One musing: I did run into my first "issue" with federated Git hosting the other day while setting up Neovim on a new machine. One of the plugins I use is hosted on Tangled and I guess its backing Knot was down. This was awkward for two reasons:
1. It as unclear to me from the Tangled website the backing knot was the issue (for a while I thought it was something on my end)
2. I really had no backup plans for something like a Neovim plugin's source forge being down and, clearly, neither did the Neovim package manager as it just kept showing an error on every session I started with no way to fix it :).
I suppose in the long run we really shouldn't be assuming that code storage is just Always There or easily cached somewhere, but I anticipate some growing pains in the mean time. ATProto doesn't seem to have the benefit ActivityPub has where if the instance I wanted to view content on was down I can usually find some other instance that's gotten the messages.
Pretty much. We want to make running your own git remotes as easy as possible. Lets you scale on your own too.
> ATProto doesn't seem to have the benefit ActivityPub has where if the instance I wanted to view content on was down I can usually find some other instance that's gotten the messages.
It does give you (or anybody) the ability to index this data independently, and not miss messages -- which AP doesn't afford. Different tradeoffs!
Someone (or some group) could also in theory go fully content-addressing with their data store, and make content available based on their hash, effectively layering that missing benefit on top of the existing architecture. Someone could probably vibecode this together in some hour(s) :)
this problem could exist with any package manager, the go package manager is one example, where it allows specifying packages from any git url. we host a mirror of all git repositories on our infra, and serve that when the backing knot is down. you could choose to trust that and pull from there (verifying that the tarball has a known correct hash), the way the go package manager pulls from proxy.golang.org.
Happy to answer any questions at all.
its undocumented at the moment but you push over https as well.
somebody has set up a git credential helper here: https://tangled.org/pds.dad/tangled-core/blob/feature%2Fgit-...
So what’s the state of Tangled today? Say I have a Tangled server (instance? host?) up and running with my repos. Some stranger wants to contribute. What do they have to do before they can open issues or send PRs or whatever?
Your Tangled git server that you'd want to run is a 'knot'[1]. It's not exactly analogous to Forgejo because it's headless, but that makes it super light on resources to run.
[0]: https://atproto.com/guides/the-at-stack#pds [1]: https://tangled.org/docs/knots/self-hosting/
This is great. I'm delighted at the idea of having my own knot hosting my projects, talking to my friend's knot, and coordinating on a global project's knot, all without having to lock everyone into one centralized point of failure (even mine). Amazing. I love it!
soon, repos will be able to declare a contribution policy: presently its open to all (anybody can open an issue), but owners can choose to limit this to just contributors for example.
Also, will Tangled support private repos that are only visible or fetchable to specific people? Would that even make sense in its model?
private repos are coming very soon, we have a working demo of private repositories.
At this point it's really the only forge I want to use going forward, considering that it sits nicely alongside all my other social data with ATProto.