For most of the past two decades, the code forge has been where projects live: where code is hosted, where changes are reviewed, and where contributors find each other. Forges offered convenience in exchange for centralisation.
But the centralised forge is crumbling. Relying on someone else for uptime, for features, and to be a good steward of your code hasn’t played out well. What has stood the test of time is email: Git to move the code, and email — an open protocol — to talk about it. At the cost of user experience, however.
Tangled aims to give you the best of both: the longevity of an open protocol, with the convenience and polish of a proper forge.
It’s the first truly federated code forge — you can host code on your own servers and still collaborate seamlessly with others. Our approach is pragmatic: self-host just the parts you want, like Git hosting or CI runners, or all of it, including the API server and UI. Whatever you choose, you can still talk to everyone else.
Owning your infrastructure also means you can hack on, extend and customise your forge as you see fit. Because Tangled is built on the AT Protocol, you can build your own extensions, subscribe to the firehose, or even write entirely custom knots, like this one that runs on Cloudflare Workers and uses their Artifacts product for git storage. Or an entirely custom spindle such as mitchellh.com/tack. Go even further and host our ultralight API server and build your own custom forge.
Agents have made building such hyper-personalized software trivial, and especially so when software is designed with hackability in mind from the get-go. Tangled is incredibly agent friendly.
The future of software engineering may be a moving target, but our bets on open protocols and developer agency give us the agility to move with it, and to become .
A fresh look!
The obvious big one: with this release, Tangled has a whole new look. We’ve redone the UI on top of our new architecture (described further below), in Svelte. Things should now be quicker, visually consistent and prettier! The keen eyed of you might’ve also spotted that we’ve swapped out Inter for Timeless Sans.
A bobbin near you
Until now, Tangled’s web UI and backend were a single Go monolith called the
appview. The appview service handled AT Protocol indexing, caching,
off-protocol data and UI rendering using html/template + htmx. It ran on a
single SQLite database on one medium-sized server in Sweden.
This was great as long as you were ~50–100 ms away from Sweden, but most of our users aren’t! We rearchitected: we built a new standalone frontend app in Svelte, deployed at the edge. It is populated by our new diskless, entirely in-memory indexer service written in Rust: bobbin. Bobbins are deployed globally in over 11+ regions, ensuring users around the world get the best API and UI performance.
The astute reader might’ve noticed: bobbin is purely read-only and only deals with AT Protocol data. What of the rest? That functionality (and more) has been delegated to a new set of supporting services.
The new data model and repo-owned data
First, the data model itself: we have a new set of lexicons, and everything now
lives under org.tangled.*, replacing the old sh.tangled.* records.
Knot2 is our aptly named, second implementation of the knot server, this time rewritten in Rust. Knot2 bakes a fully custom Git server, and also bundles in an SSH server in the same binary.
With knot2, we’ve also changed where some of that data lives. Issues, pull requests, comments, reactions and labels are now stored on the knot, right next to the code, as collaborative objects (COBs). A COB is just a chain of Git objects in the repo itself. Collaborators, knot members and the blocklist are also stored the same way.
In that sense, knots now behave a lot like a PDS: they hold signed records, full history included, for everything that belongs to a repo and much like a PDS, these records are synced via the standard AT Protocol firehose.
But why? A project’s issues and pull requests are as much a part of it as its code, so they should live with it, wherever you choose to host it. This gives your project maximum portability.
If the knot writes your issues and comments, what stops it from putting words
in your mouth? Attestations. Every time you create or edit a record on a knot,
the web app also writes an org.tangled.graph.attestation record to your own
PDS, pointing at that exact version of the record and the COB change behind it.
Two-way verification!
Self-hosters will have to upgrade their knots to the v1.20.0 by following the upgrade guide.
Organizations
Organization accounts are here! An Organization on Tangled is a real AT
Protocol account, with its own DID and handle, hosted on a Tranquil
PDS instance. They’re
passwordless, delegated accounts: you create one from the New
Organization page, and you get
<name>.tngl.sh with yourself as its owner. Owners can invite members, and
anyone in the Organization can act as it when creating or forking repositories.
Like any other account, you can swap the handle out for a domain you own. If
you’ve been running a regular account as a stand-in “org”, hang tight — we’re
working on a way to move those over. Read more in the
docs.
Stacked PRs for everyone
Our PR flow has been overhauled. The new flow gives everyone, regardless of whether you use Jujutsu or just vanilla Git, the ability to submit and review stacked PRs. If you’re using Git, you now get the ability to interdiff between versions (previously called rounds). JJ users get to interdiff between individual changes as well.
Launch weeks ahead
This isn’t all. We’re staggering this launch across the next few weeks. Up next are private repos, a CLI, SDKs for different languages and skills for your agent.
Until then, enjoy every part of this launch equally.