Skip to content

Why AT Protocol

Git is decentralized, but the rest of code collaboration is not. Almost all open source code lives on one platform, GitHub. When one company holds all the code, it can fail or change the rules for everyone. Email, git and IRC have lasted for many years. Central services do not.

Code collaboration has always made use of two protocols, one for code transfer and one for communication:

  • Email flow: git moves the code, email carries communication.
  • GitHub: git moves the code, the GitHub website carries communication.
  • Tangled: git moves the code, the AT Protocol carries communication.

Tangled shares events between git servers, which we call “knots”. You can work on repositories on any server. You can fork across servers. You can push to a repository on your own server and open a pull request on a repository on a different server.

AT Protocol carries the events around the code, like issues and pull requests. It also carries the social parts: a timeline of events, follows, and stars. It shares collaborator invites and SSH public keys. The rest is plain git.