we need a federation of forges — tangled blog

Code collaboration has always used two protocols, one for code transfer and one for communication:

• It started with an email flow: git (code transfer) + email (comms)
• Then there was GitHub: git (code transfer) + GitHub website (comms)
• The forgefed project is: git (code transfer) + maybe activitypub (comms)
• We are building Tangled: Git (code transfer) + AT protocol (comms)

Committed events are federated between Git servers (called “knots”). You can collaborate on a repository on any server and you can fork across all servers. You can also push to a repository on your own server, and open a pull-request on a repo hosted on a completely different server. In many ways, it’s like hosting your own cgit instance and sending patches via email.

Tangled uses AT to facilitate authenticated transfer of events around code: like issues and pull-requests, and it also enables some social bits: timeline of events, follows, stars (and very soon vouch). AT is used for peer invocations and ssh pubkey sharing, but everything else is good old git.

OSS needs to be free from monocultures like GitHub, but code collaboration should still be fun and social.