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git, p2p, radicle, sovereignty

Decentralized and sovereign git forges

Git is distributed by design and yet we spent fifteen years recentralizing it behind a handful of forges. The healthy reflex already exists, mirroring, but it stops halfway. This post starts there and pushes further, all the way to genuinely decentralized forges, the ones that no longer need a server at all.

1. The starting point: git is already distributed

Before chasing decentralization, a reminder that would spare many over-engineered contraptions. Your local clone IS already a complete backup, with the full history. A remote, for its part, is just a URL and nothing stops you from having several per repo:

git remote set-url --add origin git@forgejo.local:user/repo.git

A git push then goes out to every destination at once. You can even set this up per branch, or per named remote, with origin to GitHub, backup to your Forgejo , archive to a self-hosted GitLab, Gitea or Gitolite. On the automation side, hooks (pre-push, post-commit) trigger whatever you want without depending on a third-party service; a post-push that syncs to a second remote or fires an rsync is three lines of shell.

Still, the real subject behind mirroring is the backup policy. A Restic, a Borg or a Plakar on your local repos, with retention and encryption and you would have a solid strategy without even needing a Forgejo. And I will say it once and for all, a backup policy without a regular restore test is decoration; you do not know whether your backup works until you have restored it.

So far, we remain in classic self-hosting. The forge lives on a server, it just happens to be your server. The interesting question begins when you remove the server.

2. Why true decentralization is coming back now

We recently saw Thomas Dohmke, GitHub’s former CEO, launch Entire, an attempt in that direction backed by a sixty-million-dollar round. What is telling is not so much the product as the stated motivation, the agentic load now hammering centralized forges.

LLM agents clone, read, open PRs, trigger CI in loops and multiply the traffic on an infrastructure that was never sized for it. Centralization, once a convenience, becomes a bottleneck and a cost. Decentralization stops being an idealist’s whim and goes back to being an engineer’s answer to a load and sovereignty problem. But you have to read the announcement for what it is, not for the word it brandishes. Entire, today, is not peers but regional mirrors, with GitHub remaining the source of record and the agents clone from the nearest mirror instead of a single central repository. True decentralization, the kind where the network keeps the code inside a given region with no central authority, is on the roadmap, not in the product. The signal is right, then, but the vocabulary runs ahead of the implementation and for genuinely sovereign production today you have to look elsewhere.

3. Radicle: full P2P over gossip

For genuinely sovereign production right now, two projects strike me as far more mature than the announcements and Radicle is the first.

Radicle is full peer-to-peer. Distribution runs over gossip between peers and the social artifacts, issues, patches, votes, are stored directly in git refs, so versioned and replicated like the rest of the repo. There is no central server to maintain, no single point of failure, no authority to ask permission from. It is the choice of total autonomy, with the owned trade-off of a mental model different from a classic web forge.

4. ngit: the pragmatic compromise on Nostr

The other mature project is ngit. It places coordination on Nostr while keeping perfectly native git underneath.

The idea is neat, because you do not reinvent git, you add a decentralized coordination layer for patches and discussions, carried by a network of relays you can host yourself. This is the pragmatic compromise. You keep the tool everyone knows, you decentralize only what must be and you stay interoperable with existing workflows. Where Radicle aims for total autonomy, ngit aims for adoption without disruption.

5. rngit over Reticulum: all the way off-grid

And then there is the case that genuinely makes me smile, in the good way, rngit, which runs git natively over Reticulum (RNS).

Reticulum is an end-to-end encrypted network stack, designed to work over just about any medium, including very constrained links. rngit therefore carries git on top of that mesh, down to LoRa or packet radio. We are talking here about genuine sovereign off-grid, pushing a commit with no Internet, no ISP, no DNS, over radio links at a few kilobits. No need to justify such a use with a collapse scenario; dead zones, isolated terrain, or simply the wish for an infrastructure that depends on no one are enough.

It is the clearest demonstration of the starting idea, git is distributed by design and when you take that design seriously, you end up pushing commits over radio.

6. Where I stand

This panorama overlaps my own playground around peer-to-peer. I have recounted elsewhere how I carry this logic over to the distribution of model weights (llmp2p ) and to GitOps itself (gitops-p2p ), because the underlying question is the same, how to make a system hold without depending on a central point you do not control. The decentralized forge is only a special case of that problem, applied to the most distributed tool we already hold in our hands and keep insisting on recentralizing.

No master, no outage

  • Git is distributed by design: your local clone is already a backup and multi-remote plus a few hooks cover mirroring without an extra forge. A backup policy without a restore test stays decoration.
  • True decentralization is coming back because the agentic load saturates centralized forges; it is no longer a whim, it is a load and sovereignty answer.
  • Radicle offers full P2P over gossip, with social artifacts stored in git refs, for total autonomy at the price of a different mental model.
  • ngit coordinates on Nostr while keeping native git, the pragmatic compromise that decentralizes only what must be.
  • rngit over Reticulum runs git down to LoRa or packet radio, the sovereign off-grid and the proof that “distributed by design” can be taken at its word.

[edit: 2026] The Ansible implementation of all this: the forgejo-runner role .