The federated code forge
282 points - yesterday at 3:44 PM
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One musing: I did run into my first "issue" with federated Git hosting the other day while setting up Neovim on a new machine. One of the plugins I use is hosted on Tangled and I guess its backing Knot was down. This was awkward for two reasons:
1. It as unclear to me from the Tangled website the backing knot was the issue (for a while I thought it was something on my end)
2. I really had no backup plans for something like a Neovim plugin's source forge being down and, clearly, neither did the Neovim package manager as it just kept showing an error on every session I started with no way to fix it :).
I suppose in the long run we really shouldn't be assuming that code storage is just Always There or easily cached somewhere, but I anticipate some growing pains in the mean time. ATProto doesn't seem to have the benefit ActivityPub has where if the instance I wanted to view content on was down I can usually find some other instance that's gotten the messages.
Happy to answer any questions at all.
Some feedback:-
* I found the UI on the homepage/timeline a bit busy - lots going on. Notifications, Recents, Announcements don't seem like they need to live on this page?
* The Activity chart on a users profile page seems a bit wild to me. I'd suggest simplifying it or just using what GitHub/GitLab use with their square grid activity chart - it's what users are most familiar with. It's kind of analagous to all the LLM/Chat applications in recent years - they all converged on the same UI because that's what works - no need to reinvent the wheel when users understand an existing pattern. Plus - it's better for marketing:- people like to share their activity on GitHub/GitLab as it quickly conveys how much work they've done over the year - your current page doesn't.
I am asking because I have been waiting for that change. I intend to make all the public repos from https://juju.bi (code forge I am building) interoperable with Tangled and basically behave as knot server.
git clone https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core
And it failed? Cloning into 'core'...
warning: redirecting to https://knot1.tangled.sh/did:plc:j5hmlfdrwkvtxm7cjmu7j2is/
remote: Thanks for using knot1.tangled.sh!
remote: Enumerating objects: 99191, done.
remote: Total 99191, done.
Receiving objects: 100% (99191/99191), 122.19 MiB | 39.12 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (49286/49286), done.
error: invalid path 'localinfra/fixtures/blobs/did:plc:igzuueb63dytyy3tpaweofuu bafkreieify5bix4cmrj4iuxiceb6srr2boltkbbf7yizwtgwurqv42sltm'
fatal: unable to checkout working tree
warning: Clone succeeded, but checkout failed.
and retry with 'git restore --source=HEAD :/'
You can inspect what was checked out with 'git status'
It's not a great look when the very first thing I'd want to try to do: 1. Redirects from .org to .sh suspiciously
2. falls over.
I now have to try to work out whether that other domain is deliberate or compromised.Pre-update, code review UI was horrific compared to GitHub. Post-update, code review is much better, but "Comments" section without a "Comment" button is unforgivable. People are probably closing PRs right and left without knowing it. Shift-Enter is a submit action.
I'm a keyboard-first user, but for something which can end up in somebody's inbox notifications, UI button is the way to go.
I just don't understand how such a prolific pattern is being ignored.
atcr.io/tangled.org/knot:2
Does anyone know if ‘tangled.org’ is verified / guaranteed to be owned by tangled.org?At this point it's really the only forge I want to use going forward, considering that it sits nicely alongside all my other social data with ATProto.