[icy]

I'm biased (founder of tangled.org), but the future really should be federated forges. Host repositories on sovereign infra with global identity + federated "metadata" (issues, pulls, etc.).

Global indices for this should be trivial to spin up so availability is never a concern (we're working towards this!).

[PunchyHamster]

It's cute idea but most people don't want to host their own stuff.

And if they are using 3rd parties to host their stuff, inevitable 1-3 big players will show up offering that as a service.

And even if you do host your own stuff to avoid availability problems, the big actors can still fail just like GH and you can't do shit coz your dependencies need it.

So the solution is same as it is now, proxy or mirror everything you use

[icy]

Yeah that's fine, we offer first-party hosting for free forever.

[mperham]

> we offer first-party hosting for free forever.

You should probably stop promising this.

[ArcHound]

But, there are? I can host a repo on GitHub, Codeberg and self host it too. Then I need to watch over main to keep it consistent between those. After that's established, I can do updates from wherever. Link'em in the README.

[embedding-shape]

There are distributed forges? Yes, git is distributed, but often everything around it isn't. The case parent is trying to make, is that the rest ("federated forges") should also be distributed, not just git.

[ArcHound]

Ok, gotcha. So there's a demand for the additional features that are not bundled within git to be federated somehow.

I'd say we have emails, mailing lists and bug trackers. Or maybe: what is the missing killer feature that needs federation?

[embedding-shape]

> what is the missing killer feature that needs federation?

Issues, pull requests, collaboration/permissions/access, "staring"/"favoriting", etc.

I think ultimately the goal is that people can run their own forges, yet still collaborate on repositories hosted in other forges, leveraging your existing authentication so you no longer need to sign up individually for each forge.

[nibbleyou]

There's also a tool to automatically push it to multiple repos: https://github.com/prashantsengar/GitEcho

Disclaimer: the author is a colleague of mine

Though to be fair, what the parent meant by federated forges is different than this approach.

[pabs3]

git itself can push to multiple URLs btw:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/849308/how-can-i-pull-pu...

[ljm]

I would love if it coding agents didn't default to GitHub for their deep VCS integration.

If I could get the same bells and whistles by wiring up another forge, so long as it offered a decent API and/or sent events over a webhook, I'd have everything self-hosted.

The agents would need to expose an interface on their own end but as long as you implemented it with a plugin, it'd take the dependency of GitHub and you could use MCP or skills for the rest of it.

[icy]

The neat thing about Tangled is it's built on an open protocol (https://atproto.com)—this allows us to effectively build an API-free system since all data on Tangled can effectively be ingested via the AT Protocol firehose.

Which is to say, this is perfect for agents given they don't need any bespoke SDK from us: simply write Tangled records for issues, pulls, whatever to your PDS and it'll show up on Tangled. We plan to start working on some exemplar agents first-party that would 1. enhance Tangled itself, 2. showcase cool things you can do with an open data firehose.

[ljm]

You do realise that writing Tangled records for issues, pulls, whatever constitutes both a spec and API.

The fact that you use a protocol to define it is beside the point. You still have to define what a Tangled record is, and the interface that accepts it, and the mechanism to resolve it on the client.

How else do you define what a 'tangled' is even if the underlying structure is git.

[ramon156]

Love the idea, would replace the LLM generated content ony our site, though.

I recently migrated to codeberg because I'm okay with self-hosting big runners, while using codeberg's available runners for smaller cron-based things (they even have lazy runners for this).

[icy]

It’s… all hand written? We just sound “professional”.

[iso1631]

> the future really should be federated

The internet should not be centralised, but you can't make a billion dollar company without capturing the world and selling your company to a trillion dollar company

[sikozu]

I've never heard of this before, going to sign up and check it out!

[icy]

Thanks! If you need anything, email me anirudh@!

[beernet]

What is "sovereign infra" exactly?

[mathgeek]

I know it's just marketing speak, but the term made me think of the scenes in the Matrix where what's left of humanity (ignoring all the cyclical lore that was added on top of it) has to make sure the machines can't remote in to any of their tech.

[tfrancisl]

No less than self hosted, imo. If youre on some cloud it doesnt really matter that you pay them absurd amounts of money, you arent sovereign.

[beernet]

So if a company self hosts their physical infrastructure which will burn down once a fire sets in, they are more "sovereign" than a company running on a redundant cloud? I definitely would not want to be "sovereign" then.

Point is: This discussion is much more multi-dimensional than some suggest.

[tfrancisl]

A redundant cloud that could be rug pulled from you any day if the platform decides you are in violation of their terms, or if they just dont like your project. Yes, on prem is more sovereign than that. That doesnt mean it doesn't have drawbacks, and no one said it didnt. But if sovereignty is more important than redundancy, then on prem is certainly an option.

[embedding-shape]

So literally a computer at home/in the office, as with anything else you don't really "own" the infrastructure? Or is this just about "cloud"?

[icy]

Yeah sorry it's marketing BS speak for self-hosted or just infra that you control. It could be a VPS, it could be a Raspberry Pi at home. Your repos live on your servers. (And we support this on Tangled today!)

[embedding-shape]

> just infra that you control

But a VPS isn't actually infrastructure you control, you essentially have as much control over it as "cloud", so I don't think that'd be counted as "sovereign", would it?

[icy]

Perhaps, but it's still better than nothing!