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We need a federation of forges

blog.tangled.org

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Re: We need a federation of forges

#71

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?

When a project is funded by these VCs I question:

Why does it need VCs? Why not company and corporate sponsorship like Ladybird?

Why should we spend our time on a developer tool that would be enshittified down the line when VCs expect 10x returns?

Re: We need a federation of forges

#72
post #56
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I’ve met the Radicle people a couple times. I’ve never given it a thorough review but, for their goals, their designs have always seemed strong, and they’re pleasant people to chat with.

The main difference was atproto wanted to tackle scale, so we went with a servers & aggregation model. Radicle is going for device-to-device networking as a primary goal.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#73

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…

Thanks for the lead on the details, this has been on my spring cleaning todo list. Sounds like I have my weekend errand picked.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#74
post #47

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…

VC money is absolutely not a means to an end, what is signals is that the company doesn't care about community and only cares about profit.

I'm with the OP you're replying to. Taking VC is an albatross that means a large portion of devs will never trust you or use your services (outside of bleeding your funds dry).

If this place truly cared about community they should have made a non-profit or some type of NGO, basically anything with a true community governance model. Not the current model of caring about money over a community.

We currently live in a society that solely cares about money and seriously doubt devs want to continue uplifting the current system that only benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else.

How many board seats does the company plan on giving to the community to ensure enshittification doesn't occur?

Re: We need a federation of forges

#76

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…

I think this is less about source code itself, and more about the surrounding ecosystem of project management. Handling of issues, pull requests, who gets commit or admin access, all that stuff. If you mirror your git repo to other providers, fine. But if you have thousands of issues and PRs on Github, you still can't really move away and you still can't really work if Github is down.

Edit: I absolutely support federated forges, including Tangled as well as ActivityPub based approaches like the (slow) progress to federate Forgejo.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#77

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…

Projects are more than code. This doesn't solve the problem of issue trackers, pull requests, CI, etc.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#78
post #74
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…

VC money is absolutely not a means to an end, what is signals is that the company doesn't care about community and only cares about profit. I'm with the OP you're replying to. Taking VC is an albatross that means a large portion of devs will never trust you or use your services (outside of bleeding your funds dry). If this place truly cared about community they should have made a non-profit or some type of NGO, basic…

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