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Comment by icy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

Don't think anyone uses Github to follow people

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

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.

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)

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

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