Tangled Launches Federated Code Forge on AT Protocol
Original: The federated code forge
Why This Matters
Federated dev tooling could shift power away from GitHub-scale platform monopolies.
Tangled has launched a federated code forge built on AT Protocol, letting developers self-host Git and collaborate across servers. The platform ships a new Svelte UI, a Rust-based in-memory indexer deployed across 11+ global regions, and repo-stored issues via Git objects.
Tangled positions itself as a direct answer to centralized platforms like GitHub — offering federation instead of lock-in. Built on AT Protocol, it lets developers host code on their own infrastructure while still collaborating with anyone else on the network. The philosophy mirrors email: an open protocol that outlasts any single provider.
The October 2024 release is a major architectural overhaul. The previous setup was a Go monolith — appview — running on a single SQLite database on one server in Sweden, which hurt latency for non-European users. The new stack separates concerns: a Svelte frontend deployed at the edge, backed by 'bobbin,' a read-only, in-memory AT Protocol indexer written in Rust, now running in 11+ global regions.
On the backend side, 'Knot2' replaces the old knot server — also rewritten in Rust — and bundles a custom Git server with an SSH server in one binary. Critically, issues, pull requests, comments, reactions, and labels now live as Collaborative Objects (COBs) directly inside Git repos, not in a separate database. Record namespaces have also migrated from `sh.tangled.*` to `org.tangled.*`.
Extensibility is central to the pitch. Developers can subscribe to the AT Protocol firehose, write custom knots (one example runs on Cloudflare Workers with Artifacts-backed Git storage), or build their own forge interface entirely.