I dropped X and adopted BlueSky & Mastodon, but must admit I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them, if I star the repo my stars end up spread across multiple services.
I guess the ideal end goal would be if GitHub federated too and then some of that stuff would work.
The appeal of ditching X was obvious but I can't see the same for GitHub at the moment.
On that note there's also https://tangled.org built on atproto which (kind of?) solves that. You have one identity (the same one for all atproto apps) which you use to interact with any tangled repository (including those on self-hosted servers).
With its support for self-hosted CI runners it could also be a good alternative for people looking to move now that GitHub has decided to charge for those.
Having one account/sovereign Personal Data Store that can hold many different kinds of data. Then having many different clients and services that are decoupled from the data, offering all kinds of experiences is just night and day better than everything else. For everyone.
You account works everywhere & that's awesome. You also have credible edit & can take your account to a different server without disruption, baked in: amazing win for sovereign computing & digital rights far better than (basically) anything.
People can make cool connected online services, without having to figure out how to host all the data! That's so powerful, so cool (and ActivityPub maybe can decouple someday, but we don't see it yet. The data store and the app go hand in hand, & you end up with an account for each service). It makes it wildly easy to build incredible connected services with fantastically little effort and costs.
That said, I did try to get some of my git repos on https://Tangled.org just today, and alas found that the actual git data needs a "knit" server to do that. And afaik there are are no knot servers I can just use. I'd never seen that complexity for a atproto app before! Usually with something like the book reading social app https://bookhive.buzz or the annotation service https://seams.so , just having your regular account is all the data & service you need. Tangled was a surprising contrast, but I hope to be online there sometime soon-ish!
I totally agree! This is actually a very good summary of the value prop for atproto honestly. Definitely saving this. ("credible edit" -> "credible exit" I'm assuming.)
It certainly took a while for me to grasp how all the different components in the atproto stack function and work together, but the decoupling actually makes so much sense and I've also become a huge fan of it for all of the reasons you mention. It really feels like a natural extension of Web 2.0 to me.
Re: Tangled
Tangled does actually host a default knot server at https://knot1.tangled.sh. You should be able to select it when you create a repo?
But yes Tangled's component infrastructure is kind of unique. Only the social data (issues, PRs, comments, stars, follows, etc.) is stored in your data repository on your PDS. The git server requires a separate "knot" server.
It's described a bit more in-depth here[1]. As far as I understand it's basically just the git repo hosting part of Tangled's AppView, split off into its own thing to make it possible to self-host it. This means you stay in control of your repo data but also get the benefits of having an actual server with a remote git repo as the authoritative source for the purpose of collaboration, which is what people are generally used to when collaborating using git.
You're probably correct in that the "normal" way would be to have the Tangled AppView act as the git server, but have it store the remote git repo on your PDS. But as records in your PDS data repository are either JSON documents or unstructured blobs I guess it's kind of hard to use that for a git repo, which is largely filesystem dependent. I imagine it would require some kind of translation layer. Or something like git-bundle[2] maybe?
Social movements don't need to be quantifiably better to take off.
When the relevant audience is bored enough to be open to something new, it only takes a few influential people to tip the scales.
People don't want to be truly revolutionary; that takes actual risk. They want the appearance of being revolutionary with minimal downside and social reassurance.
(w/r/t GitHub there's already enough buzz in the right circles and it will likely happen this year.)
> I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them
The same is true in the other direction ("Ugh, this project is hosted on GitHub and I now need to set up an account"), with one major difference: compared to other sites which tend to just accept username + email + password for setup and username + password to log in, it's a huge PITA to set up a GitHub account in 2025 and to log in to an infrequently used account from a logged out state. GitHub won't let you get away with using it in such a simple way.
I dropped X and adopted BlueSky & Mastodon, but must admit I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them, if I star the repo my stars end up spread across multiple services.
I guess the ideal end goal would be if GitHub federated too and then some of that stuff would work.
The appeal of ditching X was obvious but I can't see the same for GitHub at the moment.