Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We need a federation of forges

blog.tangled.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 424 posts

Re: We need a federation of forges

#51

Post by ghc »

baq wrote: post #9
ghc wrote: post #4

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.

gittorrents were talked about and built at least 15 if not 20 years ago. the issue isn't mirroring of data, this is a solved problem. everything else that a forge does is a problem - issue tracking, PRs, reviews, CI/CD, authn, authz, secrets, audit trails, ...

BitTorrent also enabled search engines to be built easily, which created discoverability. Unfortunately it's a much harder problem for git repos, especially when competing with GitHub search.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#52

Post by xandrius »

icy wrote: post #47
code-blooded wrote: post #36

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?

Tangled is built entirely in the open: https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core , and our primary goal is to be "permanent software"—i.e. be fully reproducible and entirely self-hostable at minimal cost. VC money is a means to an end. We're both Indian founders in Europe, and grants are nigh on impossible to find (4–12+ months for anything to materialize). VC is quite simply the quickest way for us to build a team, setup…

Mmmm still rather not support this.

I prefer slow and steady wins the race kind of project. Good luck!

Re: We need a federation of forges

#53

Post by 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.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#55

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

code-blooded wrote: post #36

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?

> who will be there to fix bugs and maintain it?

Those of us who use it. Tangled is a neat project and architecturally it makes a lot of interesting choices but code-wise it's relatively simple and from my personal forays in it I'd say pretty easy to maintain.

The majority of the codebase is loosely related go modules. Then some static HTML+CSS. And finally a small sprinkle of typescript to tie things together. And of course a bit of Nix for orchestration.

IIRC it all runs on a pretty trivial amount of hardware that a single person could currently host by themself.

Users' knots, spindles, and PDS (plus atproto at large) do the real heavy lifting infra-wise.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#56

Post by icy »

ghc wrote: post #37
icy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is! https://radicle.dev :)

Oh, that's pretty cool! Now I can't decide whether that approach or one based on AT is better...

Pick whichever. We much harder problem (gossiping git!) and rather elegantly at that.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#57

Post by baq »

xandrius wrote: post #52
icy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangled is built entirely in the open: https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core , and our primary goal is to be "permanent software"—i.e. be fully reproducible and entirely self-hostable at minimal cost. VC money is a means to an end. We're both Indian founders in Europe, and grants are nigh on impossible to find (4–12+ months for anything to materialize). VC is quite simply the quickest way for us to build a team, setup…

Mmmm still rather not support this. I prefer slow and steady wins the race kind of project. Good luck!

when in doubt, copy astral's exit strategy and get bought out by a foundation model lab. (yeah n=1, but that's still greater than 0 ;))

Re: We need a federation of forges

#58

Post by mikepurvis »

d_silin wrote: post #3

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

It's not a clear one-way trip though. The "original" blogosphere of the 2000s was heavily federated with MovableType supporting trackbacks and then later systems automating that further with pingbacks. Ultimately it all fell to spam and hosting complexity though, and now almost all blogs are on a handful of centralized hosts again.

Spam/moderation is going to be the biggest hurdle to overcome with any distributed forge effort. It'll likely come down to some kind of web-of-trust/vouching system, but it's delicate balancing ease of access with not making it a slog to constantly manage spam.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#59

Post by colesantiago »

knotbin wrote: post #38
colesantiago wrote: post #31

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.

You completely missed the point. The point isn't that you should find a company that you trust and think is ethical. The point is to shift the power dynamics so you don't have to trust anyone. That's what building on ATproto does. Tangled is also fully open source and anyone can host their own knot and AppView.

You seem to have missed the fact that Bluesky is funded by the same crypto VC.

Look how well that has turned out even though Bluesky is open source.

Tangled is not funded by the community.

It would be better if it was rather than it be owned by VCs.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#60

Post by danabramov »

jerojero wrote: post #14

"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.

ActivityPub and atproto are differently shaped. Pitting them against each other is like asking “why need web when we have email”.

ActivityPub is email-shaped. Servers are inboxes sending messages to each other.

atproto is web-shaped. User repositories host data (like personal sites or git/RSS), while apps aggregate from repositories (like Google Reader).

Different topologies lead to different properties. Eg atproto lets user change hosting with no disruption in app experience. atproto also lets anyone build new apps aggregating over existing data.

ActivityPub doesn’t allow either of those things. It’s literally a bunch of small centralized coupled hosting+app services messaging each other.

Post reply on HN