They had the mostly-centralized offering up immediately, and now they're spending a lot of time making the parts easier to self-host one by one. What does that say about the protocol? And I assume Tangled also suffers from the general ATProto AppView problem, where your AppView has to consume all the content in the entire network even though 99% of it is likely uninteresting to you.

Code hosting platforms are probably much more disjointed than microblogging platforms, so something like ActivityPub, where servers only keep track of content that users are actually interested in, would make much more sense. It's a shame that the people working on ForgeFed and/or Forgejo federation seemingly aren't making much progress.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand how the protocol works.

First, Tangled has been entirely self-hostable since the beginning! We've just made it much easier to run for everyone.

Second, the "appview" is simply an indexer. It consumes records from the firehose and only those that it cares about. In our case, those are org.tangled.*. There's no reason we'd consume all of the firehose.

ActivityPub categorically does not make sense here because of how coupled identities are to instances.

You already could host either the web app, the knot (the repo), or the spindle (the runner) yourself, they were just harder to run yourself. I think it says a lot of good things that you can one by one pick which pieces of the system you want to host where!

It is a social network so I'm not sure what the issue about yes needing to read the network is. There are really good relays designed to help aggregate and filter the network. They can run on $5 VPS, processing the entire network, which is awesomely cheap, not just Tangled, which is awesome, what I would call a huge win. Paul has a talk on designing for scalability, about how it's possible to have such small boxes doing the network aggregation with so little resources, that appviews can then consume their interests from. solving for scale in open social networks, https://youtu.be/BoJnj2yPf14

The servers are definitely not keeping the whole network. The post talks to this some, but the new Knot2 retains a local copy of repo-relevant material (comments prs etc) in its own git tree, that collects what the network has done together, and makes it easy to ship/replicate, while also using that as a sync source to replicate back into atproto too, to make network visible.

Agreed that I really wish ForgeFed were showing much more clear progress. It seems like such a good idea, but it's been a number of years now and it's super murky what the progress is and where we are. Having >1 viable player in the decentralization of forges would be great. I haven't checked in a bit but I do read Forgejo release notes and my impression is it's been a very slow trickle.