I'd like to preface I'm pretty active in atprotocol ecosystem, so my experience is more than likely a bit more biased, but thought I'd share some of my thoughts as a big fan of tangled.
I've really enjoyed Tangled. It has so far been what I've wanted from a GitHub replacement, is simpler and does not have as many features, but it has been the main social/git provider I've been using for personal open source projects for about a year now (this me https://tangled.org/did:plc:rnpkyqnmsw4ipey6eotbdnnf)
- It has a social graph connected to it I know from the social media I use (Bluesky), it's nice to put a face/name I may have seen to their commits/prs/issues
- Is nice it's login is the same as other things I use
- They have recently added built in support for static sites, nice for those client side webites or simple index.htmls you want to host somewhere straight from your git repo.
- Spindles is their build system/actions. Not a nix fan, but they do use some flavor of that and have worked really well for what I've needed
- An open API that allows me to easily render information thanks to being built on shared standards I know (atproto). I've built bots and wrote a few features into npmx.dev that uses various things from tangled easily thanks to that.
- Ability to run your own knot(git server) and runner (spindles), or easily use the ones they host, but the cool thing about this is the social features are separate so even if you have a separate git server the issues/prs/etc are all coming from that shared social layer, not like they need to make an account on it to partake in the convo.
It's not perfect. It has alpha in the navbar and does feel like that sometimes. I am missing some features, but all in all I've really enjoyed using it for my open source work and will more than likely continue using it going forward.
I'm afraid that atproto will suffer from Bluesky's irrelevance. Not sure if that's a valid fear.
In what sense is bluesky irrelevant in this context? It's obviously not Twitter scale, but no alternative to GitHub will be GitHub scale for a long time to come either...
And it does seem to have the right feature set. Not sure which other social graph/network you could reasonably build a GitHub alternative around that would be less irrelevant....
It's largely perceived to be an ideological site. Obviously every community has its own biases and tastes, but I think Bluesky has just captured the imagination as the "left-leaning social platform." When the NYT was talking about a potential link between the WHCD shooter and Bluesky posts, that's what they referred to Bluesky as.
Obviously Tangled can live completely separate from Bluesky, it doesn't even need to share branding. Protocols are just protocols and people who don't understand how email works often don't even realize that Outlook and GMail use the same protocols. I'm hoping for this future personally where ATProto is only something the nerds care about (and write code for.)
(Please don't respond to this post with ideological argument. I'm just trying to talk about Bluesky and ATProto.)
I wonder how much this translates to places outside the US... Bluesky being the place for everything Center-left and left of it by US standards would just make it the place for mainstream opinion in much of the EU.
Personally I found it much easier to avoid politics on Bluesky than on other platforms. Which is why it's been more sticky for me than Twitter was. And I put that down to having good feed control, and not being beholden to an algorithm that tries to keep me engaged.
>It's largely just become an ideological site.
That may be the case, but anyone can use ATProto. Unlike X where reach is suppressed for ideological motivations, or Mastodon with the federation turf wars, anyone can use it, regardless of their politics. If you disagree with the ideology of the majority users and avoid it for that reason, it just perpetuates the problem.
Unfortunately, I suspect it is only that way at present because the "other side" is perfectly content to continue existing in a communications environment that prioritizes them, rather than one that is actually open.
Unlike Mastodon? What's the difference? Anyone can use AP regardless of politics, you just might get banned from other's infra the same as for ATProto.
Fair enough! We are a pretty small ecosystem all in all. I will say in Tangled's case their infrastructure is separate from Bluesky's for the most part, and the rest can be switched easily enough if ever needed.
One example is if you don't care anything about atproto, you can create a new account on Tangled's website that creates the account on their servers, but thanks to how atproto works it's just like you made one on Bluesky and can still interact with Tangled and everyone on the protocol for it's social features.
We're not discussing social networks though, this is about Git project hosting. Bluesky doesn't have to compete with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or any of that for Tangled to be useful.
Everything is irrelevant until it isn't. Then it isn't until it is. If we all do our part, X will become irrelevant.
Aren't we reinventing what were forums in pre smartphone days?
Those were all isolated places, where you needed an account for that specific forum (whereas you can use your PDS anywhere), where that forum held your data (whereas you hold your atproto data, and we all internetwork to see the aggregate), where you were subject to the moderation decisions of that forum (whereas you have control over your PDS (but not other people's clients)).
Pretty unclear what your comment is trying to indicate but it sure feels very different to me, and I've offered some characterizations for why.
More generally, atproto is useful for all kinds of tech, solves a cold start social network problem. Aren't we reinventing forums, and tv watching, and book reviews, and trail maps, and photo sharing, and streaming, and d&d, and key attestation, and file sharing, and publishing, and note taking and containers and git hosting? Yes. Yes we are. https://atstore.fyi
(Under a common protocol set, in a way that respects users unlike everything else that's happened online so far.)
Isn't this stuff we're inventing more complicated than having accounts on websites?
atproto will suffer from centralization via Bluesky and its user wanting it to be centralized.