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Comment by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | Hacker News Reader

> who will be there to fix bugs and maintain it?

Those of us who use it. Tangled is a neat project and architecturally it makes a lot of interesting choices but code-wise it's relatively simple and from my personal forays in it I'd say pretty easy to maintain.

The majority of the codebase is loosely related go modules. Then some static HTML+CSS. And finally a small sprinkle of typescript to tie things together. And of course a bit of Nix for orchestration.

IIRC it all runs on a pretty trivial amount of hardware that a single person could currently host by themself.

Users' knots, spindles, and PDS (plus atproto at large) do the real heavy lifting infra-wise.

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I don't think that will work. How many of us did contribute a simple patch to LibreOffice, Firefox, or GNOME?

At least this statement doesn't hold for LibreOffice. Their Online version, including "simple" HTML/CSS components, was archived because of a lack of maintainers. For their main project, the vast majority of contributions in the last release were made by former ecosystem partners (Collabora) or TDF staff. Volunteers only did a fraction of the work [1].

[1]: https://www.collaboraonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/L...

The difference is that LibreOffice, Firefox, and GNOME are really really technically complicated.

Document file formats are a fucking nightmare, especially the Microsoft ones, and needing perfect compatibility with them spanning a generation is hell on earth.

Firefox is a similar scenario but for the web and decades of "it works on the dominant browser but the dominant browser refuses to follow the spec".

And GNOME is a matter of varying levels of direct hardware support/integration and app compatibility across basically the entire personal desktop computer and laptop eras.

Each of those has a compatibility scope that's absolutely massive.

Comparatively Tangled is a greenfield project with no compatibility requirements other than "support git" and "don't break compatibility with itself".

The most valuable thing Tangled will ever do is establish the protocol of Tangled. Once that’s done, it lives as long as people are willing to run it.

Exactly. I'm personally slowly working on my own parallel "appview" of tangled that is accessible exclusively via SMTP, IMAP, JMAP, and eventually integration with a Lore + Patchwork frontend.

Oh that sounds very cool! Where can we follow your progress?

Oh I haven't uploaded anything yet but I'm around in the Tangled discord (and you can find me on bluesky/tangled with the handle onedeuxtriseigo.nullpo.dev).

I'll make a proper announcement when it's anywhere close to presentable or even functional and I imagine the tangled folks will amplify that when I do.

its one of the most complex htmx projects i have seen. super cool.

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