Lots of negativity in the comments and while I'm as distrusting of VC funding as the next guy I think competition in this space is something we should encourage, and bootstrapping that is hard if not impossible at this point. Obviously this post was timed well with the 2-3 GitHub-hating posts that made it to the top of HN yesterday, but I commend the attempt here. I hope it takes off in a meaningful way.
The problem I feel with federated solutions is basically the 'cold start' problem.
When you are wanting to join a federated network, you have two choices: join a pre-existing server thereby creating the exact same problem you are escaping, ie: a giant server that holds you to its whims, BUT you do get a big network to begin with.
Or you start your own server but your network is zero, discoverability is zero, your feed is empty, and you have to convince other sites to federate with you / not block you for the crime of being a 1 person server / etc.
Am I alone in this feeling or am I just doing federation wrong? (But also this may just be a problem / quirk of Mastodon)
Yeah that's why Tangled didn't go with ActivityPub (Mastodon protocol) and went with ATproto instead, which is specifically built to solve that problem, so individual servers are all aggregated by centralized AppViews (that anyone can host) that give a singular unified "view" of the network that is just as cohesive as a centralized network feels.
Tangled is built entirely in the open: https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core, and our primary goal is to be "permanent software"—i.e. be fully reproducible and entirely self-hostable at minimal cost.
VC money is a means to an end. We're both Indian founders in Europe, and grants are nigh on impossible to find (4–12+ months for anything to materialize). VC is quite simply the quickest way for us to build a team, setup infra and accelerate development. We're also incredibly aligned with our investors on our goals (we took 6+ months to find the perfect partner for this).
How can they ever see a dollar of profit without a rug pull, license change or hosted moat? This is a neat idea - besides just replacing github, a network of loosely-federated git servers seems like a promising base for distributed social media or chat platform someday - but it seems like the only way it can really stay open is if you're planning to stiff your investors.
How much work are you putting into simplicity? In my experience, in order for software to be permanent it needs to be like mold: only a single spore is required to grow a massive fruiting body and the spores themselves are very small and very uncomplicated. In this case, a spore is a single developer, and the simplicity is a low skill ceiling. Reproducibility does not benefit longetivity if the preconditions themselves themselves are highly complicated, and the benefit of simple bootstrapping is easily overshadowed if the software itself isn't friendly to being extensively hacked on by the average programmer.
In the latest FOSS project I’m starting, I’m not avoiding all “open core” supposedly FOSS projects. In my experience, they’re the projects most likely to do a rug pull and change licenses. If they cannot commit to their entire project being free and open, they are less likely to actually be committed to the principles of free and open software.
While I was quite excited about some of the ideas being discussed in this project, it being VC backed is a complete non starter for me. Your claims of being built in the open don’t make me feel any better, you will eventually need to make returns for investors.
VC money is absolutely not a means to an end, what is signals is that the company doesn't care about community and only cares about profit.
I'm with the OP you're replying to. Taking VC is an albatross that means a large portion of devs will never trust you or use your services (outside of bleeding your funds dry).
If this place truly cared about community they should have made a non-profit or some type of NGO, basically anything with a true community governance model. Not the current model of caring about money over a community.
We currently live in a society that solely cares about money and seriously doubt devs want to continue uplifting the current system that only benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else.
How many board seats does the company plan on giving to the community to ensure enshittification doesn't occur?
> the company doesn't care about community and only cares about profit.
There are plenty of examples of VC funded companies that care about community & don't "only care about profit". Bluesky is a good one (literally a community / social platform). That's such a black & white take it baffles me.
> Taking VC is an albatross that means a large portion of devs will never trust you or use your services
A "large portion of devs" (the majority) use so many VC funded services? Probably _most_ services devs use are VC funded. GitHub itself - was VC funded.
You can have an anti-VC opinion but you have to also live in reality.
You're badly missing reality here. There's no "community governance" as there would be in a local farm shop or something. It's a bunch of online people with interests. They aren't going to visit you if you're sick or coach your kid's team or attend your funeral.
The two reasons actual communities work in actual locations are: 1) because to some extent the people all live in a place and want the place to be nice for them and their (grand)children, so they are invested personally and 2) companies aren't set up to help communities. Communities are the ones doing community things. It's crazy to demand other people do work in a certain way when you're doing nothing.
This kind of absolutism is crazy. People who are doing 90% of what we want them to do should be greatly celebrated and rewarded. Else we penalize idealistic people who are not perfect instead of penalizing the people who are actually doing the opposite of what we care about (ex. Autodesk).
Do you want software to become as closed source as mechanical engineering? No! So let's celebrate people building software that's open source, even if it's VC funded! They are awesome for doing that!
It's not about VCs being scum but about investors needing a relatively fast return on investment which is understandable but also often times incompatible with investment in large scale, open source infrastructure.
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.
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.
> Why does it need VCs? Why not company and corporate sponsorship like Ladybird?
You talk about corporate sponsorship like that's trivial to find. Trust me when I say we spent over half a year chasing down grants/sponsorships only to be met with closed doors, extremely long wait times for pennies. We'd also be required to keep our day jobs—which means less focus on Tangled dev, and ultimately very slow progress overall.
We debated VC heavily (we're both idealists after all), but figured we can make it work—it's ultimately the founders that make bad calls leading to enshittification. There's plenty of examples of VC-backed companies that haven't enshittified. Tailscale is an excellent one, and hence we brought on Avery as an angel in our round.
Sure Tailscale is an excellent one. For now at least. It is also not open source and also has a paid product.
Perhaps maybe in a few years time, Tangled Enterprise would be available to compete with GitHub Enterprise and that is where the switch over happens for companies who want to move over from GitHub to Tangled.
I don’t know because somehow Tangled would need to make money somehow?
I hope Tangled becomes profitable enough to withstand enshittification, because more and more funding rounds and not meeting targets means giving up control and facing a repeat of what happened at Bluesky.
"There are 4 standards that try to solve this problem, its too many, we need one that finally unifies it all and solves the problem once and for all"
"There are 5 standards that..."
Jokes aside, I think we need stronger arguments as to why something like activity pub is not good enough to solve the problem instead of trying to come up a new way of solving the "decentralized comms" problem.
ActivityPub and atproto are differently shaped. Pitting them against each other is like asking “why need web when we have email”.
ActivityPub is email-shaped. Servers are inboxes sending messages to each other.
atproto is web-shaped. User repositories host data (like personal sites or git/RSS), while apps aggregate from repositories (like Google Reader).
Different topologies lead to different properties. Eg atproto lets user change hosting with no disruption in app experience. atproto also lets anyone build new apps aggregating over existing data.
ActivityPub doesn’t allow either of those things. It’s literally a bunch of small centralized coupled hosting+app services messaging each other.
That's become my answer to all "why not ActivityPub?" questions.
AP isn't completely stagnant but there's a reason AT is still holding on to and accelerating that early developer excitement AP had. Maybe it's marketing, maybe it's money, maybe it's some technical thing. Maybe it's the community. Whatever it is, people seem to enjoy developing in the Atmosphere in a way I never saw on AP.
its linked in the original post as well, but here is an explanation of why activitypub is not a good fit for this problem, by the authors of ForgeFed themselves: https://forgefed.org/blog/actor-programming/
Reading that - I'm really not sure that AT Protocol has a much better story there either.
(as I understand it) the data has to live in a PDS, PDS are keyed by accounts, so you are similarly stymied for collaborative projects? I guess AT Proto is still a real work in progress so maybe that story has improved since the last time I checked it out.
Yeah the problems they seemed to have were over collaborative data structures with permissions. You’re right about how atproto solves that, which means you’re using CRDTs if you need to collaborate. If that’s a fit mismatch, I’d tell people to just appoint api servers which wrap a repo and provide the needed semantics.
Can't we really go back to pre-github model? I mean all it did was to reduce the barrier for contributions. With current flood of AI generated PR it doesn't sound like a big inconvenience to have to register at code hosting service used by project you want to improve/participate in.
Forge federation seems like a bad idea to me. If you want to go the route of decentralized project management (note that git as a VCS tool is already decentralized for this purpose), you're probably much better off modernizing the git-over-email workflow instead.
Decentralizing the code isn't an issue; cloning repo's between servers is so standard that any forge can import a code repo from any other forge.
The difficulty is ancillary stuff like issue trackers, wikis and MRs, but using a federated protocol for that seems ill-advised given the much weaker safeguards against spam. Mailing lists have a very large existing body of work on the matter of dealing with spam and a proven method of mirroring/archival. (Most git wikis are just git repositories with a different renderer.)
The main reason nobody likes doing git-over-email is mostly just because it's very user-unfriendly to set up (since modern mail clients typically aren't correctly configured to deal with them). It's a very developer oriented workflow in the worst way possible. A modernized mailing list program that automatically takes care of things like reformatting emails/not leaking email addresses to the general public would go a long way to make it easier to deal with.
Crazy... I actually hashed out a plan to begin bulding a successor to github earlier this week and this blog post describes EXACTLY what I was thinking about with atproto+git.
Why? I really don't see the purpose of a federation of git repos. Git is already totally decentralized. 99% of projects only have a small list of committers. Tangled just doesn't solve an actual problem. Github was used because it was an easy to set up, free, place to store code and share it, and it had source viewing which was a step up from sourceforge. With multiple solutions available that makes this easy, its just not necessary to federate anything. The common user account part of github just isn't critical.
It's not a clear one-way trip though. The "original" blogosphere of the 2000s was heavily federated with MovableType supporting trackbacks and then later systems automating that further with pingbacks. Ultimately it all fell to spam and hosting complexity though, and now almost all blogs are on a handful of centralized hosts again.
Spam/moderation is going to be the biggest hurdle to overcome with any distributed forge effort. It'll likely come down to some kind of web-of-trust/vouching system, but it's delicate balancing ease of access with not making it a slog to constantly manage spam.
Is there really nothing like BitTorrent for git, or have we just not heard about it because of GitHub's network effects? It feels like this problem was solved long ago for binaries.
Yeah I’ve met the Radicle people a couple times. I’ve never given it a thorough review but, for their goals, their designs have always seemed strong, and they’re pleasant people to chat with.
The main difference was atproto wanted to tackle scale, so we went with a servers & aggregation model. Radicle is going for device-to-device networking as a primary goal.
Git is already distributed by itself. The management-part is what's missing (mergerequests, permissions, issues..), and it's disputable whether this is really necessary, or just a nice to have.
gittorrents were talked about and built at least 15 if not 20 years ago.
the issue isn't mirroring of data, this is a solved problem. everything else that a forge does is a problem - issue tracking, PRs, reviews, CI/CD, authn, authz, secrets, audit trails, ...
BitTorrent also enabled search engines to be built easily, which created discoverability. Unfortunately it's a much harder problem for git repos, especially when competing with GitHub search.
I used JJ for a bit, but I personally really, really dislike the anonymous branch approach it forces you into.
Branches are just useful conceptually, at least to me. For the same reason I like my documents grouped into folders.
Frankly - I think JJ just ended up taking up far more mental bandwidth than git. Simple operations need generated ids, commands require complicated input (ex - the entire revset thing), I have to be constantly thinking about the tool and its structure.
It feels really oversold to me. It's solving problems for people who live in source control, not problems for people who just want snapshots of code every now and then. Hell - just look at some of the example commands from the suggested tutorial:
With all due respect, if the intro tutorial to your tool includes a command having to literally write function names in quoted commands, or run a command with fucking 8 (EIGHT!) arguments... You've jumped the shark.
Not trying to harsh anyone's buzz - if you like it... great, it's clearly quite powerful. But it misses the mark for me. I want "just powerful enough" with minimal mental overhead.
Last time I tried Tangled they had no concept of private repos. That’s the only thing keeping me on GitHub (oh, and my massive likes collection, I use those as bookmarks).
I’m self-hosting with cgit, maybe I could move my private repos to SourceHut? Idk.
I really don't understand this fear about a single pillar of failure, as people were in tears about the Ghostty thread yesterday. git is not GitHub. git is not HTTP. git is inherently decentralized with no concept of client/server. In git there is only local and a plurality of remotes.
That said the solution is simple. Open a secondary, or a new primary, account with another provider and add it to your project's list of remotes. Here:
Boom, problem solved: do it yourself redundancy/decentralization. If you want to make this federated then write a file containing a variety of remotes per addressed location and a script to dynamically update git according to your catalog at every location.
Not if your CI depends on github, or if you have specific actions to review things, or if you use SSO because you're an enterprise, or....
Workarounds exist for each of these cases, but they add significant friction. That's not terrible if you're one person, but if you're an org? big problem.
Most enterprises self host for all those critical things so they aren't blocked by third party service interruptions. SLAs might refund some money, but they won't recover the lost time.
I think this is less about source code itself, and more about the surrounding ecosystem of project management. Handling of issues, pull requests, who gets commit or admin access, all that stuff. If you mirror your git repo to other providers, fine. But if you have thousands of issues and PRs on Github, you still can't really move away and you still can't really work if Github is down.
Edit: I absolutely support federated forges, including Tangled as well as ActivityPub based approaches like the (slow) progress to federate Forgejo.
Pull requests are a core feature of git, the protocol, so I think you probably mean certain PR features more than just PRs.
Issue trackers can be self-hosted from fully mature applications via docker images. You might find something here: https://selfh.st/apps/
CI is typically actioned from a configuration file in your repository to a CI SAAS solution, which could be anything. Travis CI was popular for a long time. When I was big into CI SAAS my favorite was Semaphore CI.
GitHub is a huge and almost 20 year old company suddenly experiencing massive scale growth as a result of an externality it didn't cause and that no one predicted. That is an incredibly difficult scenario for any long-running, established organization to handle.
Yes, GitHub is temporarily breaking under the increased load, yes, it's likely to still be a thing in 2 months, and no, it's unlikely to still be a thing in 12 months.
It's very unlikely a cool new thing will peel enough developers off GitHub in the next six months to survive long term as GitHub inevitably gets its ability to handle the new normal scale back.
I was just thinking about forge federation this morning. It'd be nice to base the federation on email, which has been working fine for decades (boring tech and all that), and build UIs on top of it to facilitate collaboration.
This looks cool but the issue github is dealing with is exponential usage. They're trying to 30x their capacity right now - let that sink in! Microsoft here or there, any company would be struggling under this load. And I frankly don't think that any ideology driven alternative will ever be able to provide better uptime under the same load - or any alternative period, for that matter. We're just living in times where everyone is catching up with the capabilities of agents, and it was obvious that things like this will happen 12 months ago. Good luck for your project though!
I agree that any company would struggle in such case. The thing is that everyone see that GH is pushing for more agents, their Copilot thingy, and AI everywhere, while basic functionality that people relies on is constantly failing.
If you push a lot of new features but your baseline is constantly failing, then something is wrong.
If you're seriously using agents, you'll know that if they didn't offer that then people would rapidly switch platforms if they didn't. Maybe not all of them yet, but soon it will be all.
You frame the symptom as the problem though. Others seem to be attributing this to Azure migration and Copilot overhead tightly coupled to GitHub infrastructure.
Slight tangent: the post says that github is crumbling. Can someone get me up to date on what's going on please? Admittedly I'm not following tech drama particularly closely, but I thought I'd have heard if a major thing like github was going down the chute.
So there has been increasing issues form the github side for the past year and I believe they also just lost alot of customer/user data on top of several critical vulnribilities and bugs in base service and in actions.
My POV: Github actions are inconsistent in billing, security and require alot of attention to do right. Github has worse uptime than alot of free online videogame services, when most enterprise and business world leans on it for developers. Leaving a lot of users with terrible experience the past year having to constantly examine github firefighting for issues around availability, security, and billing instead of doing work that makes the company/people money.
Example walk through of securing github actions for ci/cd and managing SBOM python dependancy/supply chains (giant complexity) [1], Github has remote code execution[2], Uptime by 3rd party tracker shows 86% past 90 days. (First quarter in 2 years where they didn't have atleast one month above 90% uptime) [3]
You completely missed the point.
The point isn't that you should find a company that you trust and think is ethical. The point is to shift the power dynamics so you don't have to trust anyone.
That's what building on ATproto does. Tangled is also fully open source and anyone can host their own knot and AppView.
> Look how well that has turned out even though Bluesky is open source.
??? Bluesky can make decisions, mistakes, or moderation choices you disagree with and you can just go to https://blacksky.community, a completely independent AppView with different moderation that was up for the entirety of a 24hr outage Bluesky recently had.
Swapping one broken chair for another broken chair won’t cut it.
Development and steering is subsidised by VCs funding Bluesky at this point. (especially a crypto VC)
Have you ever asked whats in it for them?
What plans are they going to put into the protocol?
I can see the AT Protocol shoving crypto payments or whatever in their insatiable quest for growth and ROI, because when the funding money runs out when BS miss their growth targets, this is what happens.
And for Tangled’s monetisation path, it is questionable.
It’s a bit long but should give you a really crisp picture.
When you are wanting to join a federated network, you have two choices: join a pre-existing server thereby creating the exact same problem you are escaping, ie: a giant server that holds you to its whims, BUT you do get a big network to begin with.
Or you start your own server but your network is zero, discoverability is zero, your feed is empty, and you have to convince other sites to federate with you / not block you for the crime of being a 1 person server / etc.
Am I alone in this feeling or am I just doing federation wrong? (But also this may just be a problem / quirk of Mastodon)
The server costs for the frontend should be very low allowing them to operate basically forever and they are fed in by a series of other hosts
Even though it's federated, when development stops, who will be there to fix bugs and maintain it?
VC money is a means to an end. We're both Indian founders in Europe, and grants are nigh on impossible to find (4–12+ months for anything to materialize). VC is quite simply the quickest way for us to build a team, setup infra and accelerate development. We're also incredibly aligned with our investors on our goals (we took 6+ months to find the perfect partner for this).
While I was quite excited about some of the ideas being discussed in this project, it being VC backed is a complete non starter for me. Your claims of being built in the open don’t make me feel any better, you will eventually need to make returns for investors.
I prefer slow and steady wins the race kind of project. Good luck!
I'm with the OP you're replying to. Taking VC is an albatross that means a large portion of devs will never trust you or use your services (outside of bleeding your funds dry).
If this place truly cared about community they should have made a non-profit or some type of NGO, basically anything with a true community governance model. Not the current model of caring about money over a community.
We currently live in a society that solely cares about money and seriously doubt devs want to continue uplifting the current system that only benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else.
How many board seats does the company plan on giving to the community to ensure enshittification doesn't occur?
There are plenty of examples of VC funded companies that care about community & don't "only care about profit". Bluesky is a good one (literally a community / social platform). That's such a black & white take it baffles me.
> Taking VC is an albatross that means a large portion of devs will never trust you or use your services
A "large portion of devs" (the majority) use so many VC funded services? Probably _most_ services devs use are VC funded. GitHub itself - was VC funded.
You can have an anti-VC opinion but you have to also live in reality.
GitHub was founded in a very different world. Would we start using it post 2025 is the question.
The two reasons actual communities work in actual locations are: 1) because to some extent the people all live in a place and want the place to be nice for them and their (grand)children, so they are invested personally and 2) companies aren't set up to help communities. Communities are the ones doing community things. It's crazy to demand other people do work in a certain way when you're doing nothing.
Do you want software to become as closed source as mechanical engineering? No! So let's celebrate people building software that's open source, even if it's VC funded! They are awesome for doing that!
OpenAI and Claude both took VC money and everyone on this message board uses them regardless of ~community~
Not all VCs are scum
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.
Why does it need VCs? Why not company and corporate sponsorship like Ladybird?
Why should we spend our time on a developer tool that would be enshittified down the line when VCs expect 10x returns?
So even if they don't expect returns from a given atproto project, they are investing money (and therefore funding FTEs) in the ecosystem at large.
The investment isn't necessarily in any one of these projects in isolation. It's in the AT protocol at large.
You talk about corporate sponsorship like that's trivial to find. Trust me when I say we spent over half a year chasing down grants/sponsorships only to be met with closed doors, extremely long wait times for pennies. We'd also be required to keep our day jobs—which means less focus on Tangled dev, and ultimately very slow progress overall.
We debated VC heavily (we're both idealists after all), but figured we can make it work—it's ultimately the founders that make bad calls leading to enshittification. There's plenty of examples of VC-backed companies that haven't enshittified. Tailscale is an excellent one, and hence we brought on Avery as an angel in our round.
Perhaps maybe in a few years time, Tangled Enterprise would be available to compete with GitHub Enterprise and that is where the switch over happens for companies who want to move over from GitHub to Tangled.
I don’t know because somehow Tangled would need to make money somehow?
I hope Tangled becomes profitable enough to withstand enshittification, because more and more funding rounds and not meeting targets means giving up control and facing a repeat of what happened at Bluesky.
Jokes aside, I think we need stronger arguments as to why something like activity pub is not good enough to solve the problem instead of trying to come up a new way of solving the "decentralized comms" problem.
ActivityPub is email-shaped. Servers are inboxes sending messages to each other.
atproto is web-shaped. User repositories host data (like personal sites or git/RSS), while apps aggregate from repositories (like Google Reader).
Different topologies lead to different properties. Eg atproto lets user change hosting with no disruption in app experience. atproto also lets anyone build new apps aggregating over existing data.
ActivityPub doesn’t allow either of those things. It’s literally a bunch of small centralized coupled hosting+app services messaging each other.
AP isn't completely stagnant but there's a reason AT is still holding on to and accelerating that early developer excitement AP had. Maybe it's marketing, maybe it's money, maybe it's some technical thing. Maybe it's the community. Whatever it is, people seem to enjoy developing in the Atmosphere in a way I never saw on AP.
(as I understand it) the data has to live in a PDS, PDS are keyed by accounts, so you are similarly stymied for collaborative projects? I guess AT Proto is still a real work in progress so maybe that story has improved since the last time I checked it out.
https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3meluqcwky22a
https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3mfrsbcn2gk2a
https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3mguviy6iks2a
https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3mhj6bcqats2o
this is the key bit, atproto has this. sidecar services like knot can use service authentication[0] for authenticated requests.
[0]: https://atproto.com/guides/auth
Decentralizing the code isn't an issue; cloning repo's between servers is so standard that any forge can import a code repo from any other forge.
The difficulty is ancillary stuff like issue trackers, wikis and MRs, but using a federated protocol for that seems ill-advised given the much weaker safeguards against spam. Mailing lists have a very large existing body of work on the matter of dealing with spam and a proven method of mirroring/archival. (Most git wikis are just git repositories with a different renderer.)
The main reason nobody likes doing git-over-email is mostly just because it's very user-unfriendly to set up (since modern mail clients typically aren't correctly configured to deal with them). It's a very developer oriented workflow in the worst way possible. A modernized mailing list program that automatically takes care of things like reformatting emails/not leaking email addresses to the general public would go a long way to make it easier to deal with.
Good validation imho.
Spam/moderation is going to be the biggest hurdle to overcome with any distributed forge effort. It'll likely come down to some kind of web-of-trust/vouching system, but it's delicate balancing ease of access with not making it a slog to constantly manage spam.
If I want to create 100 repos of vibe coded projects every month someone will have to pay for it.
At this point, just give me an honest version of GitHub that tells me what things actually cost. 5$ a repo, and another 1 per gb stored in LFS, cool.
Fixed low cost but different UI: sourcehut.org
HardenedBSD Is Now Officially on Radicle
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47944864
The main difference was atproto wanted to tackle scale, so we went with a servers & aggregation model. Radicle is going for device-to-device networking as a primary goal.
the issue isn't mirroring of data, this is a solved problem. everything else that a forge does is a problem - issue tracking, PRs, reviews, CI/CD, authn, authz, secrets, audit trails, ...
I used JJ for a bit, but I personally really, really dislike the anonymous branch approach it forces you into.
Branches are just useful conceptually, at least to me. For the same reason I like my documents grouped into folders.
Frankly - I think JJ just ended up taking up far more mental bandwidth than git. Simple operations need generated ids, commands require complicated input (ex - the entire revset thing), I have to be constantly thinking about the tool and its structure.
It feels really oversold to me. It's solving problems for people who live in source control, not problems for people who just want snapshots of code every now and then. Hell - just look at some of the example commands from the suggested tutorial:
jj new ym z r yx m -m "merge: steve's branch"
jj log -r 'ancestors(trunk, 2)'
jj new o
jj log -r '@ | ancestors(remote_bookmarks().., 2) | trunk()'
---
With all due respect, if the intro tutorial to your tool includes a command having to literally write function names in quoted commands, or run a command with fucking 8 (EIGHT!) arguments... You've jumped the shark.
Not trying to harsh anyone's buzz - if you like it... great, it's clearly quite powerful. But it misses the mark for me. I want "just powerful enough" with minimal mental overhead.
`jj` is a wrapper around git and offers a much better dev-ex for managing changes.
it has features like:
- conflicts are first class citizens
- `rebase` is the default mode; there is no need for an interactive rebase mode.
- all descendant changes automatically rebase
- a much more intuitive version of `git reflog`. in `jj`, we have `jj op log`
- cheap branching: branches in `jj` are just tags (or bookmarks) that can be moved around
I’m self-hosting with cgit, maybe I could move my private repos to SourceHut? Idk.
But you're right, the protocol doesn't currently support this.
That said the solution is simple. Open a secondary, or a new primary, account with another provider and add it to your project's list of remotes. Here:
If further explanation is needed see SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42830557/git-remote-add-...Boom, problem solved: do it yourself redundancy/decentralization. If you want to make this federated then write a file containing a variety of remotes per addressed location and a script to dynamically update git according to your catalog at every location.
Not if your CI depends on github, or if you have specific actions to review things, or if you use SSO because you're an enterprise, or....
Workarounds exist for each of these cases, but they add significant friction. That's not terrible if you're one person, but if you're an org? big problem.
Enterprise Cloud up time is 100% for last 90 days for most services, with a one being at 99.98 and one at 99.97.
Enterprise customers get an SLA
Edit: I absolutely support federated forges, including Tangled as well as ActivityPub based approaches like the (slow) progress to federate Forgejo.
Issue trackers can be self-hosted from fully mature applications via docker images. You might find something here: https://selfh.st/apps/
CI is typically actioned from a configuration file in your repository to a CI SAAS solution, which could be anything. Travis CI was popular for a long time. When I was big into CI SAAS my favorite was Semaphore CI.
Yes, GitHub is temporarily breaking under the increased load, yes, it's likely to still be a thing in 2 months, and no, it's unlikely to still be a thing in 12 months.
It's very unlikely a cool new thing will peel enough developers off GitHub in the next six months to survive long term as GitHub inevitably gets its ability to handle the new normal scale back.
Or rather, it will go over way too well.
If you push a lot of new features but your baseline is constantly failing, then something is wrong.
My POV: Github actions are inconsistent in billing, security and require alot of attention to do right. Github has worse uptime than alot of free online videogame services, when most enterprise and business world leans on it for developers. Leaving a lot of users with terrible experience the past year having to constantly examine github firefighting for issues around availability, security, and billing instead of doing work that makes the company/people money.
Example walk through of securing github actions for ci/cd and managing SBOM python dependancy/supply chains (giant complexity) [1], Github has remote code execution[2], Uptime by 3rd party tracker shows 86% past 90 days. (First quarter in 2 years where they didn't have atleast one month above 90% uptime) [3]
[1] https://astral.sh/blog/open-source-security-at-astral [2] https://www.wiz.io/blog/github-rce-vulnerability-cve-2026-38... [3] https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
This is likely on the back of Mitchell Hashimoto (Hashicorp founder) announcing he’s moving off of Github as well.
And really just years of Github feeling inconsistent, bad UX, no good solutions for open source developers in terms of AI spam etc.
Check a local repo and go to pr's, there's a big banner telling you there's an ongoing ncident
In particular:
https://www.githubstatus.com/history
tangled distributes the rest of the stack - issues, comments, pulls, stars, etc.
https://blog.tangled.org/seed/
It always ends the same way.
enshittification.
Also:
> Bain Capital Crypto is an investor.
A crypto VC is invested in this.
This is not the solution.
Look how well that has turned out even though Bluesky is open source.
Tangled is not funded by the community.
It would be better if it was rather than it be owned by VCs.
??? Bluesky can make decisions, mistakes, or moderation choices you disagree with and you can just go to https://blacksky.community, a completely independent AppView with different moderation that was up for the entirety of a 24hr outage Bluesky recently had.
I'd say AT Protocol is turning out pretty well.
Bluesky PBC still has major influence of the AT Protocol.
> and you can just go to https://blacksky.community, a completely independent AppView
Swapping one broken chair for another broken chair won’t cut it.
Development and steering is subsidised by VCs funding Bluesky at this point. (especially a crypto VC)
Have you ever asked whats in it for them?
What plans are they going to put into the protocol?
I can see the AT Protocol shoving crypto payments or whatever in their insatiable quest for growth and ROI, because when the funding money runs out when BS miss their growth targets, this is what happens.
And for Tangled’s monetisation path, it is questionable.
So no.
Not a solution.