Tangled is a federated git forge using the AT protocol for code collaboration events, enabling cross-server PRs, issues, and forks.
Key Takeaways
The stack: git for code transfer, AT protocol for comms – issues, pull requests, follows, stars, SSH pubkeys, and collaborator invites.
Federated “knots” (git servers) let you push to your own server and open a PR on a completely different server.
Positioned as the next step in a lineage: git+email -> git+GitHub -> git+ActivityPub (ForgeFed) -> git+AT (Tangled).
OSS currently has ~90% of projects depending on a single provider; Tangled’s bet is that decentralization must preserve the social collaboration layer, not strip it.
AT protocol handles authenticated transfer of events; everything else is plain git, keeping the core portable.
Hacker News Comment Review
The strongest pushback is the standards proliferation problem: commenters questioned why AT protocol over ActivityPub, with no concrete technical argument in the post distinguishing the two for this use case.
Radicle.xyz surfaced as an existing alternative doing distributed/seeded forge hosting, raising the question of differentiation.
One commenter noted GitHub’s current instability is a load problem (reportedly 30x capacity pressure from AI agent usage), not an architectural one – suggesting federated alternatives won’t absorb that load regardless of ideology.
Notable Comments
@whereistejas: flags that Tangled is jujutsu-first, a concrete technical differentiator not mentioned in the post itself.
@ghc: asks whether a BitTorrent-style protocol for git already exists but is simply buried under GitHub’s network effects.
