Tangled is a new social-enabled Git collaboration platform, built on top of the AT Protocol. We envision a place where developers have complete ownership of their code, open source communities can freely self-govern and most importantly, coding can be social and fun again.

There are several models for decentralized code collaboration platforms, ranging from ActivityPub’s (Forgejo) federated model, to Radicle’s entirely P2P model. Our approach attempts to be the best of both worlds by adopting atproto—a protocol for building decentralized social applications with a central identity.

Our approach to this is the idea of “knots”. Knots are lightweight, headless servers that enable users to host Git repositories with ease. Knots are designed for either single or multi-tenant use which is perfect for self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi at home, or larger “community” servers. By default, Tangled provides managed knots where you can host your repositories for free.

The App View at tangled.sh acts as a consolidated “view” into the whole network, allowing users to access, clone and contribute to repositories hosted across different knots—completely seamlessly.

Tangled is still in its infancy, and we’re building out several of its core features as we dogfood it ourselves. We developed these three tenets to guide our decisions:

1. Ownership of data
2. Low barrier to entry
3. No compromise on user-experience

Collaborating on code isn’t easy, and the tools and workflows we use should feel natural and stay out of the way. Tangled’s architecture enables common workflows to work as you’d expect, all while remaining decentralized.

We believe that atproto has greatly simplfied one of the hardest parts of social media: having your friends on it. Today, we’re rolling out invite-only access to Tangled—join us on IRC at #tangled on libera.chat and we’ll get you set up.

Update: Tangled is open to public, simply login at tangled.sh/login! Have fun!