[icy]

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).

[aejm]

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.

[curious_cat_163]

Hey! Love the idea. I think a lot of skepticism here would be addressed if you discussed your plans to monetize. People just want to know how you will (eventually) make money in a way that is aligned with how they expect this to evolve.

[ineptech]

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.

[ux266478]

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.

[icy]

I've written about this: https://anirudh.fi/future

[pasto421]

there's something about new VC fundedbro narcissism that's so fascinating

> GitHub? Where do we even begin…

The problem with GitHub is neither its UX nor its functions. Its downfall is VC funding but you made sure to only copy that and none of the good things.

> GitLab? Way too enterprise-y, and definitely not easy to self-host.

The only reason you don't offer an enterprise version yet is because atproto sucks and there's no way to make it private. Do you honestly think VCs are paying you to play with your strings and sheep? Your users won't pay for anything because there are already free alternatives that don't force them to join yet another cult. "Why should I join tangled? uhmmm it's like a worse version of everything but it has atproto! you like atproto don't you, 14 year old well established project will millions of users?"

> Sourcehut? So opinionated it alienates about 98% of potential contributors. Pretty great if you really love email, I guess.

Do you hear youself? In what world is tangled not extremely opinionated that alienates everyone but hardcore atproto followers? "pretty great if you really love atproto i guess".

> Forgejo/Gitea? Nice, sure. You can self-host—but without a shared identity, I still need to create an account on your instance just to send a PR.

It also works and is widely used and battle tested. Has a familiar UI and CI. Oh and apparently this newfound concept called private repos.

> Radicle? Honestly, it’s amazing. Purely technically, Radicle is far ahead of anything else, Tangled included. But the world—at present—just isn’t ready for full-on P2P.

The world is ready for appview + pds + did + ... yeah okay. Only hardcore atproto fans wants this bs.

[constantius]

While forcefully stated, these criticisms are on point, especially given the lack of answers by Tangled on monetisation.

[ori_b]

What does your investor expect as far as returns, and how are they going to get it?

[code-blooded]

I don't say you specifically have bad intentions or that VC money is all evil.

But now you need to grow fast, which greatly increases the risk for me as your potential user, so you should at the very least write a post to make sure you're aligned with your users not just with your angels.

How are you going to use the money? What's the business model? How do you ensure you're around in 10+ years? How are you going to please your overlords with that business model and what will you do if they force you to squeeze more money out of the business?

I hope you succeed, because the competition is good for users, but VC-founding is a liability not a strength.

[xandrius]

Mmmm still rather not support this.

I prefer slow and steady wins the race kind of project. Good luck!

[baq]

when in doubt, copy astral's exit strategy and get bought out by a foundation model lab. (yeah n=1, but that's still greater than 0 ;))

[shimman]

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?

[zachlatta]

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!

[shimman]

This kind of absolutism is absolute necessary against tech leadership that are anti-democracy.

[zachlatta]

Two founders of a small startup in Europe trying to build a new decentralized git forge and open sourcing their code are anti-democracy?

Come on.

[code-blooded]

The problem with VC-founded projects is that there's some kind of rug-pull, ads, privacy violation (e.g. using repos to train AI) or "feature enhancing" subscription likely coming.

As a user who would need to invest time and effort in using Tangled, I think it's fair to ask to have the plan explained. I'd rather see explicit price for services than see enshittification happen.

[zachlatta]

Just like engineering, monetizing is an iterative process. As long as they don't make it hard to move off their platform, IMO it's completely fine for them to try different monetization models.

We should celebrate people building open source stuff and in the public. The alternative is for the software tooling ecosystem to look like EE or mechanical engineering tools - all closed source, proprietary, and with super expensive licensing.

It's easy to take open source for granted - 'information wants to be free', but we are at risk of the open source movement dying with proprietary AI completely changing everything about software.

If we penalize people who are working toward the right goal, we contribute to that decline.

[account42]

No, absolutism is absolutely needed or all you'll do is slightly slow down the shift of the overton window of enshittification.

[zachlatta]

This is how you get bad stuff. This mindset will turn the software ecosystem into mechanical / electrical engineering. Closed source, bad, and expensive tools.

[philipallstar]

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.

[kikki]

> 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.

[account42]

> GitHub itself - was VC funded

And look where we are now. What sane person would got looking for an alternative only to sing up to the same bs again.

[AlecSchueler]

> Probably _most_ services devs use are VC funded. GitHub, was VC funded?

GitHub was founded in a very different world. Would we start using it today is the question.

[bix6]

O yeah cuz the non profit tactic worked so well for OpenAI.

OpenAI and Claude both took VC money and everyone on this message board uses them regardless of ~community~

Not all VCs are scum

[LunaSea]

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.

[phreeza]

Would you be open to sharing a version of your pitch deck? The main question in my mind is what kind of exit the VCs have in mind when they give you this money.

[the_biot]

Is the code base AI slop? You've published your code as open source, but without an explicit AI policy.