YHK - yet another hacker news clone

The federated code forge

64 points zlliang 1 hour ago 27 comments

gnabgib 1 hour ago | parent

Tangled, a Git collaboration platform built on atproto (332 points, 2025, 86 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45543899

icy 1 hour ago | parent

Hi! Tangled co-founder here. We're super stoked with this launch -- we've stabilized our AT Protocol lexicons, completely overhauled our architecture and UI, and made self-hosting the entire stack (or parts of it!) incredibly easy. We've also shipped support for organizations, and have private repos rolling out in the following couple weeks.

Happy to answer any questions at all.

kstrauser 1 hour ago | parent

I’m excited about this direction. I’ve moved most of my own projects onto my own Forgejo, but miss it being easy for remote strangers to open PRs and such without registering in my system, which I have zero desire to allow.

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?

nerdypepper 1 hour ago | parent

all they would need is an atproto account. you can get one of these on Tangled itself, or bring your own. they can then open issues on your repository.

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.

kstrauser 50 minutes ago | parent

How soon will that be, do you suppose? It's not a blocker for most of my projects, but I can think of a few that I'd like to keep more closed (while still making them publicly cloneable). That doesn't keep me from using Tangled today for the open repos. It just means I'd need to have at least a couple of sharing setups - Tangled plus Forgejo - going at the same time for a while.

Also, will Tangled support private repos that are only visible or fetchable to specific people? Would that even make sense in its model?

nerdypepper 47 minutes ago | parent

for collaboration policies: its already part of the protocol, just needs to be baked into the flagship client!

private repos are coming very soon, we have a working demo of private repositories.

kstrauser 12 minutes ago | parent

Love it. Thanks!

icy 59 minutes ago | parent

That's exactly the problem we want to solve. Of course, they still need identity of some kind -- in this case, they'll need an AT Protocol account -- either by self-hosting a Personal Data Server[0], or signing up with a provider such as Tangled or Bluesky/Blacksky, etc. This is the last ever account they'll need (and it's theirs, and portable!). They can then begin contributing; they'll use this same account for all of Tangled and other AT Protocol services.

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/

kstrauser 53 minutes ago | parent

Got it. I'm still trying slightly unsuccessfully to wrap my head around this, but I've run a Mastodon instance for about 10 years and it took me a little while to wrap my head around that, too.

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!

HumanOstrich 1 hour ago | parent

I wanted to try this but when I signed up for a BlueSky account it was immediately banned by some automation. I appealed but never heard back.

nerdypepper 56 minutes ago | parent

don't need to signup for bsky to try out Tangled however, you can directly just signup for an account with Tangled.

0x457 19 minutes ago | parent

Are there plans to add http(s) support to knot? I was planning on hosting my own knot at home, but didn't want to expose my home IP (I use cloudflared for other services that need to be exposed)

nerdypepper 14 minutes ago | parent

already exists :)

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-...

0x457 5 minutes ago | parent

I wish I knew this before I setup mirroring of my personal forge to github haha.

embedding-shape 9 minutes ago | parent

> made self-hosting the entire stack (or parts of it!) incredibly easy

Back when you first launched, I thought running a knot was already pretty easy :) Could you expand on how it's different now, and what part(s) aren't now easy to self-host, if there is any?

mbStavola 58 minutes ago | parent

I honestly love Tangled.

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.

stryan 41 minutes ago | parent

Really looking forward to seeing Tangled develop! I've got a side project that's main repo and CI is on my self-hosted Gitea but code and releases are mirrored to Github; I'm hoping to move it off Gitea and onto Tangled for code/releases/potentially CI and just keep Github for discoverability/backups/namespace "squatting". Just need git-bug to add a Tangled bridge so I can keep issues synced and (ideally) for there to be instructions for running the client self-hosted. It doesn't have to be a full featured client but I also don't want to be SOL for web visibility if the main Tangled appview is down.

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.

nerdypepper 34 minutes ago | parent

> I really had no backup plans for something like a Neovim plugin's source forge being down

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.

icy 31 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

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!

embedding-shape 11 minutes ago | parent

> 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) :)

huksley 36 minutes ago | parent

Is the private repo support possible when self hosted?

jon-wood 30 minutes ago | parent

Not currently, Tangled's data model is entirely built around Atproto, which at least at the moment assumes everything posted is public. There's work in progress at the moment to layer access controlled data on top of that which I think Tangled could use with time though.

nerdypepper 22 minutes ago | parent

we have already got a working demo of private repositories that works very similarly to atproto spaces alpha, but without requiring spaces to be stabilized, we will have something to show off in the next couple weeks :)

rebolek 21 minutes ago | parent

I would really love to use it but when are you going to support SHA256? I have SHA256 repo and I don’t want to rewrite all history especially when Git 3 is moving to SHA256 anyway.

icy 13 minutes ago | parent

We already do.

nerdypepper 7 minutes ago | parent

selfhosted knots default to sha256.