FOSSMeet'26

Tangled!!! The Old New Way to Use Git

Abstract:

Code used to be free. Patches flew over mailing lists, SourceForge was the place to be, and no single company owned how you collaborated. Then GitHub happened, and for a while, it was genuinely great.

Then Microsoft bought it. The Terms of Service kept creeping. And then they trained AI on everyone’s GPL code without asking.

So we tried to leave. And we built real alternatives — GitLab, Gitea, Forgejo. Solid software. But here’s the problem, when you self-host, you move to an island. No cross-instance pull requests. No collaboration without an account on your server. And now instead of GitHub monoculture we have... fragmentation. KDE on invent.kde.org. Debian on salsa.debian.org. GNOME on gitlab.gnome.org. Everyone siloed.

Federation was supposed to fix this. Forgejo is making real progress with ActivityPub, stars federation works, PR federation is being actively worked on. GitLab has had an open epic for this since forever and it’s still crawling. It’s hard to pivot a giant.

That’s where Tangled comes in. Built from scratch with decentralization as a first principle!!! not bolted on. It runs on the AT Protocol (yes, the Bluesky one), which turns out to work really well for developer identity and cross-server collaboration.

This talk covers the whole arc, git over email, the GitHub takeover, why self-hosting alone isn’t enough, and why Tangled might actually be what we’ve been waiting for.