Every issue, pull request, comment, reaction, and label on a Tangled repository is now a chain of Git objects, stored in the repository itself, right next to the code it describes. That single decision, shipped as part of Tangled's October 30 relaunch, is the most consequential forge design choice since GitHub bolted a social graph onto Git — and it inverts the usual question. The interesting thing about a federated forge is not that you can self-host it. It is that the boundary between the code and the conversation about the code has been moved into the one data structure every developer already trusts: the Git object graph.

This article walks through what Tangled actually shipped, what the new architecture is made of, and what running a piece of it yourself commits you to.…