Image: Tangled
Why it mattersA team can host code on its own server and still work with other teams. A move to another host carries the issues and the pull requests along with the files.
A team worries about where its code lives when a Git host changes hands or sets a new price. Tangled is a federated code forge that answers that worry with federation on the AT Protocol. The project published a redesign on 30 October 2026. The Hacker News thread on the post reached 254 points.
Tangled runs on a per-user piece of infrastructure called a knot. The announcement is by Anirudh at Tangled. Issues, pull requests, comments, reactions and labels now live inside the repository itself. They sit next to the code as collaborative Git objects. A move to a new host carries the discussion along with the code.
What changed on 30 October
The redesign moved Tangled off one medium-sized server in Sweden. A new Rust read-only indexer called bobbin now runs in more than 11 regions. The previous setup served users within 50 to 100 ms of Sweden. Others paid for the distance. The frontend was rewritten in Svelte and runs at the edge.
The underlying data model moved from the sh.tangled.* namespace to org.tangled.*. The post rebuilt the knot server in Rust and now bundles custom Git and SSH servers in one binary. Organisations gained real AT Protocol accounts with passwordless, delegated access. Each account carries a short handle like name.tngl.sh.
How federation works here
Tangled sits on the AT Protocol, the same stack behind Bluesky. A contributor needs an AT Protocol account. The account can come from Tangled, from Bluesky, or from a self-hosted Personal Data Server. The same identity then works across the whole network.
The post names an older model as the parallel. Git used to move the code and email used to carry the talk about it. Here, Git still moves the code. The AT Protocol moves the discussion. Both open protocols sit outside any single company.
What is still coming
The team said this launch is staggered across the next few weeks. The next items are private repos, a CLI, language SDKs and skills for an agent. A new pull request flow was in the launch. It supports vanilla Git and Jujutsu users. Jujutsu users get interdiff between individual changes. Everyone else gets interdiff between versions.
The project is run by Tangled Labs Oy, a Finnish company. The announcement names no funding figure. The code remains open source, with the core repository linked from the post.
Choosing a forge now
A team unhappy with the current state of GitHub has had three real options. Self-host GitLab or Gitea, which keeps the data but drops network effects. Move to Codeberg or sourcehut, which keeps federation at a cost in features. Stay on GitHub and hope. Tangled is a fourth option. It keeps the data in the team's own knot. It keeps the issues and pull requests next to the code. Other knots still read and collaborate.
The constraint is maturity. The project is in a stage where private repos are still weeks away. A team working on a closed-source product today still cannot move. A team on an open-source project with a federation preference has a new option to compare. The 254 Hacker News points on one blog post are the market noticing that it exists.
Source
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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