Manganin: tools matter

Manganin is a Git forge written in Zig. It's a reimagining of what modern source code management could be if we compromise on nothing. It is named after an alloy of manganese and copper that remains quite constant in electrical resistivity with changes in temperature.

Vouch tree

The world runs on trust, now more than ever. The number of lines of code in a PR is not necessarily correlated with its quality, or how much effort was invested. Open source maintainers are getting burned out, making their time and attention ever more scarce. Buzz on social media drives people towards strong opinions about projects without ever having used them.

Enter: the invite tree. A prospective contributor needs to get vouched by another existing contributor, who promises that their vouchees can be trusted to follow the rules of the project. Vouching someone gives them the ability to open issues, make PRs, and otherwise contribute to the project. A chain of accountability can be followed from each user to the top of the tree, and vouching someone who griefs the project can have consequences. The result is a high-trust environment where someone's ability to waste the core team's time is tied to how trusted they are. Compare lobste.rs, with broadly civil discussion on difficult topics, and where bans are rare, to the cesspool that is Reddit.

Your data in your hands

Manganin is architected to be self-hosted: it has no proprietary data formats or vendor lock-in, and minimal hardware requirements. When you manage your own deployment, you own your own data, all stored natively in Git using plain text files.

Configure whether users must be vouched in order to clone repositories, blocking unauthorized bots and model-training scrapers, all without JavaScript, redirects, or slowdowns.

Why build another forge?

There are projects in the open source world that could benefit from features I'm passionate about. There are quite a few Git forges out there already, but they mostly do the same stuff--making something innovative will inject much-needed diversity into the ecosystem of source control, at the very least informing future development with a unique model; at best, becoming a tool that can accelerate the development of existing open source projects.

Dogma/paradigm

GitHub is a titan in the world of software development, seen as almost synonymous with Git. Forgejo/Codeberg was designed to be a drop-in replacement to GitHub, which makes sense for that project! But what if we reimagined what source code hosting using Git could be? What if we broke the shackles that tie us to design decisions made decades ago? What if we had issue tracking that engineers actually liked using? Imagine creating and editing issues offline, using your own preferred text editor, and syncing your work in a Git-native, local-first manner, relying on battle-tested tools that already exist. I believe that it is possible to provide a streamlined workflow where the GitHub model introduced friction and frustration. I believe that thoughtfulness at every level of design and implementation will lead to better solutions for common workflow problems.

Together, we serve the users.