Tangled Announces Federated Code Forge Update With New UI, Data Model, and Organizations

Tangled, which describes itself as the first truly federated code forge, has announced a broad product update. The release includes a redesigned Svelte user interface, a globally deployed Rust indexer called bobbin, repo-owned collaborative data, organization accounts, and support for stacked pull requests.

A federated forge built on the AT Protocol

Tangled says users can host code on their own servers and still collaborate with others, self-hosting only selected parts such as Git hosting or CI runners, or all components including the API server and UI. Because it is built on the AT Protocol, users can build extensions, subscribe to the firehose, write custom knots, or host an ultralight API server to build a custom forge. The company says agents have made building hyper-personalized software trivial, especially when software is designed with hackability in mind from the start, and calls Tangled incredibly agent friendly.

New UI and global read-only indexer

The web UI and backend were previously a single Go monolith called the appview, which handled AT Protocol indexing, caching, off-protocol data, and UI rendering with html/template + htmx on a single SQLite database on one medium-sized server in Sweden. Tangled says this setup worked well for users about 50 to 100 ms from Sweden, but most users are not. The new architecture uses a standalone Svelte frontend deployed at the edge and a diskless, in-memory Rust indexer called bobbin, deployed globally in over 11 regions. Bobbin is purely read-only and only deals with AT Protocol data, while other functionality has been delegated to new supporting services. Tangled also swapped Inter for Timeless Sans and says things should now be quicker, visually consistent, and prettier.

Repo-owned data and attestations

Tangled has introduced new lexicons, with records now living under org.tangled.* instead of the old sh.tangled.* records. Knot2, a second knot server implementation rewritten in Rust, bundles a fully custom Git server and an SSH server in the same binary. Issues, pull requests, comments, reactions, and labels are now stored on the knot next to the code as collaborative objects, which are chains of Git objects in the repository; collaborators, knot members, and the blocklist are stored the same way. Tangled says this gives projects maximum portability because issues and pull requests live with the code. To prevent a knot from misrepresenting records, the web app writes an org.tangled.graph.attestation record to the user's own PDS each time a record is created or edited on a knot, pointing to that exact version and the collaborative object change behind it. Self-hosters must upgrade knots to v1.20.0 by following the upgrade guide.

Organizations and stacked pull requests

Organization accounts are now available. An organization is a real AT Protocol account with its own DID and handle, hosted on a Tranquil PDS instance, and is a passwordless, delegated account created from the New Organization page with a name.tngl.sh handle and the creator as owner. Owners can invite members, and anyone in the organization can act as it when creating or forking repositories; like other accounts, the handle can be swapped for a domain the user owns. Tangled is also working on a way to move regular accounts that have been used as stand-in organizations. The pull request flow has been overhauled so users of either Jujutsu or vanilla Git can submit and review stacked pull requests; Git users can interdiff between versions, previously called rounds, while Jujutsu users can interdiff between individual changes. In the coming weeks, Tangled plans to launch private repos, a CLI, SDKs for different languages, and skills for agents.

Sources: tangled.org