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Comment by theamk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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