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Bluesky?

Great! Then we've got a hosted solution at tangled.org. :)


no thanks, not interested ;]

atproto is a red flag for me now, toxic leaders at bluesky, who effectively control the protocol, it's not really open for others to have a say in what it looks like

you also don't have private repos and you will need to have centralized app view permission addons to have parity with user expectations, given the weak permissioned data proposal bluesky chose (their own proposal that works for what they need)


> Tangled is forcing some of their particular technologies (nix/rust) on users for those pieces and that is a hard sell. I don't use those techs, so I'm not interested to use a platform that I need to learn them to use.

Tangled CEO here. How are we pushing Rust exactly? :D Nix, yes but you don't really need to touch it at all with our Alpine-based CI images.

We have been under heavy load the past day or so, we're working round the clock to scale!


Hi since you are here, I find tangled amazing and I really hope it succeeds.

Since you are here, do you have any updates about the issue of issues and PRs living in the author's PDSs and not on the knot ? (Which also acts as the repository's PDS if I am not mistaken)

    >  As time goes on we are re-assessing the idea of users owning what is "collaborative data" (issues, PRs, etc.) on their PDSes - soon may come the day that an issue also lives on the knot as a source of truth, with an accompanying pointer record on user PDS to attest that it's theirs.


> We have been under heavy load the past day or so, we're working round the clock to scale!

GitHub is saying the same thing

re: pushing, when I looked many months ago, it looked very much like the rust/nix/jj club, who are on average very opinionated about "good" tech choices and try to shoehorn others into using them. It's a culture I'm not interested in being around


The difference with GitHub is you can also use it if the main instance is down if you self host. (And again self hosting still gets you the interconnection benefits just like if everyone was on tangled.org)


you can also buy GitHub Enterprise onprem and get a managed, self-hosted experience, thereby avoiding the public GitHub downtime

downtime and self-hosting is not a reason most people are convinced to move forges, it takes a lot to get someone there


I don't think you understood. You can still get a feature complete social experience that is NOT ISOLATED from anyone.

Your GitHub Enterprise comparison is wrong, because with an onprem github entreprise you don't have the social github features (and that's the whole point of tangled, use something else if you want a private forge for your company, it's not for this purpose)

My point is, Tangled being on ATProto, you can still access all of the repos, PRs and issues of other people by looking through your self-hosted appview even if the official appview is down, because an appview, is just that, an "app *view*" It's the view layer in your traditional app, and ATProto is the database.

It's a view of the data on the ATProto network, it is not the data holder, everyone can be their own data holder that is visible through any appview.

> downtime and self-hosting is not a reason most people are convinced to move forges, it takes a lot to get someone there

Yes, I agree, but I personally think tangled is great because of the interoperability

People on codeberg, on gitlab, on github, on self-hosted gitea instances, on self hosted gitlab instances, and so on, all control their issues, PRs, and git repos (they run on their own infra) but they are also more independent, are not subject to a central platform's policies (or are subject to the one they prefer) and so on, and they also introduce contributor friction, you need separate accounts, it can be difficult to cross reference issues and PRs accross projects on different forges, users can't easily have a central feed of project they starred.

On tangled you get to have the first part (freedom) while not having the second downside (unique account, cross-references work seamlessly, etc...)

Give me reasons open source projects moved forges away from github, and I am pretty sure if tangled did exist when they did so it would fit more boxes of "why they left" than their target forge.


atproto is not the next thing, there will be more social protocols to come

tangled will struggle to have private repos that align with user expectations for RBAC, atproto ACL permission proposal is insufficient, Bluesky is not interested in alternative proposals, the centralization of atproto is most prominant in who has write permissions to the repos


While private repos are usefull, I do not think that is tangled's main proposal at all.

I am just thinking you do not like tangled because you don't use the social features of github and so don't see the point here. I can understand that, but then tangled is just not for you ?

And yeah ATProto is not the next thing, but IMO having a portable identity and services that can act as "one big single app" are requirements for a modern social protocol to do applications like Twitter,Instagram, and github's social features for example, ATProto is just the one that does it better imo for now.

But again since you are always bringing on private repos, I think tangled is just not for you since the ATProto model is for open data and so fits open source projects really nicely I think.


> I am just thinking you ...

you are incorrect and this is why it's advised not to project the answer but ask a question instead

for clarity, I do in fact use github's social features

I also believe that the idea around the atmosphere that the point of atproto is to have open data is completely misaligned with how most of society wants their data handled, this is based on my talking to people IRL, outside of the echo chambers of social media, what's actually happening is more and more people signing off because of toxicity

open source and small devs do not pay the bills, github is financially sustainable because they have enterprise clients, same for gitlab and bitbucket


> tangled will struggle to have private repos that align with user expectations for RBAC, atproto ACL permission proposal is insufficient, Bluesky is not interested in alternative proposals, the centralization of atproto is most prominant in who has write permissions to the repos

This isn't entirely true because we're working on our own extensions to the protocol that will enable full-fledged RBAC at a knot/repo level. We're not beholden to PBC and AT Protocol; when needed, we're OK to roll custom bits.


> we're working on our own extensions to the protocol

what I hear is another path to app centralization, regardless of your intent, this is what comes out of custom extensions to a protocol

bluesky should have actually been open about the permissioned design process, posting your own proposal to a blog and not entertaining other proposals, or even joining the broader conversation that was happening, is not open in my book


Forgejo federation being mentioned each time never stops being silly. It hasn't been a thing for years, and they don't appear to have made any meaningful progress to show for.


Had a quick look at it and it's riddled with ideology statements everywhere which is a huge red flag.


https://tangled.org! Founder/CEO here. We're a new forge building things from the ground up, and are fully federated -- you can host your git repos on your own infra, along with the CI runners. We've also got a pretty neat set of features (if I may say so myself): stacked PRs, Nix-based CI (if you want it), and a fully open protocol (https://atproto.com) to for you and your agents.

Happy to answer any questions.


The whole "social coding" angle is highly off-putting. List of "X followed Y" on the front page, and the large "social coding" reminds of facebook, social manipulation, developer burnout and all the negative things about social networks. It also brings up the questions about project's long-term direction - is this going to focus on the code part or the social part?

Which is a pity - as I think most projects just need a git host + web UI + easy pull requests + a way to clone other's repos, and tangled seems to do this pretty well.


Arguably the "social coding" angle is the reason why Tangled is the only actual alternative to GitHub. Otherwise there's actually plenty of other alternatives to GitHub, but none of them have GitHub's punchcard, which I'm ashamed to admit is the primary draw for me.


Forgejo, and by extent Codeberg, has the punchcard-like feature, it‘s just hidden under „Public activity“ on the profile page


Don't think anyone uses Github to follow people


I'd like to know if most people use GitHub because of the social network part, or other reasons. I, for one, hate the social network part.

One thing with GitHub for open source projects is that the CI is free (and included macOS runners). The other is that many people have a GitHub account and would refuse to contribute to a project on another forge if it means that they must create a new account.

The federated design of Tangled solves the latter problem, so there's that.


The neat thing about Tangled is you can build your own frontend pretty quickly. We've got an open API https://api.tangled.org (or self-host your own API server: https://docs.tangled.org/bobbin#bobbin)


You're not the target market, there are a number of other forges as seen in this thread as alternatives.


One may want the federation ("I can use all those forges without creating multiple accounts" and "I can open a pull request from my forge into another forge") without wanting the social network angle, right?


Yes, for you there is Radicle.dev then


Radicle is decentralised, not federated...

Also if everybody moved to Tangled, I would have to somehow interact with it, wouldn't I? I dislike the social network aspect of GitHub, but it doesn't mean I don't need GitHub.


There's not a big need for federation if it's already decentralized. Either way you can do some research on other options, no one is forcing you to use one or the other.


And you can just use Tangled without the social network aspect. I don't see why you don't want me to use Tangled just because I don't like the social network aspect?!


Why would I care what you use? I just said perhaps @theamk is not the target market if they don't like the social network aspects, and then you replied to me, so I'm not sure why you're on my case specifically. Use what you want.


And my point is that they (or I) may be the target market of Tangled while not being into the social network aspect of it.

Which seems totally reasonable, as per the Founder/CEO of Tangled: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49335338.

> Use what you want.

Then don't tell me to use something other than Tangled, I guess?


You're reading too much into my comment suggesting an alternative. As I said, I don't care what you use and you can take my suggestion or not, I'm not telling or commanding you to use it.


What's the monetization pathway here? No private repositories (because everything is on ATProto) so near zero commercial use potential - CI is free, everything is free, no pricing page... Am I the product if I use this service?


Daniel Holmgren from bluesky is working on permissioned data for ATP [1]. Once that lands tangled will probably add unlimited private repos and extra CI compute on the first party servers as a paid feature.

Self hosting will be free forever. That is not a threat to monetization plans because most people would pay a reasonable price ($10 month) to avoid dealing with infra. Remember that hardware is cheap so margins can get pretty high and 1000 paying customers at the lowest tier is probably enough to pay for a full time engineer. 10,000 and you can have a small team (plus unpaid open source contributors). You don't need Amazon scale and growing profits to be successful.

[1] https://dholms.leaflet.pub/


I recently got a spindle and a knot set up on my home server (along with Tranquil PDS). A few rough edges that we got ironed out but it's cool to have all of that self-hosted on my own machine yet still part of the AT proto world! I'll be honest, I'm not putting anything critical on it yet but that's my lack of trust in my own home server setup not doubt in Tangled's infra!

A better web UI for the queued jobs on my spindle would be great btw!


I am curious, does your server "initiate" the connection to the "federation", or do you have to make it publicly accessible (by opening a port, etc)?


I'm not an AT Proto wizard (there's a lot of good text and video explainers out there) and I know that Tangled is building on it but also adding their own functionality. But from a high level, I register my 'knot' with my account on Tangled.org which is exposed through a public domain. In my case that's routed through a Cloudflare tunnel to a reverse proxy running on my server. Tangled is then running an "app view", which is basically an aggregate of a subset of AT proto activity. So my commits, PRs, releases, etc go into the app view which then points traffic back to my server. So the long and short of it is the app view is the missing piece of the AT proto system and you have to register your data with an app view provider, of which Bluesky is the most prominent. But there are open source app views, in fact the Tangled team just announced one called bobbin that's super resource light.

Additionally (and optionally for Tangled use), I'm also hosting my own PDS which is my personal data server. This is the home for my AT proto profile, which contains all of my AT proto activity like Bluesky comments and likes. Tangled does look at the PDS for identity but the code is in the parallel structure of the knot. I suspect this is cause AT proto wasn't built for code so the PDS isn't sufficient for an entire git repository but don't quote me on that.

Finally I'm running a spindle, which is just a CI runner, and that's registered with Tangled very similarly to how a self-hosted GitHub or Gitlab action runner would be.


Tangled feels like the future but it seriously needs private repos ASAP to capture the momentum of the current GitHub exodus.


Just signed up, so not much to report yet, but one thing I noticed is that, because the sign in is on tngl.sh rather than a subdomain of tangled.org, it might be confusing for some users, especially as the sign in page has a very different design, theme and layout to the rest of your website and tangled as a whole. Additionally, my password manager didn't show the just created password due to the URL mismatch. Perhaps this could be addressed to improve the experience.

Edit: I really like that one-click "watch logs via SSH" copy button. Maybe those could be attached to the top of the top, as it stands the pipeline just pushes them further and further down. Find the UI and UX overall very pleasant.


I think the main thing I'm waiting for in the atproto space, for _most_ applications, is private data solutions. And the recent RFC on private data spaces (I forget the terminology) is a start, but has a ways to go.


Yeah I would like to try Tangled if I can set it up in a completely private configuration


The "social media" platform aspect is really offputting. That's really one of the aspects where it's obvious that GitHub lost perspective of its purpose.

And atproto isn't really something I'd want to be around; it's really associated with the wrong crowds.


I wanted to use tangled but my repo is SHA256 and you sadly don’t support it. I know SHA256 is not very usual but anyway, do you plan to support it?


Yes, it's on the roadmap.


This looks pretty cool. I like the idea of a federated option

What’s the monetization plan? My biggest concern would be using this and it losing support in a few years


I love jj and am a fan of the ideas of AT protocol, so tangled has been on my radar for a while. Last I checked though, it sounded like it was much better suited for open source code, not private repositories. Is that still the case?


We don't yet support private repos, correct. This is very high priority on our roadmap (~6-8wks out).


Is there a way to just browse hosted projects without creating an account? I couldn't find anything


Of course, just head to tangled.org/timeline :)


Are you guys working on jj support?


We already support JJ for stacked PRs, but more native integration is planned.

https://blog.tangled.org/stacking


[flagged]


It's not crypto anything.


https://tangled.org would love to have you :) We're hosted in the EU, and are free for open source, forever. Tangled is also designed to be federated from ground up, so you get to own your infra & data while still participating in an open network.



Tangled is a VC-funded Oy (Finnish limited liability corporation, €3.8M seed a few months ago). I searched and couldn't find a published donation route, which makes sense given it's VC-funded.

To Tangled -- it's great that the core code is MIT licensed and anyone could stand up a competing appview (the credible-exit property of atproto).

Do Tangled Labs Oy's articles include a purpose clause instead of the default profit-only purpose[0]? Or is something similar on the roadmap?

[0] OYL 1:5 reads The purpose of a company is to generate profits for the shareholders, unless otherwise provided in the Articles of Association.


What is the long-term sustainability story here?

You're deliberately avoiding a network effect lock-in by being federated, you make competition trivial by giving away not only the protocol but also making your code available, and you don't even restrict commercial competition by using the MIT license rather than, say, BSL.

To me that sounds like you are deliberately starting a race-to-the-bottom competition on price with, well, everyone capable of hosting a SaaS? Heck, if you don't end up with some solid competition the whole "federated code" USP doesn't play out. To me that doesn't exactly scream "good return on my €3,8M seed round". Am I missing a brilliant plan here, or should we expect a rug pull a few years down the line?


It initially begun as an email thread, but we settled on WhatsApp owing to, well, most people having WhatsApp.


Surely e-mail is even more widely used?


Dunno if it's a generational thing or what, but I check my email like maybe once a day sometimes I can go 2-3 days without looking at it. It's just a place where Stuff gathers and I go through it when I Get around to it. Can't even remember when I used email to actually communicate with a non-business entity outside of work.

WhatsApp messages I get immediately.


Surely checking once every three days is frequent enough to see an invite for a meetup that happens once every eight to ten weeks?


Thanks for reminding me to attend this. I'll try to join the next one!


I mean, it's an sqlite file on disk. You can sync it however you like. https://litestream.io is a fun choice.


Of course but my question was more in the direction of if the data is suitable to be transferred to another host without becoming useless. The native cloud integration could be attaching an origin field to each history field whereas the db itself might only be intended for local only use.


We’re solving for this very issue. Issues & pulls will belong to the repo, backed by a “COB” (collaborative object) system.


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