yeah. I have a question. You talk about neutrality of a protocol, and,

[00:10:15] Jessie Broke: I kind of have an idea, but maybe you can speak to the degree of neutrality that data can exist between different nodes in the Radicle

[00:10:30] Jessie Broke: Network, because I do know what the answer is, but I'd like you to just, you know, rehash that if you could.

[00:10:35] Cloudhead: So I think I understand your question. So you're asking about whether neutrality can exist in such a network.

[00:10:47] Jessie Broke: Where you can sensor data that's coming

[00:10:50] Jessie Broke: From, you know, nodes. And I know that I, I last went to ETH Denver and there was a guy that's going around for all the decentralized data storage protocols.

[00:11:02] Jessie Broke: Basically helps form blacklists for content.

[00:11:06] Jessie Broke: So I wonder, you know, has some sort of push to censor certain things that might be deployed on Radicle that may be,

[00:11:15] Jessie Broke: Antithetical to the kind of the good

[00:11:18] Jessie Broke: Natured but neutral spirit of what Radicle tries to push. Has that come your way yet?

[00:11:24] Cloudhead: Yeah, yeah, it's definitely come my way. There's been a few incidents like this where people uploaded content that was definitely not kosher and not not meant to be hosted on the Radicle network. I mean, first of all, the network is a more Radicleuser protocol. Being built on git is kind of optimized for text, write code, text, whatever. So it doesn't perform so well when you put, you know, large images or video. Right? I'm talking really large images, but or let's say games or stuff like that. So, so that's, that's one thing. It's, it's really not optimized for that. The other thing is obviously that, you know, there's there's content people just don't want on their nodes. Right? It could even be text, but it's just stuff people don't want other nodes. And the good thing with an open protocol like Radicle is that everyone gets to make that choice, right? It's it's every individual user's choice to say, hey, this is okay. And I'm happy to have it on my device or my node, or this is not okay, and I don't want it on my device. And and I think that's that's part of the beauty of it, is that everyone gets to make that choice individually.

[00:12:40] Cloudhead: There doesn't have to be a sort of you know, global consensus on whether something is okay or not or a global moderation system. Right. Now, one thing Radicle is, is not yet it doesn't yet have much of is is moderation tools. So this is something we're starting to really think of in terms of, you know, what, what do node operators need to to moderate the repos on their node? Just things like, okay, looking at the size of repos, size of files, things like that. Right. And then as you said these these blacklists or different policies that could potentially be shared between nodes and between users. I think what's interesting, I think blue Sky is doing something very similar is a collaborative moderation, right, where you kind of get together as a community and you say, okay I've discovered that, you know, so and so piece of content is nefarious or whatever. Here's my list of stuff that I'm blocking on my node, and then you share that with other, other people, other node operators, and they can they can kind of integrate it into their policies for their nodes. And you kind of have a system like that. And you know, you can you can build something more than just a text file with put a bunch of, of repo IDs.

[00:14:04] Cloudhead: You can have a system where you, you follow someone else's policies, for example, and you say, hey, I just want my moderation to follow the moderation of so and so, right? And and that can be recursive, right? You can have someone follow someone else's policy that follows someone else's policy, etc.. Right. So you can you can build a network like that. Of course, there's there's always risk of centralization when, when such a thing happens. Because the easy way is always to just follow someone else's policy. Right. But the good thing is there's, there's a way out, right? If you realize that a content that you think is perfectly accessible is being censored on your node because you followed someone else's policy, you can decide, well, I'm going to, you know, unfollow that policy, follow a different one, or just make an exception, right, for that piece of content that you think should not be censored on your node. Right? So this this is all kind of theory, right? We don't we don't have this yet, but it's it's very much possible. And this is the sort of thing I would like to build for ethical.

[00:15:16] Dr. Corey Petty: Discovery work like that seems to be something that like when I in the past, when I used this to collaborate on some repositories, it was like useful. But I knew exactly I was talking with the person, I knew exactly what I needed to connect to and get things. But if

Episode hosts - Demetrick Fergurson, Corey Petty, Jessie Santiago

In this episode, we interview Cloudhead from the Radicle project, discussing the intricacies of maintaining a peer-to-peer code collaboration platform. Cloudhead explains the challenges and innovations of developing Radicle, emphasizing its offline functionality, lack of requirement for a user account, and the complexities involved in building a decentralized platform.Key difficulties include engineering novel solutions due to the scarcity of peer-to-peer models and ensuring a user-friendly experience amidst peer-to-peer limitations. He describes Radicle as a peer-to-peer, sovereign code forge aiming to improve open-source development workflows, inviting developers, and users to contribute, provide feedback, and engage with the community.

<p>Hashing It Out is a highly-technical bi-weekly show that brings you the pioneering developers driving the Cypherpunk movement. In each show we take a deep dive through privacy, sovereignty, and network state technology with some of web3's most influential innovators.</p><section class="footnotes-container">&nbsp;</section>

Hashing It Out is a highly-technical bi-weekly show that brings you the pioneering developers driving the Cypherpunk movement. In each show we take a deep dive through privacy, sovereignty, and network state technology with some of web3's most influential innovators.

Dr. Corey Petty

Jessie Santiago

Demetrick Ferguson

Hashing It Out

<p>In this episode, we interview <a href="https://twitter.com/cloudhead">Cloudhead</a> from the <a href="https://radicle.xyz/">Radicle</a> project, discussing the intricacies of maintaining a peer-to-peer code collaboration platform. Cloudhead explains the challenges and innovations of developing Radicle, emphasizing its offline functionality, lack of requirement for a user account, and the complexities involved in building a decentralized platform.<br><br>Key difficulties include engineering novel solutions due to the scarcity of peer-to-peer models and ensuring a user-friendly experience amidst peer-to-peer limitations. He describes Radicle as a peer-to-peer, sovereign code forge aiming to improve open-source development workflows, inviting developers, and users to contribute, provide feedback, and engage with the community.</p><section class="footnotes-container">&nbsp;</section>