There's `rad sync status` which will show you (for a particular repository) which other nodes have echoed back to you that they have received and verified the most recent state of your namespace of that repository. So, if you expect some other node to have received your changes, you can use this command to verify that.

When the user explicitly asks to sync, then by default the process will be considered to have completed successfully as soon as three other nodes have echoed that they have received your changes. This threshold is configurable. Further, one can define a list of nodes that they care particularly much about, in which case the process will only be considered to have completed successfully if all these nodes also signaled that they have received your changes.

For anything deeper than that, you'd have to resort to logs. And if you connect your node to the other one your are interested, you can get a pretty good picture of what's going on.

If one node "falls off" the network, then the above mechanisms will communicate that to you, or fail after a timeout.

With Git repositories, humans establish order explicitly. They push commits which are a DAG. The collaboration around that (mostly discussions on issues, patches) is also stored in and synced by Git, but here, humans do not have to establish order explicitly. Rather, these things, in Radicle lingo called "Collaborative Objects" are CRDTs, so they will merge automatically. Nodes also opportunistically tag operations on these CRDTs with the latest operation they know, to help a bit by establishing an order where possible.

This sounds so much more appealing to me than github and co. Unfortunately I guess there's no multibillion dollar exit in the cards in this case.

Has there been any thought about how this might interact with centralized-ish hosting? For example. Suppose a large project chose to use a radicle repo as its "blessed" point of coordination. Being a major project of course there's a mirror on (at minimum) github that points back to a web page (presumably the radicle app) for filing issues, collab, wiki, whatever.

So a user that doesn't have any interest in learning about radicle wants to file an issue using the web app. When I glanced at the heartwood repo it seems to be read only with no indication of being able to log in (that's entirely unsurprising ofc). How much work / community welcome / etc is there likely to be for a project to offer a usable web front end, presumably leveraging a solution such as OIDC? Basically being able to "guest" users of centralized platforms in to the project so that they can collaborate with near zero overhead.

As a motivating example consider outfits that want to self host a git forge but also want to offer centralized services to users. Communities such as KDE and SDL come to mind. Many of them have ended up migrating to github or gitlab over the years for various reasons but in an alternate reality it didn't have to be that way!

I realize I'm effectively asking "do you have thoughts about implementing a partially federated model" but hopefully you can see the real world usecase that's motivating the (otherwise seemingly unreasonable) question.