To elaborate on that: There's receive.denyNonFastForwards=true on the server which will deny --force no matter what the client says, and major hosting sites lik

To elaborate on that: There's receive.denyNonFastForwards=true on the server which will deny --force no matter what the client says, and major hosting sites like GitHub and GitLab have "protected branches" which allows protecting say "master" against this, while allowing it on topic branches. What you ran into is that there's nothing in the protocol itself that makes the client say "this is a forced push". The client just says "update this ref from A->B", and it's expected that it's already read the ref advertisement to see what A is, and whether it can move to A to B with --force or not.