This is a really cool project and I’ve been following it for awhile. I’m also keen on breaking up the code forges monopolies.
I’ve been dipping my toes into this space mainly because I think code forges as they exist are trying to solve multiple problems at the same time. I think there’s value in splitting this functionality up into discrete services.
For example, most forges: host your git repo, web view, collab tool, ci/cd pipeline, and task management.
I don’t see why these necessarily need to be bundled together.
For example, as long as we are comfortable not having direct access to the git repo, we can have a purely static web viewer for git: https://pgit.pico.sh
For collab, as long as we are comfortable sharing patchsets and reviewing locally, we can have a collab server that doesn’t need a git repo in order to function: https://pr.pico.sh
Then self hosting your own bare git repo on a VPS is trivial.
Git is already decentralized, centralizing it because all the other services require it is the anti pattern
If multiple services have multiple owners it becomes also a question of trust. You either validate one service that fits 80% of your requirements, or validate ten services where each solves one specific requirement.
Also, of course - economy of scale for the infrastructure / integrations between features. Monoliths are still a thing.
But yeah, I agree developer experience may be traded here.
Git was really useful because it allowed decentralization but didn’t require it like CVS or SVN. It catered to the “just clone the repo and create a new branch when you hop on the airline and push updates to origin when you land” model. But it’s really unusual that people really want a hugely distributed model. Typically, people want to go to The Blessed Repo and get The Blessed Code. For example, Linus’s got kernel tree is more important than everyone else’s clone.
I see you hand waved people who pay money so that forges can operate.
If you have a company you don’t want to pay 20 invoices to different vendors.
If you have a company you don’t want to deal with debugging integration between your CI/CD and web view and git providers, you want to make a ticket and have it fixed.
When you are developing a project you don’t want to spend time figuring out which task management will integrate with other parts.
As a developer you also don’t want to jump through 5 different tools and waste time you want integrated and streamlined experience.
Git being decentralized doesn’t have value besides the fact that I can have my local copy and work on it separately from whatever is there on the central server my company uses.
Inevitably someone will end up paying for Tangled. Their architecture demands an infrastructure piece that actually hosts the forges and PDSs through BlueSky won't always be free. They're also non-trivial to run.
It is trivial to set up a VPS with a git remote. Access it with ssh. Done. Git clone fred@fooda.com:/hubs/frog gets you hopping instantly.
I think the issue behind the curtain (attempt at an obscure reference to the wizard of oz) is lock in. And why is lock in such an issue all around us? Why is github so completely focused on lock in rather than service? Behind the curtain of lockin is funding. Paying for it. A business model.
Maybe centralization => lockin => money? Like gmail. Like github. Etc.
If you have no business model for service => money (and we do not!) then this is what you get.
While there may be no technical reasons why these functions need to be bundled together in a forge, there may still be economic reasons (can’t support development as a standalone function) and usability reasons (people want it to arrive “batteries included”). The counter might be “open source proves this can work because people ignore the economics there, too,” but remember that most open source projects die with a single maintainer and the most successful ones have some sort of corporate patrons contributing sponsorship money, engineers, etc.
We recently shipped a change to switch out our OAuth library—which introduced a regression, preventing new users from being added to the default knot and spindle (the git hosting server & CI runner). We just discovered this and pushed a fix—please log out and log back in again and you should be able to create repositories!
First Question: is it possible to change your handle or delete your account on the tngl.sh PDS instance?
Second Question: how much resource does creating and hosting a new AppView entail? For example let's say I make an appview that's essentially the PDS-hosted equivalent of Cloudflare Pages, where a user upload a folder of a static website and the appview just forwards it verbatim at a hypothetical https://atprotocities.org/@cool.guy/... , would you need to bear the brunt of the traffic cost as an AppView host?
Cool product! Knowing a little bit of AT protocol, I can assume that the expression you used, “social-enabled”, is related to that. Does Tangled have plans for more social features or social-enabled simply means AT protocol?
We definitely want to be very social-first down the line! Our focus at present is to nail the core features first, however. The vision is to build Tangled to be a indie/community-focused code forge.
Yeah this thing has actual support for stacked PRs which Github has somehow failed to do for decades. If I ever need some self hosting thing I'll definitely check this out.
My only hesitation is that I'd want it for private use in a company, and it isn't clear to me how to avoid connecting your Tangled instance to the rest of the public network.
Github is no longer a trusted nor a reliable platform. Moving at least the oss stack to atproto (or any other open network) is an excellent way to safeguard it against Big Tech, Government censorship etc. Love to see this.
I was in the first ~100 users to sign up for tangled after seeing that they were roadmapping stacked patch style pull request review and being generally impressed with how quickly they were building and shipping features all off the excitement from a budding community in the world of atproto. I am very excited to see where this goes and how they continue shipping.
There are a lot of opportunities here that could be levered to offer much better experiences and fundamental control and long term viability if they continue to execute this way.
I really like the idea of more decentralized git collaboration. What do people think are the biggest blockers to adoption in this space? Having to run a server or manage some kind of private keys? Is it purely network effect?
Spam, illegal content, and moderation in general. How do you protect against new account spam when any domain could be a PDS and any PDS could host an arbitrary number of users? What do you do about people stuffing ebooks and TV shows in git repositories? If a project is getting piled on with all its issued spammed because of political views of the repo's maintainer, is this considered a problem, and if so how is it fixed?
The advantage of an AppView is that, like BlueSky, you can actually have a central moderation team and consistent moderation policy. Even if people post whatever they want on their own PDS it is possible to curate what people normally see. However, even though I avoid following the drama I can see that the BlueSky moderation team is constantly under fire for some decision or other. Choose your poison.
Nowadays I don't have the appetite for fully decentralised public networks and all the responsibilities and problems they bring. It's nice that AT's content is completely open compared with something like Twitter, but it's so helpful that the day-to-day administration is centralised when you want an authority to appeal to without ending up with the quagmire of "defederation".
A question to ponder: is anyone here going to volunteer to run a "permissive" radicle seed node? (i.e. providing storage and access to arbitrary git repos uploaded anonymously)
But doesn't the decentralized firehose make it easy to build curation? You decide what/whom you want to subscribe to---rest of social media be damned. Why do you care what unmoderated crap is flooding the world outside your cosy corner?
And if you choose to receive a broader sampling, you can subscribe to someone who will curate it for you---either manually, or through algorithms. It seems like an elegant way to have a web-of-trust layer for curation, composed with an algorithmic curation layer---and be able to tune the latter separately to suit user needs, without being beholden to the interests of the platform operator. You can easily switch your subscriptions if you don't like the way someone is curating it, without wholesale losing access to the network!
> A question to ponder: is anyone here going to volunteer to run a "permissive" radicle seed node?
Doesn't opening up curation+subscription solve this problem too? Anyone can curate in opinionated ways, and offer to "host" whatever they are okay with accepting responsibility for (at whatever level of endorsement, so long as it is clearly communicated) and users have the choice to subscribe.
The problem today is that curation is tangled with access to the network, so you're forced to accept the curation provided to you by the owner of the walled garden (and incentives are misaligned)
AtProto does have platform and user managed labelers for the moderation piece, so it's at least built into the protocol. The jury is still out on how well that concept will scale.
Tangled very nicely gets rid of the having to run a server problem, yet still gives you a sovereign platform for doing git from. Truly divine.
The barrier is largely that Tangled is so new. People don't know about it. People don't know what Bsky & the Personal Data Server offer or they haven't been enticed out of the zero energy local minima.
There's some need for more features. For more tangled dev. Ideally for alternate clients, just because. But it's already enormously solid, the early adopters are living the better life, the future is already here and we are just waiting for devs to redistribute themselves appropriately.
I'm increasingly becoming convinced that atproto is pointless. Federation is good, but this idea of implementing "take everything with you" at the protocol level is unnecessarily complicated and centralizing. With Bluesky it might make a little more sense, but with Git? So many better, easier options here. Archive your repo and a) learn how to the do the real decentralized thing OR b) make your own centralized thing OR c) just move to Gitlab or similar.
"Take everything with you" is just downstream from "find or be a trustworthy node."
What’s the “real decentralised thing”? You can already archive your repo—Tangled doesn’t prevent that.
AT Protocol is great for when you’re working with the data surrounding your code: issues, pulls etc. which are much harder to move around, or even just archive from GitHub.
Case in point: Gitea (ironically), they’re stuck on GitHub because their 30k+ issues and PRs cannot be migrated from GitHub due to API rate limits.
"Real decentralised thing" here I meant 'using Git in that way that was kind of invented for but no one seems to do,' aka distributed/decentralized with no central server at all.
Why not improve upon https://radicle.xyz? It's been running for a while now with promising future. From my naive understanding of running a radicle node, it consumes around 40G of storage for the current network of 5k repos
The social factor. As someone who is very active on Bluesky, the social inertia of Tangled is great. I like Radicle too, but it's harder to collaborate with people, because it's harder to sell to people.
Readit News
I’ve been dipping my toes into this space mainly because I think code forges as they exist are trying to solve multiple problems at the same time. I think there’s value in splitting this functionality up into discrete services.
For example, most forges: host your git repo, web view, collab tool, ci/cd pipeline, and task management.
I don’t see why these necessarily need to be bundled together.
For example, as long as we are comfortable not having direct access to the git repo, we can have a purely static web viewer for git: https://pgit.pico.sh
For collab, as long as we are comfortable sharing patchsets and reviewing locally, we can have a collab server that doesn’t need a git repo in order to function: https://pr.pico.sh
Then self hosting your own bare git repo on a VPS is trivial.
Git is already decentralized, centralizing it because all the other services require it is the anti pattern
Also, of course - economy of scale for the infrastructure / integrations between features. Monoliths are still a thing.
But yeah, I agree developer experience may be traded here.
Decentralized is a big word.
Git never tackled the decentralized aspect, being served over a master-slave protocol like HTTP means you have a tendency to centralize it again.
If you have a company you don’t want to pay 20 invoices to different vendors.
If you have a company you don’t want to deal with debugging integration between your CI/CD and web view and git providers, you want to make a ticket and have it fixed.
When you are developing a project you don’t want to spend time figuring out which task management will integrate with other parts.
As a developer you also don’t want to jump through 5 different tools and waste time you want integrated and streamlined experience.
Git being decentralized doesn’t have value besides the fact that I can have my local copy and work on it separately from whatever is there on the central server my company uses.
It is trivial to set up a VPS with a git remote. Access it with ssh. Done. Git clone fred@fooda.com:/hubs/frog gets you hopping instantly.
I think the issue behind the curtain (attempt at an obscure reference to the wizard of oz) is lock in. And why is lock in such an issue all around us? Why is github so completely focused on lock in rather than service? Behind the curtain of lockin is funding. Paying for it. A business model.
Maybe centralization => lockin => money? Like gmail. Like github. Etc.
If you have no business model for service => money (and we do not!) then this is what you get.
[Edit: "funding" => "is funding"]
https://codemadness.org/stagit.html
Does Pgit support branches?
They don't need to be, but it's very convenient.
We recently shipped a change to switch out our OAuth library—which introduced a regression, preventing new users from being added to the default knot and spindle (the git hosting server & CI runner). We just discovered this and pushed a fix—please log out and log back in again and you should be able to create repositories!
Otherwise, happy to answer any questions!
Second Question: how much resource does creating and hosting a new AppView entail? For example let's say I make an appview that's essentially the PDS-hosted equivalent of Cloudflare Pages, where a user upload a folder of a static website and the appview just forwards it verbatim at a hypothetical https://atprotocities.org/@cool.guy/... , would you need to bear the brunt of the traffic cost as an AppView host?
My only hesitation is that I'd want it for private use in a company, and it isn't clear to me how to avoid connecting your Tangled instance to the rest of the public network.
That is a feature, not a bug.
Are you referring to Tangled? If so, that’s patently false.
There are a lot of opportunities here that could be levered to offer much better experiences and fundamental control and long term viability if they continue to execute this way.
The advantage of an AppView is that, like BlueSky, you can actually have a central moderation team and consistent moderation policy. Even if people post whatever they want on their own PDS it is possible to curate what people normally see. However, even though I avoid following the drama I can see that the BlueSky moderation team is constantly under fire for some decision or other. Choose your poison.
Nowadays I don't have the appetite for fully decentralised public networks and all the responsibilities and problems they bring. It's nice that AT's content is completely open compared with something like Twitter, but it's so helpful that the day-to-day administration is centralised when you want an authority to appeal to without ending up with the quagmire of "defederation".
A question to ponder: is anyone here going to volunteer to run a "permissive" radicle seed node? (i.e. providing storage and access to arbitrary git repos uploaded anonymously)
And if you choose to receive a broader sampling, you can subscribe to someone who will curate it for you---either manually, or through algorithms. It seems like an elegant way to have a web-of-trust layer for curation, composed with an algorithmic curation layer---and be able to tune the latter separately to suit user needs, without being beholden to the interests of the platform operator. You can easily switch your subscriptions if you don't like the way someone is curating it, without wholesale losing access to the network!
> A question to ponder: is anyone here going to volunteer to run a "permissive" radicle seed node?
Doesn't opening up curation+subscription solve this problem too? Anyone can curate in opinionated ways, and offer to "host" whatever they are okay with accepting responsibility for (at whatever level of endorsement, so long as it is clearly communicated) and users have the choice to subscribe.
The problem today is that curation is tangled with access to the network, so you're forced to accept the curation provided to you by the owner of the walled garden (and incentives are misaligned)
The barrier is largely that Tangled is so new. People don't know about it. People don't know what Bsky & the Personal Data Server offer or they haven't been enticed out of the zero energy local minima.
There's some need for more features. For more tangled dev. Ideally for alternate clients, just because. But it's already enormously solid, the early adopters are living the better life, the future is already here and we are just waiting for devs to redistribute themselves appropriately.
"Take everything with you" is just downstream from "find or be a trustworthy node."
AT Protocol is great for when you’re working with the data surrounding your code: issues, pulls etc. which are much harder to move around, or even just archive from GitHub.
Case in point: Gitea (ironically), they’re stuck on GitHub because their 30k+ issues and PRs cannot be migrated from GitHub due to API rate limits.