The Forge We Deserve

GitHub faces stability issues and high-profile departures like Ghostty, prompting developers to seek alternatives. Tangled, a Git forge built on the AT Protocol, offers a decentralized, open-source solution that resists vendor lock-in. Tangled is in alpha but already supports features like jujutsu and stacked PRs, positioning itself as a fundamentally different alternative to GitHub.

GitHub is having a tough time. Their uptime or rather, lack thereof has become a meme, they’re facing exponential usage growth thanks to AI, and now high-profile projects like Ghostty are moving away https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-leaving-github . Developers are starting to discuss what they https://matduggan.com/if-i-could-make-my-own-github/ want https://nesbitt.io/2026/05/02/a-github-for-maintainers.html from an alternative. I’m thankful for GitHub, but it’s clear which way the winds are blowing. I hope they can fix their stability issues, but this is also an opportunity for the open-source world to try something new. So, what’s next? There are a lot of Git forges out there. Some, like Forgejo https://forgejo.org/ , are pretty good. It’s reasonable to predict that many people will move to these, and the ecosystem will become more fragmented. There are benefits to centralization, and losing these could be painful. I love that most dev tools I use have a GitHub integration, and there’s almost no friction when I want to open an issue in a GitHub project. This will not be the case in a world of many distinct gitlab.foo.com and forgejo.bar.com instances. Or perhaps everyone moves to some hot-new-AI-first-forge, and then we go through the same cycle of enshittification in 10-20 years. But we don’t have to live like this. Armin Ronacher puts it well https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/4/28/before-github/ : it should be harder for one company’s drift to become a cultural crisis for everyone else. I think we already have a promising path ahead: a Git forge built on an open, interoperable protocol. Specifically, today, this is Tangled https://tangled.org/ . It’s built on the AT Protocol. The details are a little nerdy I recommend this explainer https://overreacted.io/open-social/ if you’re interested but here are the important parts: - Your data e.g. your repos, the issues you open, the PR comments you write live on a server you can self-host or you can use a public, shared server . - A centralized app like tangled.org itself aggregates everyone’s data in one place. - It’s all open-source, so if the Tangled devs start veering off course, we can fork it. In other words: we get the benefits of a centralized service, and the benefits that come from owning our own data. You don’t need a million logins and you can still search everyone’s repos from a single search bar, but you also don’t have to entrust the Tangled people with eternal stewardship of your code. The best part of this, in my eyes, is that it is structurally resistant to the lock-in that’s burning us with GitHub. Anyone can run their own Tangled fork, should they wish to. As long as the fork remains compatible with the Tangled schema called a lexicon https://atproto.com/guides/lexicon in ATProto parlance , then it doesn’t matter whether someone reads their profile from tangled.org or tangled-but-better.org or even tangled-but-with-some-crazy-different-ui-and-features.com . A good, early example of this openness is Mitchell Hashimoto’s tack https://tangled.org/mitchellh.com/tack — it lets you use other CI providers within Tangled if you don’t like their native Nix-flavored thing. I want Tangled to do well. Today, it’s alpha software, so some things are rough around the edges — but it’s definitely usable for open-source work. They’ve raised a seed round https://blog.tangled.org/seed/ , natively support jujutsu and stacked PRs https://blog.tangled.org/stacking/ , and just introduced an interesting web of trust https://blog.tangled.org/vouching/ implementation. From what I’ve seen, it’s the only forge doing something fundamentally different to GitHub. The next forge should be a step up, not sideways. I’m starting all my new projects on Tangled, and I encourage you to try it.