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Tangled is VC sponsored. It doesn't scream stability to me, but rather "we need to grow at all cost". I don't see the appeal. Even though it's federated, when

Tangled is VC sponsored. It doesn't scream stability to me, but rather "we need to grow at all cost". I don't see the appeal. Even though it's federated, when development stops, who will be there to fix bugs and maintain it?

icy 5mo ago
Tangled is built entirely in the open: https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core, and our primary goal is to be "permanent software"—i.e. be fully reproducible and entirely self-hostable at minimal cost. VC money is a means to an end. We're both Indian founders in Europe, and grants are nigh on impossible to find (4–12+ months for anything to materialize). VC is quite simply the quickest way for us to build a team, setup infra and accelerate development. We're also incredibly aligned with our investors on our goals (we took 6+ months to find the perfect partner for this).
- xandrius 5mo ago
  Mmmm still rather not support this. I prefer slow and steady wins the race kind of project. Good luck!
  - baq 5mo ago
    when in doubt, copy astral's exit strategy and get bought out by a foundation model lab. (yeah n=1, but that's still greater than 0 ;))
- shimman 5mo ago
  VC money is absolutely not a means to an end, what is signals is that the company doesn't care about community and only cares about profit. I'm with the OP you're replying to. Taking VC is an albatross that means a large portion of devs will never trust you or use your services (outside of bleeding your funds dry). If this place truly cared about community they should have made a non-profit or some type of NGO, basically anything with a true community governance model. Not the current model of caring about money over a community. We currently live in a society that solely cares about money and seriously doubt devs want to continue uplifting the current system that only benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else. How many board seats does the company plan on giving to the community to ensure enshittification doesn't occur?
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - kikki 5mo ago
    > the company doesn't care about community and only cares about profit. There are plenty of examples of VC funded companies that care about community & don't "only care about profit". Bluesky is a good one (literally a community / social platform). That's such a black & white take it baffles me. > Taking VC is an albatross that means a large portion of devs will never trust you or use your services A "large portion of devs" (the majority) use so many VC funded services? Probably _most_ services devs use are VC funded. GitHub itself - was VC funded. You can have an anti-VC opinion but you have to also live in reality.
    - AlecSchueler 5mo ago
      > Probably _most_ services devs use are VC funded. GitHub, was VC funded? GitHub was founded in a very different world. Would we start using it today is the question.
    - account42 5mo ago
      > GitHub itself - was VC funded And look where we are now. What sane person would got looking for an alternative only to sing up to the same bs again.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bix6 5mo ago
    O yeah cuz the non profit tactic worked so well for OpenAI. OpenAI and Claude both took VC money and everyone on this message board uses them regardless of ~community~ Not all VCs are scum
    - LunaSea 5mo ago
      It's not about VCs being scum but about investors needing a relatively fast return on investment which is understandable but also often times incompatible with investment in large scale, open source infrastructure.
- aejm 5mo ago
  In the latest FOSS project I’m starting, I’m not avoiding all “open core” supposedly FOSS projects. In my experience, they’re the projects most likely to do a rug pull and change licenses. If they cannot commit to their entire project being free and open, they are less likely to actually be committed to the principles of free and open software. While I was quite excited about some of the ideas being discussed in this project, it being VC backed is a complete non starter for me. Your claims of being built in the open don’t make me feel any better, you will eventually need to make returns for investors.
- the_biot 5mo ago
  Is the code base AI slop? You've published your code as open source, but without an explicit AI policy.
- ux266478 5mo ago
  How much work are you putting into simplicity? In my experience, in order for software to be permanent it needs to be like mold: only a single spore is required to grow a massive fruiting body and the spores themselves are very small and very uncomplicated. In this case, a spore is a single developer, and the simplicity is a low skill ceiling. Reproducibility does not benefit longetivity if the preconditions themselves themselves are highly complicated, and the benefit of simple bootstrapping is easily overshadowed if the software itself isn't friendly to being extensively hacked on by the average programmer.
  - icy 5mo ago
    I've written about this: https://anirudh.fi/future https://anirudh.fi/future
    - pasto421 5mo ago
      there's something about new VC fundedbro narcissism that's so fascinating > GitHub? Where do we even begin… The problem with GitHub is neither its UX nor its functions. Its downfall is VC funding but you made sure to only copy that and none of the good things. > GitLab? Way too enterprise-y, and definitely not easy to self-host. The only reason you don't offer an enterprise version yet is because atproto sucks and there's no way to make it private. Do you honestly think VCs are paying you to play with your strings and sheep? Your users won't pay for anything because there are already free alternatives that don't force them to join yet another cult. "Why should I join tangled? uhmmm it's like a worse version of everything but it has atproto! you like atproto don't you, 14 year old well established project will millions of users?" > Sourcehut? So opinionated it alienates about 98% of potential contributors. Pretty great if you really love email, I guess. Do you hear youself? In what world is tangled not extremely opinionated that alienates everyone but hardcore atproto followers? "pretty great if you really love atproto i guess". > Forgejo/Gitea? Nice, sure. You can self-host—but without a shared identity, I still need to create an account on your instance just to send a PR. It also works and is widely used and battle tested. Has a familiar UI and CI. Oh and apparently this newfound concept called private repos. > Radicle? Honestly, it’s amazing. Purely technically, Radicle is far ahead of anything else, Tangled included. But the world—at present—just isn’t ready for full-on P2P. The world is ready for appview + pds + did + ... yeah okay. Only hardcore atproto fans wants this bs.
- ineptech 5mo ago
  How can they ever see a dollar of profit without a rug pull, license change or hosted moat? This is a neat idea - besides just replacing github, a network of loosely-federated git servers seems like a promising base for distributed social media or chat platform someday - but it seems like the only way it can really stay open is if you're planning to stiff your investors.
- code-blooded 5mo ago
  I don't say you specifically have bad intentions or that VC money is all evil. But now you need to grow fast, which greatly increases the risk for me as your potential user, so you should at the very least write a post to make sure you're aligned with your users not just with your angels. How are you going to use the money? What's the business model? How do you ensure you're around in 10+ years? How are you going to please your overlords with that business model and what will you do if they force you to squeeze more money out of the business? I hope you succeed, because the competition is good for users, but VC-founding is a liability not a strength.
- ori_b 5mo ago
  What does your investor expect as far as returns, and how are they going to get it?
- phreeza 5mo ago
  Would you be open to sharing a version of your pitch deck? The main question in my mind is what kind of exit the VCs have in mind when they give you this money.
- curious_cat_163 5mo ago
  Hey! Love the idea. I think a lot of skepticism here would be addressed if you discussed your plans to monetize. People just want to know how you will (eventually) make money in a way that is aligned with how they expect this to evolve.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 5mo ago
> who will be there to fix bugs and maintain it? Those of us who use it. Tangled is a neat project and architecturally it makes a lot of interesting choices but code-wise it's relatively simple and from my personal forays in it I'd say pretty easy to maintain. The majority of the codebase is loosely related go modules. Then some static HTML+CSS. And finally a small sprinkle of typescript to tie things together. And of course a bit of Nix for orchestration. IIRC it all runs on a pretty trivial amount of hardware that a single person could currently host by themself. Users' knots, spindles, and PDS (plus atproto at large) do the real heavy lifting infra-wise.
- pfraze 5mo ago
  The most valuable thing Tangled will ever do is establish the protocol of Tangled. Once that’s done, it lives as long as people are willing to run it.
  - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 5mo ago
    Exactly. I'm personally slowly working on my own parallel "appview" of tangled that is accessible exclusively via SMTP, IMAP, JMAP, and eventually integration with a Lore + Patchwork frontend.
    - jphastings 5mo ago
      Oh that sounds very cool! Where can we follow your progress?
      - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 5mo ago
        Oh I haven't uploaded anything yet but I'm around in the Tangled discord (and you can find me on bluesky/tangled with the handle onedeuxtriseigo.nullpo.dev). I'll make a proper announcement when it's anywhere close to presentable or even functional and I imagine the tangled folks will amplify that when I do.
- whereistejas 5mo ago
colesantiago 5mo ago
When a project is funded by these VCs I question: Why does it need VCs? Why not company and corporate sponsorship like Ladybird? Why should we spend our time on a developer tool that would be enshittified down the line when VCs expect 10x returns?
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 5mo ago
  In this case the VC in question is funding various atproto projects as they are one of the primary backing VCs for Bluesky. So even if they don't expect returns from a given atproto project, they are investing money (and therefore funding FTEs) in the ecosystem at large. The investment isn't necessarily in any one of these projects in isolation. It's in the AT protocol at large.
- icy 5mo ago
  > Why does it need VCs? Why not company and corporate sponsorship like Ladybird? You talk about corporate sponsorship like that's trivial to find. Trust me when I say we spent over half a year chasing down grants/sponsorships only to be met with closed doors, extremely long wait times for pennies. We'd also be required to keep our day jobs—which means less focus on Tangled dev, and ultimately very slow progress overall. We debated VC heavily (we're both idealists after all), but figured we can make it work—it's ultimately the founders that make bad calls leading to enshittification. There's plenty of examples of VC-backed companies that haven't enshittified. Tailscale is an excellent one, and hence we brought on Avery as an angel in our round.
  - colesantiago 5mo ago
    Sure Tailscale is an excellent one. For now at least. It is also not open source and also has a paid product. Perhaps maybe in a few years time, Tangled Enterprise would be available to compete with GitHub Enterprise and that is where the switch over happens for companies who want to move over from GitHub to Tangled. I don’t know because somehow Tangled would need to make money somehow? I hope Tangled becomes profitable enough to withstand enshittification, because more and more funding rounds and not meeting targets means giving up control and facing a repeat of what happened at Bluesky.
Ritewut 5mo ago
I don't mind VC funding as long as they aren't YC funded.
- pseudalopex 5mo ago
  Why?
  - Ritewut 5mo ago
    I believe YC is a organization run by bad people. Like, people who actually want to do harm to you. You can peek at Garry Tan's X to get a taste of the type of things I'm talking to.
    - pseudalopex 5mo ago
      Is Peter Thiel a good person?
      - Ritewut 5mo ago
        Not in my opinion
        pseudalopex 5mo ago
        Why would you not mind Thiel funding?
        Ritewut 5mo ago
        I believed Thiel was still part of YC and included in my original statement I absolutely do mind if Thiel is funding a company.
uncenter 5mo ago
You wrote this comment on a VC funded news aggregation website, so who's to say?
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  This website is funded by providing brainwashing services for YC's agenda.

icy 5mo ago

Tangled is built entirely in the open: https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core, and our primary goal is to be "permanent software"—i.e. be fully reproducible and entirely self-hostable at minimal cost. VC money is a means to an end. We're both Indian founders in Europe, and grants are nigh on impossible to find (4–12+ months for anything to materialize). VC is quite simply the quickest way for us to build a team, setup infra and accelerate development. We're also incredibly aligned with our investors on our goals (we took 6+ months to find the perfect partner for this).

xandrius 5mo ago
Mmmm still rather not support this. I prefer slow and steady wins the race kind of project. Good luck!
- baq 5mo ago
  when in doubt, copy astral's exit strategy and get bought out by a foundation model lab. (yeah n=1, but that's still greater than 0 ;))
shimman 5mo ago
VC money is absolutely not a means to an end, what is signals is that the company doesn't care about community and only cares about profit. I'm with the OP you're replying to. Taking VC is an albatross that means a large portion of devs will never trust you or use your services (outside of bleeding your funds dry). If this place truly cared about community they should have made a non-profit or some type of NGO, basically anything with a true community governance model. Not the current model of caring about money over a community. We currently live in a society that solely cares about money and seriously doubt devs want to continue uplifting the current system that only benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else. How many board seats does the company plan on giving to the community to ensure enshittification doesn't occur?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- kikki 5mo ago
  > the company doesn't care about community and only cares about profit. There are plenty of examples of VC funded companies that care about community & don't "only care about profit". Bluesky is a good one (literally a community / social platform). That's such a black & white take it baffles me. > Taking VC is an albatross that means a large portion of devs will never trust you or use your services A "large portion of devs" (the majority) use so many VC funded services? Probably _most_ services devs use are VC funded. GitHub itself - was VC funded. You can have an anti-VC opinion but you have to also live in reality.
  - AlecSchueler 5mo ago
    > Probably _most_ services devs use are VC funded. GitHub, was VC funded? GitHub was founded in a very different world. Would we start using it today is the question.
  - account42 5mo ago
    > GitHub itself - was VC funded And look where we are now. What sane person would got looking for an alternative only to sing up to the same bs again.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- bix6 5mo ago
  O yeah cuz the non profit tactic worked so well for OpenAI. OpenAI and Claude both took VC money and everyone on this message board uses them regardless of ~community~ Not all VCs are scum
  - LunaSea 5mo ago
    It's not about VCs being scum but about investors needing a relatively fast return on investment which is understandable but also often times incompatible with investment in large scale, open source infrastructure.
aejm 5mo ago
In the latest FOSS project I’m starting, I’m not avoiding all “open core” supposedly FOSS projects. In my experience, they’re the projects most likely to do a rug pull and change licenses. If they cannot commit to their entire project being free and open, they are less likely to actually be committed to the principles of free and open software. While I was quite excited about some of the ideas being discussed in this project, it being VC backed is a complete non starter for me. Your claims of being built in the open don’t make me feel any better, you will eventually need to make returns for investors.
the_biot 5mo ago
Is the code base AI slop? You've published your code as open source, but without an explicit AI policy.
ux266478 5mo ago
How much work are you putting into simplicity? In my experience, in order for software to be permanent it needs to be like mold: only a single spore is required to grow a massive fruiting body and the spores themselves are very small and very uncomplicated. In this case, a spore is a single developer, and the simplicity is a low skill ceiling. Reproducibility does not benefit longetivity if the preconditions themselves themselves are highly complicated, and the benefit of simple bootstrapping is easily overshadowed if the software itself isn't friendly to being extensively hacked on by the average programmer.
- icy 5mo ago
  I've written about this: https://anirudh.fi/future https://anirudh.fi/future
  - pasto421 5mo ago
    there's something about new VC fundedbro narcissism that's so fascinating > GitHub? Where do we even begin… The problem with GitHub is neither its UX nor its functions. Its downfall is VC funding but you made sure to only copy that and none of the good things. > GitLab? Way too enterprise-y, and definitely not easy to self-host. The only reason you don't offer an enterprise version yet is because atproto sucks and there's no way to make it private. Do you honestly think VCs are paying you to play with your strings and sheep? Your users won't pay for anything because there are already free alternatives that don't force them to join yet another cult. "Why should I join tangled? uhmmm it's like a worse version of everything but it has atproto! you like atproto don't you, 14 year old well established project will millions of users?" > Sourcehut? So opinionated it alienates about 98% of potential contributors. Pretty great if you really love email, I guess. Do you hear youself? In what world is tangled not extremely opinionated that alienates everyone but hardcore atproto followers? "pretty great if you really love atproto i guess". > Forgejo/Gitea? Nice, sure. You can self-host—but without a shared identity, I still need to create an account on your instance just to send a PR. It also works and is widely used and battle tested. Has a familiar UI and CI. Oh and apparently this newfound concept called private repos. > Radicle? Honestly, it’s amazing. Purely technically, Radicle is far ahead of anything else, Tangled included. But the world—at present—just isn’t ready for full-on P2P. The world is ready for appview + pds + did + ... yeah okay. Only hardcore atproto fans wants this bs.
ineptech 5mo ago
How can they ever see a dollar of profit without a rug pull, license change or hosted moat? This is a neat idea - besides just replacing github, a network of loosely-federated git servers seems like a promising base for distributed social media or chat platform someday - but it seems like the only way it can really stay open is if you're planning to stiff your investors.
code-blooded 5mo ago
I don't say you specifically have bad intentions or that VC money is all evil. But now you need to grow fast, which greatly increases the risk for me as your potential user, so you should at the very least write a post to make sure you're aligned with your users not just with your angels. How are you going to use the money? What's the business model? How do you ensure you're around in 10+ years? How are you going to please your overlords with that business model and what will you do if they force you to squeeze more money out of the business? I hope you succeed, because the competition is good for users, but VC-founding is a liability not a strength.
ori_b 5mo ago
What does your investor expect as far as returns, and how are they going to get it?
phreeza 5mo ago
Would you be open to sharing a version of your pitch deck? The main question in my mind is what kind of exit the VCs have in mind when they give you this money.
curious_cat_163 5mo ago
Hey! Love the idea. I think a lot of skepticism here would be addressed if you discussed your plans to monetize. People just want to know how you will (eventually) make money in a way that is aligned with how they expect this to evolve.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo 5mo ago

> who will be there to fix bugs and maintain it? Those of us who use it. Tangled is a neat project and architecturally it makes a lot of interesting choices but code-wise it's relatively simple and from my personal forays in it I'd say pretty easy to maintain. The majority of the codebase is loosely related go modules. Then some static HTML+CSS. And finally a small sprinkle of typescript to tie things together. And of course a bit of Nix for orchestration. IIRC it all runs on a pretty trivial amount of hardware that a single person could currently host by themself. Users' knots, spindles, and PDS (plus atproto at large) do the real heavy lifting infra-wise.

pfraze 5mo ago
The most valuable thing Tangled will ever do is establish the protocol of Tangled. Once that’s done, it lives as long as people are willing to run it.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 5mo ago
  Exactly. I'm personally slowly working on my own parallel "appview" of tangled that is accessible exclusively via SMTP, IMAP, JMAP, and eventually integration with a Lore + Patchwork frontend.
  - jphastings 5mo ago
    Oh that sounds very cool! Where can we follow your progress?
    - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 5mo ago
      Oh I haven't uploaded anything yet but I'm around in the Tangled discord (and you can find me on bluesky/tangled with the handle onedeuxtriseigo.nullpo.dev). I'll make a proper announcement when it's anywhere close to presentable or even functional and I imagine the tangled folks will amplify that when I do.
whereistejas 5mo ago

colesantiago 5mo ago

When a project is funded by these VCs I question: Why does it need VCs? Why not company and corporate sponsorship like Ladybird? Why should we spend our time on a developer tool that would be enshittified down the line when VCs expect 10x returns?

OneDeuxTriSeiGo 5mo ago
In this case the VC in question is funding various atproto projects as they are one of the primary backing VCs for Bluesky. So even if they don't expect returns from a given atproto project, they are investing money (and therefore funding FTEs) in the ecosystem at large. The investment isn't necessarily in any one of these projects in isolation. It's in the AT protocol at large.
icy 5mo ago
> Why does it need VCs? Why not company and corporate sponsorship like Ladybird? You talk about corporate sponsorship like that's trivial to find. Trust me when I say we spent over half a year chasing down grants/sponsorships only to be met with closed doors, extremely long wait times for pennies. We'd also be required to keep our day jobs—which means less focus on Tangled dev, and ultimately very slow progress overall. We debated VC heavily (we're both idealists after all), but figured we can make it work—it's ultimately the founders that make bad calls leading to enshittification. There's plenty of examples of VC-backed companies that haven't enshittified. Tailscale is an excellent one, and hence we brought on Avery as an angel in our round.
- colesantiago 5mo ago
  Sure Tailscale is an excellent one. For now at least. It is also not open source and also has a paid product. Perhaps maybe in a few years time, Tangled Enterprise would be available to compete with GitHub Enterprise and that is where the switch over happens for companies who want to move over from GitHub to Tangled. I don’t know because somehow Tangled would need to make money somehow? I hope Tangled becomes profitable enough to withstand enshittification, because more and more funding rounds and not meeting targets means giving up control and facing a repeat of what happened at Bluesky.

Ritewut 5mo ago

I don't mind VC funding as long as they aren't YC funded.

pseudalopex 5mo ago
Why?
- Ritewut 5mo ago
  I believe YC is a organization run by bad people. Like, people who actually want to do harm to you. You can peek at Garry Tan's X to get a taste of the type of things I'm talking to.
  - pseudalopex 5mo ago
    Is Peter Thiel a good person?
    - Ritewut 5mo ago
      Not in my opinion
      - pseudalopex 5mo ago
        Why would you not mind Thiel funding?
        Ritewut 5mo ago
        I believed Thiel was still part of YC and included in my original statement I absolutely do mind if Thiel is funding a company.

uncenter 5mo ago

You wrote this comment on a VC funded news aggregation website, so who's to say?

tardedmeme 5mo ago
This website is funded by providing brainwashing services for YC's agenda.