We need a federation of forges

whereistejas

tangled is a really cool project; the most important feature it provides is that it is jujutsu first.

d_silin

Federated solutions seem to be the future, after once-beloved provider becomes the crumbling monopoly.

ghc

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.

estimator7292

I don't think calling your git server a "knot" is going to go over well with certain large subsections of the OSS community. Or rather, it will go over way too well.

jerojero

"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.

short_sells_poo

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.

galbar

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.

bfrog

radicle.xyz also does the distributed/seeded forge setup and I think does a nice job of it already.

ddosmax556

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!

colesantiago

Tangled is VC funded just like initially how GitHub was: 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.

code-blooded

Tangled is VC sponsored. It doesn't scream stability to me, but rather "we need to grow at all cost". I don't see the appeal. Even though it's federated, when development stops, who will be there to fix bugs and maintain it?

NetOpWibby

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.

madamelic

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)

ecshafer

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.

toastal

Why do we need to stick to Git? We need better tooling around the Patch Theory-based VCS which are better for decentralized working to begin with.

danabramov

If anyone here’s curious about atproto data model, I wrote an into here: https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/ It’s a bit long but should give you a really crisp picture.

willio58

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.

bkummel

In what sense do we need Tangled if there's already ForgeFed?

austin-cheney

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: git remote add <name here> <URI> 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.

kordlessagain

If anything starts with "we need" I just laugh.