First hearing of tangled, tried signing up and this first time user experience needs to be tightened up. Currently unwilling to sign in because of the friction I ran into using a password manager. From what it looks like they:
- ask you for an email
- send you an email
- ask you for a username
- except you cant actually log in with this username directly
- im being forced to learn some new social url protocol
- why does the auth flow pass me through a new ui/url that seems owned by the project but visually disconnected (eg, different branding/colors for the form)
- my password manager couldnt bridge the gap
I'm notoriously fickle about dealing with signup/login friction, but the project sounds cool so hopefully my feedback is more actionable than curmudgeony.
Fwiw the sign up/in process for me was "click login, type in my existing blue sky handle, type in my password (into a bsky domain name login prompt), click authorize".
I expect that's the... more optimized flow at this point in this forge's life.
> - why does the auth flow pass me through a new ui/url that seems owned by the project but visually disconnected (eg, different branding/colors for the form)
Probably because of the above, identity isn't tightly associated with the app you're using here so they've stood up their own infra for it but probably not spent too much time on making it good.
> - except you cant actually log in with this username directly
Really? That's strange... I haven't made a native account... what do you need to login with then?
The irony of that linked page dragging a reposted mid tweet into multiple scrollable pages of “content” and in doing so reading exactly like a celeb news article
I think it would only be irony if it was guilty of the same issue it's complaining about in celeb news: not sufficiently explaining the context. If anything, it's too exhaustive.
Yeah, it turns out human culture has a lot of depth and complexity, even so-called "mid" culture. If you think you can write a better explainer, I'd love to read it.
I absolutely could, by removing everything past the first 3-5 sentences in the article. But that probably wouldn’t satisfy the site owner’s desired metrics and SEO targeting.
I tried Tangled and tried to run my own Knot, the problem I had was I'd create a repository, have it get created correctly on my Knot, but then would never see any updates to the repo on Tangled itself.
The main issue is that even though I had the knot with IPv6 connectivity, it only really reliably worked once I enabled lots of IPv4 NAT'ing and also created a dummy A record for the Knot.
I'm willing to give Tangled a go too with a project, but feature set to bridge the gap still has a long way to go (no idea how long it'll take). Github outages (especially when just viewing repos!) are getting way too disrupting.
People have been talking about federation across forges for a couple of years and seems like its finally at least close to being a real thing!? That's absolutely amazing!!
yep, I host two separate Tangled knots; one for my personal use and another for work at the Cambridge Computer Science department. Having large git repos on a server near me is great, and because I can sync the bare git repos it’s easy to run a local forge as well.
It also has a pretty fundamental design flaw: issue /PR comments belong to the server where the commenter is hosted, not to the repo. I’m sure they will find a workaround but finding that reduced confidence they actually understand the problem they are solving.
> As time goes on we are re-assessing the idea of users owning what is "collaborative data" (issues, PRs, etc.) on their PDSes - soon may come the day that an issue also lives on the knot as a source of truth, with an accompanying pointer record on user PDS to attest that it's theirs
Yes, separation between git storage and identity. Very simple to use your own Knot instead of the default knot1, just enter your own website link to it. Not as beholden to Github downtimes that are out of your hands.
I was using Codeberg this morning, now I'm on Tangled. All I had to do was switch remote origin.
I just tried out tangled for the first time and unfortunately it seems buggy beyond being actually usable. I created a repo but can't look at it because I get a 404 for it. The login was quite painful as well as I needed several attempts to enter my atproto handle (copy-pasted every time, so no typo).
But I'm glad more people are working on git hosting options.
> I created a repo but can't look at it because I get a 404 for it.
I remember back in early GitHub days this used to happen too, as the repository was asynchronously created but the redirect was immediate, then after a few seconds you refreshed the page and it was there. At one point they added the interstitial that I think is still there, that basically does the "waiting then redirect" for you.
Oh yes, seems like that's it. I can now view the repo. A bit annoying when creating a repo redirects you to a URL that will give you a 404 initially (and at least for minute or so, that's how long I tried).
if anyone has more info on tangled would love to hear. been looking for a decentralized git provider for a while. started self hosting but was missing the social element
[Radicle](https://radicle.dev/) gets a wee bit closer. It’s selfhostable and federated. You’ll have a hard time finding something with the same social gravity well as GitHub; it remains to be seen whether that’s a separable element or if it needs to ship as part of the forge itself.
I’ve been testing Radicle and it’s more focused on the distributed protocol for federating git repos, I.e. the data plane. The social / coordination control-plane angle is really thin, following users and repos goes by opaque IDs, etc.
It could be a better solution for agents that don’t bounce off such mundane complexity. It could be better for private repo federation (eg private collective or agent swarm.)
I’m interested in Tangled for the OSS/community aspect, it seems to have an advantage there with the richer identity layer for humans.
I think it's currently non-selfhostable. You can host your own git server (knot) and CI runner (spindle) but not really the UI/API itself, but they're working on changing it. Currently it's a bit centralised
I’d be interested too. Besides the fact that the company appears to be registered in Finland, I haven’t been able to find any information on who’s behind this, how they are funded, etc.
Similar groups to Bluesky (bain capital crypto) and some notable CEOs
GitHub's moat is not code hosting, they will need to build out the equivalent of Actions and figure out what private repos look like. Unclear how they intend to IAP with corporate identity systems, I have a hard time seeing ATProto break into that category.
Oh they raised a pretty large seed. But they don’t seem to have a business model, or at least I cannot find details on how they plan to make an actual business
The most significant, near-term, non-moaty gap is still private repos, which isn't all that big of a feature on the surface, but will have major work under the surface because of how bluesky is designing private spaces.
I also think being primarily nix/jj focussed turns a lot of people away. Those techs are not my cup of tea, so I don't see myself using tangled.
I'd be curious to hear tangled's thoughts on the path to financial sustainability. Without something that sounds plausible, I'm unwilling to migrate my code forge, for risk of going away / obsolescence.
I see it attracting more people than it dissuades. You can use jj as just a prefix for Git commands like jj git init. Yet you get supercharged repo navigation abilities. If obscelecene is your concern, jujutsu is VCS agnostic and doesn't have to use Git in the future.
Nix is as simple as it gets, even better than docker. Just 'nix run' whatever flake file someone gives you and everything works magically.
This codeforge going away can't happen for me because I self-host it.
I use both. Tangled is missing some important features (private repos, protected branches). The ui feels more comfy to me, though. And Codeberg is quite slow for me.
Idk if I can give you toooo much about migration, since I haven't used any CICD kind of stuff; just having repos to push to is super simple if you use their hosted knots. Also not too complicated to host a knot yourself; I'm hosting my own knot, and I like that I own at least one of the servers that I'm pushing code to.
Wish a git forge would support both Actions and Gitlab CI pipelines. Reuse community workflows for simple actions, default to Gitlab CI for anything custom.
the way the CI runners on tangled work, you could just plug in your own bespoke runner as long as it fits the interface. we implement two such "engines": nixery and microvm. you can plug an engine like tack[0], which can act like a bridge interface to other CI systems. there is also loom[1], which is a kubernetes based engine.
The problem is that interface isn't enough when in Gitlab the CI natively integrates with other systems, like test reports displaying results in merge requests. This would certainly enable hybrid pipelines through.
First hearing of tangled, tried signing up and this first time user experience needs to be tightened up. Currently unwilling to sign in because of the friction I ran into using a password manager. From what it looks like they:
- ask you for an email
- send you an email
- ask you for a username
- except you cant actually log in with this username directly
- im being forced to learn some new social url protocol
- why does the auth flow pass me through a new ui/url that seems owned by the project but visually disconnected (eg, different branding/colors for the form)
- my password manager couldnt bridge the gap
I'm notoriously fickle about dealing with signup/login friction, but the project sounds cool so hopefully my feedback is more actionable than curmudgeony.
Better than my experience with it, just says:
>Failed to complete sign up. Try again later.
Fwiw the sign up/in process for me was "click login, type in my existing blue sky handle, type in my password (into a bsky domain name login prompt), click authorize".
I expect that's the... more optimized flow at this point in this forge's life.
> - why does the auth flow pass me through a new ui/url that seems owned by the project but visually disconnected (eg, different branding/colors for the form)
Probably because of the above, identity isn't tightly associated with the app you're using here so they've stood up their own infra for it but probably not spent too much time on making it good.
> - except you cant actually log in with this username directly
Really? That's strange... I haven't made a native account... what do you need to login with then?
This post needs a bunch more context; right now it's only immediately accessible to people who don't need the announcement [1].
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/curtains-for-zoosha
Headline reminds me of Poob.
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/3056633-poob-has-it-for-you
The fact that I know what both Gleam and Tangled are in this context means I spend too much time on HN and not enough time doing useful things.
The irony of that linked page dragging a reposted mid tweet into multiple scrollable pages of “content” and in doing so reading exactly like a celeb news article
I think it would only be irony if it was guilty of the same issue it's complaining about in celeb news: not sufficiently explaining the context. If anything, it's too exhaustive.
Yeah, it turns out human culture has a lot of depth and complexity, even so-called "mid" culture. If you think you can write a better explainer, I'd love to read it.
I absolutely could, by removing everything past the first 3-5 sentences in the article. But that probably wouldn’t satisfy the site owner’s desired metrics and SEO targeting.
I tried Tangled and tried to run my own Knot, the problem I had was I'd create a repository, have it get created correctly on my Knot, but then would never see any updates to the repo on Tangled itself.
The main issue is that even though I had the knot with IPv6 connectivity, it only really reliably worked once I enabled lots of IPv4 NAT'ing and also created a dummy A record for the Knot.
This is a known issue - https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core/issues/494
I'm willing to give Tangled a go too with a project, but feature set to bridge the gap still has a long way to go (no idea how long it'll take). Github outages (especially when just viewing repos!) are getting way too disrupting.
Why Tangled instead of something more established like Codeberg, or if f/loss, Forgejo or Gitea?
Just because ATProto vibes?
disclaimer: i maintain tangled, some reasons to try might be:
- tangled federates: https://blog.tangled.org/federation
- native stacked PRs: https://blog.tangled.org/stacking
- tangled implements mitchell's vouch system: https://blog.tangled.org/vouching
> - tangled federates: https://blog.tangled.org/federation
People have been talking about federation across forges for a couple of years and seems like its finally at least close to being a real thing!? That's absolutely amazing!!
yep, I host two separate Tangled knots; one for my personal use and another for work at the Cambridge Computer Science department. Having large git repos on a server near me is great, and because I can sync the bare git repos it’s easy to run a local forge as well.
It also has a pretty fundamental design flaw: issue /PR comments belong to the server where the commenter is hosted, not to the repo. I’m sure they will find a workaround but finding that reduced confidence they actually understand the problem they are solving.
this is changing very soon :)
see knot2[0] for some initial experiments: https://tangled.org/oyster.cafe/knot2
> As time goes on we are re-assessing the idea of users owning what is "collaborative data" (issues, PRs, etc.) on their PDSes - soon may come the day that an issue also lives on the knot as a source of truth, with an accompanying pointer record on user PDS to attest that it's theirs
We’re solving for this very issue. Issues & pulls will belong to the repo, backed by a “COB” (collaborative object) system.
Yes, separation between git storage and identity. Very simple to use your own Knot instead of the default knot1, just enter your own website link to it. Not as beholden to Github downtimes that are out of your hands.
I was using Codeberg this morning, now I'm on Tangled. All I had to do was switch remote origin.
I just tried out tangled for the first time and unfortunately it seems buggy beyond being actually usable. I created a repo but can't look at it because I get a 404 for it. The login was quite painful as well as I needed several attempts to enter my atproto handle (copy-pasted every time, so no typo). But I'm glad more people are working on git hosting options.
> I created a repo but can't look at it because I get a 404 for it.
I remember back in early GitHub days this used to happen too, as the repository was asynchronously created but the redirect was immediate, then after a few seconds you refreshed the page and it was there. At one point they added the interstitial that I think is still there, that basically does the "waiting then redirect" for you.
Oh yes, seems like that's it. I can now view the repo. A bit annoying when creating a repo redirects you to a URL that will give you a 404 initially (and at least for minute or so, that's how long I tried).
if anyone has more info on tangled would love to hear. been looking for a decentralized git provider for a while. started self hosting but was missing the social element
[Radicle](https://radicle.dev/) gets a wee bit closer. It’s selfhostable and federated. You’ll have a hard time finding something with the same social gravity well as GitHub; it remains to be seen whether that’s a separable element or if it needs to ship as part of the forge itself.
I’ve been testing Radicle and it’s more focused on the distributed protocol for federating git repos, I.e. the data plane. The social / coordination control-plane angle is really thin, following users and repos goes by opaque IDs, etc.
It could be a better solution for agents that don’t bounce off such mundane complexity. It could be better for private repo federation (eg private collective or agent swarm.)
I’m interested in Tangled for the OSS/community aspect, it seems to have an advantage there with the richer identity layer for humans.
This looks like a much more sensible design for code repos: all the artifacts live in the repo.
I think it's currently non-selfhostable. You can host your own git server (knot) and CI runner (spindle) but not really the UI/API itself, but they're working on changing it. Currently it's a bit centralised
you can selfhost the appview: https://blog.tangled.org/bobbin, which makes all of tangled fully selfhostable now.
It is self-hostable, but Tangled could disclose that great fact a bit more upfront.
I’d be interested too. Besides the fact that the company appears to be registered in Finland, I haven’t been able to find any information on who’s behind this, how they are funded, etc.
https://blog.tangled.org/seed/
Similar groups to Bluesky (bain capital crypto) and some notable CEOs
GitHub's moat is not code hosting, they will need to build out the equivalent of Actions and figure out what private repos look like. Unclear how they intend to IAP with corporate identity systems, I have a hard time seeing ATProto break into that category.
Oh they raised a pretty large seed. But they don’t seem to have a business model, or at least I cannot find details on how they plan to make an actual business
I'm not sure what's been published but as someone who plays with tangled as a hobby the immediate monetisation paths I could see are:
- Charging to bypass the (admittedly very reasonable) rate limits on the main appview
- Providing paid hosting tiers for private git knots, high traffic git knots, git LOP knots, CI runners/spindles, web page hosting (via their github pages equivalent), etc
- Introducing a paid-for and permissioned nix binary cache platform since their CI spindle system is already nix-first.
- providing paid PDS hosting for corporate/business customers with SSO integration etc.
- SLAs and support contracts
There's enough options here that they have a pretty flexible path towards profitability.
> GitHub's moat is not code hosting
Of course not, it’s the number of people who are already signed up.
Instagram’s moat also most certainly isn’t a scrollable photo timeline.
There's more to it than the number of people.
Actions, GitHub apps/external integrations, identity/permission management
The most significant, near-term, non-moaty gap is still private repos, which isn't all that big of a feature on the surface, but will have major work under the surface because of how bluesky is designing private spaces.
I also think being primarily nix/jj focussed turns a lot of people away. Those techs are not my cup of tea, so I don't see myself using tangled.
I'd be curious to hear tangled's thoughts on the path to financial sustainability. Without something that sounds plausible, I'm unwilling to migrate my code forge, for risk of going away / obsolescence.
I see it attracting more people than it dissuades. You can use jj as just a prefix for Git commands like jj git init. Yet you get supercharged repo navigation abilities. If obscelecene is your concern, jujutsu is VCS agnostic and doesn't have to use Git in the future.
Nix is as simple as it gets, even better than docker. Just 'nix run' whatever flake file someone gives you and everything works magically.
This codeforge going away can't happen for me because I self-host it.
What's tangled? Which Gleam?
[delayed]
How does tangled compare with codeberg? Seem like a cool project, wonder how the migration story is.
I use both. Tangled is missing some important features (private repos, protected branches). The ui feels more comfy to me, though. And Codeberg is quite slow for me.
Idk if I can give you toooo much about migration, since I haven't used any CICD kind of stuff; just having repos to push to is super simple if you use their hosted knots. Also not too complicated to host a knot yourself; I'm hosting my own knot, and I like that I own at least one of the servers that I'm pushing code to.
Tangled is also VC funded, something to consider.
I just switched to Tangled. It was actually very similar experience. I will be using Tangled henceforth!
Wish a git forge would support both Actions and Gitlab CI pipelines. Reuse community workflows for simple actions, default to Gitlab CI for anything custom.
the way the CI runners on tangled work, you could just plug in your own bespoke runner as long as it fits the interface. we implement two such "engines": nixery and microvm. you can plug an engine like tack[0], which can act like a bridge interface to other CI systems. there is also loom[1], which is a kubernetes based engine.
[0]: https://tangled.org/mitchellh.com/tack
[1]: tangled.org/evan.jarrett.net/loom
The problem is that interface isn't enough when in Gitlab the CI natively integrates with other systems, like test reports displaying results in merge requests. This would certainly enable hybrid pipelines through.
Github is fine. I know it has issues, but for the day to day random OS gig it has never failed me.
If you too are wondering their CI story, it is based on NixOS:
https://blog.tangled.org/ci/
https://blog.tangled.org/spindle-microvm/
Curiously the link to the spec is broken: https://tangled.sh/@tangled.sh/core/blob/master/docs/spindle...