Comment by Arubis
1 day ago
[Radicle](https://radicle.dev/) gets a wee bit closer. It’s selfhostable and federated. You’ll have a hard time finding something with the same social gravity well as GitHub; it remains to be seen whether that’s a separable element or if it needs to ship as part of the forge itself.
I’ve been testing Radicle and it’s more focused on the distributed protocol for federating git repos, I.e. the data plane. The social / coordination control-plane angle is really thin, following users and repos goes by opaque IDs, etc.
It could be a better solution for agents that don’t bounce off such mundane complexity. It could be better for private repo federation (eg private collective or agent swarm.)
I’m interested in Tangled for the OSS/community aspect, it seems to have an advantage there with the richer identity layer for humans.
Issue and PR content are not social artifacts, they belong in the repo or at least its hosting instance. Likes and activity feed are the sort of thing that belongs in the social layer.
Interesting point, I was thinking more about the latter, but you are right that issues and PRs are the more important piece.
It does look like Tangled currently does those in a weird way, ties to the issue owner rather than repo - but here’s a proposal to fix: https://leaflet.pub/p/did%3Aplc%3Axasnlahkri4ewmbuzly2rlc5/3...
Doing some weird distributed join across all your committer’s PDSs seems a bit weird, and the semantics of cross-referencing issues seems gnarly in that world.
I think I’d be OK to model a PR as a tweet, it’s more owned by the sender. But issues seem like they should be owned by the repo for sure.
Issues and PR content are absolutely social artifacts, as they communicate information to others, whether opened by the repo owner or not. In fact, other people can interact with them, and are supposed to do so, which makes them even more inherently social.
1 reply →
Can I interact with and discover any federated instance without having to know it exists?
My experience with Bluesky Vs Mastodon really showed that the friction of federation in the latter can really kill the experience for me. I think we need something like Signal is to WhatsApp but for GitHub and my impression is that the ATProto world is the only one with the potential to deliver this.
This looks like a much more sensible design for code repos: all the artifacts live in the repo.