Tangled rebuilds its federated GitHub alternative in Rust
The AT Protocol-based code forge swapped its Go monolith for a set of Rust services, redesigned its interface in Svelte, and now stores issues and pull requests as git objects instead of database rows.
Tangled, a federated code forge built on the AT Protocol, the same protocol behind Bluesky, shipped a major rebuild on 30 October. The Finnish startup replaced its centralised Go monolith with a distributed set of services: Bobbin, a new Rust indexer running across 11 or more regions, and Knot2, a Rust rewrite of its knot server with its own built-in Git and SSH servers.
The data model changed too. Repository data such as issues, pull requests and comments now lives as collaborative objects directly inside git repositories, under new org.tangled.* lexicons that replace the old sh.tangled.* ones. Tangled also added native organisation accounts with <name>.tngl.sh handles and delegated, passwordless access, plus stacked pull requests with interdiffs for both Git and Jujutsu users. The front end is now Svelte, deployed at the edge, with a new typeface replacing Inter.
Why it matters: most GitHub alternatives compete on price or self-hosting. Tangled is betting on federation, storing your project’s history as portable data you own rather than rows in someone else’s database, which is a different pitch if you’re tired of your repo metadata being locked to one host.
The caveat: private repositories, a CLI, language SDKs and agent skills are all still described as coming “in subsequent weeks”, so this is a public, pre-1.0 tool today.