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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

I see you hand waved people who pay money so that forges can operate.

If you have a company you don’t want to pay 20 invoices to different vendors.

If you have a company you don’t want to deal with debugging integration between your CI/CD and web view and git providers, you want to make a ticket and have it fixed.

When you are developing a project you don’t want to spend time figuring out which task management will integrate with other parts.

As a developer you also don’t want to jump through 5 different tools and waste time you want integrated and streamlined experience.

Git being decentralized doesn’t have value besides the fact that I can have my local copy and work on it separately from whatever is there on the central server my company uses.

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Inevitably someone will end up paying for Tangled. Their architecture demands an infrastructure piece that actually hosts the forges and PDSs through BlueSky won't always be free. They're also non-trivial to run.

The vast majority of this comment is false, btw

The infrastructure to host the forges is still a problem yes, but PDSes are VERY trivial to run, they’re just a Node.js app and they have a Compose file to make running it a quick shell script to run. And they will always be free, Bluesky is well aware that making access to the platform a paid thing would kill the project outright, and even then the code is open source and in the process of being written up as an RFC, so… please fact check your comments before posting :)

Regardless that increases the barrier to entry for the median developer compared to e.g. Github. In any case, there are several other providers for PDSs coming up and infra is one of the hot areas in the atproto community

I've been working on an atproto side project. These are very much reasonable considerations when dealing in any atproto application. It is truthful to say that most BlueSky users do not use a personal PDS. It is reasonable to say Tangled will likely trend the same way. It is reasonable to say these are things anyone building on atproto must account for.

It's also factual to say that Tangled is substantially different from BlueSky. Their AppView is stateful, they synchronize via NATS, and PDSs are linked beyond that. Again, substantially more complex than your average atproto architecture.

A PDS is just a docker image of a TS node app w/ sqlite that can run on effectively no hardware at all (someone got one running on a microwave once upon a time).

A relay is also fairly trivial to set up and can be orchestrated via docker I believe. You can run them on a raspberry pi as long as you have a half decent internet connection.

The tangled appview runs on a single machine w/ like 4 cores and a few gigs of ram.

You can run a knot (git host for tangled) on pretty much any hardware.

And a spindle (CI runner for tangled) on anything that meets the requirements for your CI ops.

It's multiple moving parts which increases complexity but IIRC they also all have nix flake support as well so orchestrating all of the moving parts together via nix is increasingly trivial.

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