10 ms·

Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

634 points by jorijn 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
giancarlostoro 5mo ago
Everyone seems to be leaving GitHub, and forgetting the entire spirit of what git is in my eyes. Git was always meant to be decentralized, the problem here is that all the tooling around git was centralized to GitHub because it was a cleaner experience, they scaled nicely, and were properly maintained. I would prefer to still see mirrors on GitHub that are auto-synched because I've seen projects for years either self-host or go somewhere niche, then the GitHub mirror dies or is removed, and said projects go poof to the sands of time for one reason or another, completely gone. Everyone seems to be picking some random git host alternative, and some of them are really simple to use. Git is decentralized, GitHub is just another place you can host your code in, but you can push your code to multiple remote servers.
- limagnolia 5mo ago
  Forgejo is doing a lot of work to make the tooling decentralized, too. They are using open protocols and standards to link self hosted forges together.
  - hperrin 5mo ago
    I can’t wait for federation in Forgejo. With that, there’s honestly no reason not to host your own forge.
    - Ritewut 5mo ago
      The reason will be that not everyone wants to deal wit maintaining a self-hosted box.
      - trueno 5mo ago
        my eyes have been glazing over it feels like our infra/devops dudes have proverbially given up and they're just looking to buy cloud services to do everything now. security guy looks like he wants to jump off a bridge and i keep trying to nudge them into waking up to not needing 99.9% uptime we'll settle with 95% uptime and no one needs to be on call, and you can go to sleep at night knowing all the code lives behind your damn fort knox firewall company intranet and 75 layers of authentication. it's interesting because the more paid services these guys bring on board the more complex the security shit gets for them. the head of our IT is a fucking lunatic though and he is steering shit towards utter disaster, he's obsessed with being the guy who picks the next cloud service that "makes things so much better". my small team is actually considering just getting some mac minis and making a cluster of servers. we decided we don't need infinite uptime for hosting m-f office tools and we can just ... not interface with our infra/devops guys who have lost their damn minds and say no to everything now. they're supposed to be the compute tower under the tragedy known as TBM and they haven't approved a single VM in like 2 years.
        lelanthran 5mo ago
        What would you use a cluster of mac minis for? I mean, if you're going that far, a couple of refurbished servers gives you far more compute and far more capacity and much better maintainability.
        anarticle 5mo ago
        It's about offloading blame. If a server nukes, it's on infra to get a guy to unscrew it. If a service nukes, infra guy says "welp it's down", keeps on clicking. It doesn't matter what happens 6m-2y down the road, your odds of being laid off or job hopping are high in the current regime so this all makes sense. You pay some amount of your budget to make your life "easier" in the now. The trouble comes 2-5y down the line when the service is bought out by <insert MEGACORP here>, and you have to scramble to replace it or hold your nose and pay up. (tbh, migration is not that hard, but the org will act like it is) The matrix of authentications, compliances, and intranets will only go up as your company grows and often are enforced by people who do not suffer them daily.
    - donmcronald 5mo ago
      I would love to see it happen, but an internal service vs something exposed to the internet can be challenging. I think services like Cloudflare could play a role if they were able to provide some kind of forward auth and preferential treatment of core users during overload. My self hosted systems would have to be the source of truth and Cloudflare would have to be replaceable for me to consider using it. Think along the lines of automated pre-auth that coordinates with the origin based on some standard.
    - ranger_danger 5mo ago
      There is already federation support in radicle and vervis.
  - spopejoy 5mo ago
    Plus as TFA notes, they went full copyleft: > As of v9.0 in August 2024 the project relicensed from MIT to GPLv3+, with the explicit goal of staying copyleft and resisting future commercial capture of the codebase. The value of copyleft for decentralization is too often overlooked.
- gchamonlive 5mo ago
  Yes, but GitHub is more than just git. The most important aspect of the platform that everybody seems to forget is the social component and how easy it made to create a persistent, off-site repository and collaborate across repos.
  - MrFurious 5mo ago
    The "social component" is a big problem in actual FOSS.
    - rapnie 5mo ago
      People forget what FOSS is, and you get a world of unclear expectations. FOSS is code + a copyright license. How the code is created is an entirely different matter, and where FOSS projects often fall short. As FOSS projects come Forgejo is well-organized around a community governance model.
      - brunoborges 5mo ago
        Indeed, the fact that maintainers didn't have until only recently the control for disabling Pull Requests tab in a GitHub repo, is what drove a lot of issues in FOSS collaboration over the past decade. FOSS and open source licenses never ever granted entitlement for contributors to have their proposals reviewed/merged by maintainers. Neither it ever offered entitlement for users to ask for free support. FOSS is about giving people access to source code so they can do with it whatever they want, and maintainers/authors should have always had the ability to "publish and forget" the source code, without having to deal with those "entitlements".
    - bbor 5mo ago
      IDK, it's hard to criticize the community too much given how wildly, absurdly successful it is. If I arrived on Earth yesterday and you tried to tell me how much software is Free/free in an otherwise-capitalist economy, I wouldn't believe you! I really really am not trying to start a political argument, but just as food for thought: this is exactly why I have faith in socialism (read: 'prosocial institutions and norms'). And whether socialism is eu- or dys-topian, it certainly cannot happen in the first place without a "social component"!
- _flux 5mo ago
  I think you're forgetting issue tracking and CI.
  - shimman 5mo ago
    Forgejo has both these things, I'd even argue Forgejo has a better runner than GitHub actions as it's less resource heavy and easier to debug when issues arise (only ran into one, and it was self inflicted).
    - _flux 5mo ago
      I have no trouble believing it is better :), but it is not as easy to mirror a Github issues, or CI configuration, to Forgejo or back as it is to handle the git side. I think Radicle is interesting. It doesn't solve the CI bit, at least not yet, but I suppose it's possible to hook up some local runner for it. There's also a bug tracker which I believe was called bug, but I can't find it ;), that tries to bridge different issue trackers and providing offline mode for working with them. People of course also love free CI capacity where they can run even untrusted code, so in that sense Microsoft resources might be difficult to compete against.
      - amusingimpala75 5mo ago
        Radicle CI does exist but it is admittedly fairly early on in development
      - xvilka 5mo ago
        There is some CI service in Radicle but it's still very barebones[1]. [1] https://radicle.network/nodes/seed.radicle.dev/rad:z3qg5TKmN83afz2fj9z3fQjU8vaYE https://radicle.network/nodes/seed.radicle.dev/rad:z3qg5TKmN...
    - treyd 5mo ago
      I really wish people would drop the GHA model because it's so bad and insecure by design. GitLab's CI is miles better and easier to use.
- bayindirh 5mo ago
  While I'm not forgetting the spirit of what Git is, I'm also remembering how GitHub used "all open repositories" to train their first Copilot without telling anyone. So, no thanks. I'll not be committing any personal code there anymore. And no, I don't care for the social aspects either. Discoverability, stars, and AI bot powered issue bombardment. I'm fine like this. Also, remember, "Open Source is not about You".
  - dandellion 5mo ago
    Don't forget a achievement badges.
  - PaulKeeble 5mo ago
    It did so in direct violation of the licenses of the code held there as well and then sold code snippets they had no rights to and still do.
    - rpdillon 5mo ago
      How did you draw those conclusions? They don't seem to be in line with court rulings (i.e. Anthropic), which hold that training is fair use. Code is being treated the same as any other copyrighted content that is used for training, from blog posts to PR announcements from companies and everything in between. Of course the blog posts are PR announcements have their copyright held by their authors, with no license provided at all, so if OSS code being used in training is a violation, then so would everything being trained on (to a first approximation...public domain works excepted). But no court has every taken that position to my knowledge. There's just so much confusion around this. In this thread alone: * Distillation is legal under copyright; the violations would come as ToS violations, which is contract law, not copyright law. * Training is legal as well, so long as the original material was obtained legally. * Moving code off of GitHub doesn't change any of this: AI companies are free to download your git repo no matter where it is hosted, just like they can any other content on a publicly accessible website. * Liability comes into the picture when the models are used to infringe copyright in their output. We'll have to see the outcome of the NYT case here, but that is proceeding at a glacial pace. I am not a lawyer; I'm an interested amateur that's been following the saga for years. I wish the discussion here on HN were more nuanced. If anyone has legal updates that render any of the above incorrect, I'd love a pointer to the decisions. One area I'm particularly weak is the legal status in countries that are not the US: I don't follow those laws nearly as carefully, nor the court cases brought.
- dewey 5mo ago
  I don't think anyone is forgetting that, but most people don't care that much about the decentralized part. They care about it being user friendly, free and for companies if it has all the enterprise features / SSO etc. that they need.
- perkovsky 5mo ago
  I agree with this. Moving the git repo is easy, moving the whole project surface is the hard part. Issues, releases, CI, docs, security advisories, search and discoverability all tend to get coupled to GitHub over time. For open-source projects, I like the idea of self-hosted as the source of truth, but still keeping a read-only GitHub mirror so people can actually find it.
  - giancarlostoro 5mo ago
    ...Maybe that's the answer, we need a "hub" for the smaller missing things to start, you pop in your git repository when you join, and it can sit as a thin layer over your repo with issues, releases, etc... Sounds like a lot of work, but doing it piecemeal would do it. I think trying to re-host git itself might be more trouble than its worth. My kingdom for someone to build this so I don't have to use ADO boards anymore.
    - radlad 5mo ago
      Like some kind of UI over a database scraped by code which understands Github, Forgejo, Gitlab, sr.ht, etc? One issue is that issues tend to be monotonically increasing numbers, and references to old issues vs. new issues get confusing over time.
  - cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
    The ideal situation is to eliminate thinking that the thought process for "actually finding" a project == GitHub. We let Microsoft parasitize our brains with this. The software community has long had alternate forums. GitHub isn't even a particularly good one, and it's recently just become a swamp of generated content, fake stars, and mining your content. In the last couple months at least once a week I get some LLM generated phishing spam from some bot that "found your projects on GitHub and want to collaborate" etc. And it's well documented now how you can just go out and "buy" GitHub stars. Please. Cut the umbilical.
- pixlmint 5mo ago
  GitHub centralizes 2 things: Authentication, as well as Repository Hosting. Does the code really need to be hosted in a central location like this? (Clearly not, which is why people are leaving GitHub in the first place) But the one part GitHub provides that's genuinely valuable is the social aspect, and when you get a PR from a user named torvalds you can trust that this is in fact Linus. This isn't the case with more distributed systems. That's why I'd really like to see some entity handle just the auth/identity providing. Forgejo/ Gitea/ Gitlab instances can then choose to use that. Then, for example if you want to take on another contributor and they have their own forgejo instances, you can invite them through this provider, when they fork your repo it ends up in their own forgejo, and they can easily create PR's into your repo.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - lorecore 5mo ago
    Signed commits could solve this in a more decentralized way if people post their public keys on their own domains.
    - skydhash 5mo ago
      Own domains is the real deal. My preffered model is tarball releases with checksums, or better yet, with signatures (like remind[0] or msmtp[1]). Such pages are trivial to host properly and loads quickly. [0]: https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/ https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/ [1]: https://marlam.de/msmtp/download/ https://marlam.de/msmtp/download/
      - account42 5mo ago
        I was confused for a bit what those two projects have to do with signatures but I guess you are just using them as examples of having (PGP) signatures for downloads?
  - giancarlostoro 5mo ago
    > That's why I'd really like to see some entity handle just the auth/identity providing. Forgejo/ Gitea/ Gitlab instances can then choose to use that. Then, for example if you want to take on another contributor and they have their own forgejo instances, you can invite them through this provider, when they fork your repo it ends up in their own forgejo, and they can easily create PR's into your repo. Agree, I feel like a true alternative should focus on this missing piece to bridge the gap.
- mamcx 5mo ago
  "Git is decentralized" Because is a kind of filesystem. How a TEAM operate IS NOT. And that is the point of Github. There is no escape to the coordination problem! (And if you say mails, patches, and other asynchronous ways: same thing, more complex)
- locknitpicker 5mo ago
  > Everyone seems to be leaving GitHub, and forgetting the entire spirit of what git is in my eyes. And here lies your misconception: services such as GitHub are really not about git. That's a red herring. It's not about tooling either. People use services such as GitHub because of things like issue management, access control, release management, project pages, and CICD integration. You click on a button and you create a repository that's automatically added to your organization, with all access controls sorted out. You click on a button and you grant read access to someone. You click on a button and you onboard a whole team. Underneath it all, it's completely irrelevant if you are even using Git. Some people even use github's CLI interface instead. Does it matter if it's git or not? Do you even care? I have personal projects hosted and mirrored across GitHub, Gitlab, and BitBucket. That works, but only as far as backups are concerned. Even in projects that onboarded onto a third party CICD system, git is really not the reason for picking one service over another.
- Daviey 5mo ago
  This was the original model of launchpad.net, it was supposed to be a hub of Foss that pulled in from the decentralised VCS's, and provide them all via bzr. But bzr lost the battle, Canonical was slow to adopt Git, lack of investment in the platform, so it was another lunch that got taken from them.
  - account42 5mo ago
    Canonical should just rename themselves to Not Invented Here. Their inability to work with others and instead reinventing the same thing badly is beyond comical at this point.
    - Daviey 5mo ago
      Interesting, got some examples of things they reinvented?
- marxism 5mo ago
  Something nobody's really calling out: Forgejo is genuinely hackable. I just added a "showcase" mode to my instance: private repos can show their README and root file listing publicly (so I can advertise that a project exists and what it does), but viewing actual code, cloning, issues, PRs are all locked behind group membership. About an hour of work, small and frankly trivial diff: https://peoplesgrocers.com/code/forks/forgejo/pulls/1 https://peoplesgrocers.com/code/forks/forgejo/pulls/1 I didn't have to fight the architecture at all, the seams were right where I needed them. Added migration adding a boolean column to the repo config table, a few tweaks in permission middleware, and voila, it just worked. Really excellent decoupling in the Forgejo codebase [1] You can't do anything like this with GitHub. That's the actual freedom! Separate from the where-do-I-host-my-git question. There is a big difference between software that "sure technically I can change it since I have access to the source" vs software that's been constructed specifically to be customized and changed. [1] Permission checks live in obvious places, the template system let me modify UI without touching unrelated code. Someone (many someones) clearly cared a lot about keeping this codebase modifiable by outsiders, and it shows. That's hard to do and should be more celebrated.
- the__alchemist 5mo ago
  I do not mean for this to come across as a nit, but think it's worth stating explicitly: > Everyone seems to be leaving GitHub A small minority is leaving Github; this group is more likely to write articles about the choice than those who still use Github.
  - account42 5mo ago
    It always starts with a small minority. In this case, it already includes some very well known projects.
- Dwedit 5mo ago
  Is the tooling really centralized around Github? I use TortoiseGit, and that doesn't seem to care which service you are using. Although it does seem to have special authentication features specifically made to help you log in to Github.
- cortesoft 5mo ago
  A lot of the complains in the blog post would still be there, though, even if GitHub was just a mirror (the AI training stuff, the US jurisdiction concerns).
- throw1234567891 5mo ago
  Nobody’s forgetting anything. People want tooling around git bare repos. GitHub was cool because of forks and instant forked repos. That’s how they’ve established their moat.
- mattlutze 5mo ago
  [dead]
- dark-star 5mo ago
  That "everyone" is just a small, vocal community if you look at the total numbers of repos on GitHub (which is still climbing)[1] Yes, I understand that people are upset about the Copilot issues and maybe even the "frequent" outages (which usually only affect fringe parts of the site not everyone uses daily) It's good that there are other solutions (forge, sourcehut, whatever) but most projects are still alive and very well on GitHub and my guess is that this will stay for a while. Also, personally I have no issues with GitHub training AI on my (badly-coded and bug-ridden) code if they really want to :) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1snqyj3/is_there_an_official_count_of_daily_github_repos/ https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1snqyj3/is_there_an...
  - account42 5mo ago
    Why do you think total numbers of repos is a relevant metric here? If anything, the slop spam on GitHub is a problem and a core part of why people are leaving.
    - dark-star 5mo ago
      that might be true, yes, but still: the burden of proof (that "github is dying") lies with the original poster. A statement like "last week, these 3 big projects left GitHub" is not that
- f33d5173 5mo ago
  Not everybody uses git because they're infatuated with "the spirit of git". Only a tiny minority have ever even used it with the patches-by-email model it's intended for, and I would guess the vast majority of the rest have no interest in learning. People use git basically because it's what github uses, or slightly more generously because it works well when paired with a centralized host like github. The model of developing code locally and dicussion issues and patches via a web portal is the model people are taken with. Only a small portion of that is provided by git proper.
  - IanCal 5mo ago
    Although that only requires a centralised host per repo.
- midtake 5mo ago
  Everyone knows git is decentralized. What people are searching for is a space for the social component of development such as issue tracking. Being able to reference lines of codes in issues is a killer feature of github. Gitea and gitlab do it too but not as well. Also "just use multiple remotes" doesn't solve the problem. If you don't trust GitHub you shouldn't be pushing code there to begin with. So the ideal platform for hosting an equivalent platform as Github needs to be a trusted one as well.
- tonymet 5mo ago
  github's draw is the community and exposure.
- HiPhish 5mo ago
  > Git is decentralized, GitHub is just another place you can host your code in, but you can push your code to multiple remote servers. That's precisely what I have been doing for years, I still get to keep one foot in the GitHub ecosystem. I still get most contributions on GitHub, and that's fine by me. When a PR comes it I check it out locally, review it, and when it's done I merge locally to master, push to origin, and then origin pushes to GitHub which then automatically closes the PR and gives the author attribution. I never actually have to interact with GitHub after the initial pull.
  - nijave 5mo ago
    Where do review comments go? What if changes are needed?
- hk1337 5mo ago
  While that is true, the real power of git being decentralized is that you have a local repo and a remote repo. Typically, you’ll have a dozen local repositories from developers cloning the project
- dskoll 5mo ago
  I will not put anything on GitHub for a couple of reasons. 1) MSFT is using our free labour to train its AIs. 2) Being Canadian, I do not want any dependence on a US-based company, seeing as the US can no longer be considered a trustworthy ally.
hosteur 5mo ago
I have been self-hosting Forgejo for some time now. It is impressively easy to maintain and operate. I can highly recommend giving it a spin.
jagged-chisel 5mo ago
“It’s not because of outages” - goes on to complain about outages. The outages might be due to AI load, but that’s to relevant because your leaving isn’t due to outages. Even though the article is primarily about outages. If you have a problem with your code being scanned for AI training, then write that article. But this article is about outages.
- felooboolooomba 5mo ago
  I think a lot of people within the US don't realize how badly US is seen from the outside, especially from "allies". Illegal tariffs, threatening tariffs, NATO sabotage, threatening invasion, abandoning Ukraine, supporting Russia. It's not just one guy doing this, he has a whole party behind him that could reel him in any second.
  - GMoromisato 5mo ago
    I feel bad for Europe. They are pining for a world that no longer exists and lack the power (and, more importantly, the will) to do anything about it. I can imagine an alternate history in which Tim Berners-Lee founds an internet giant in Europe that dominates the 21st century. Imagine a European Google with a search monopoly, a smartphone (from Nokia), and a social network (Xing? Mastodon?). But of course, Sir Timothy never wanted that. Alas, we're on a different timeline. I wish I were a young man so I could live to see how it all turns out.
- bpavuk 5mo ago
  it's about GitHub's issues in general, including outages. every section gets somewhat equal amount of attention
  - jagged-chisel 5mo ago
    The section named “Why outages aren't actually the reason” never tells me why outages aren’t the reason. It just continues taking about outages. I’ll admit I got tired of reading about outages and didn’t absorb the remainder of the article well.
sgt 5mo ago
Is Forgejo Actions any good? CI/CD would be cool.
- xx_ns 5mo ago
  From personal experience, there have been a few papercuts (mostly trying to figure out why runners aren't picking up jobs), but it isn't too hard to debug and the CI format is simple. When it works, it works well enough. It uses a similar workflow as GitHub actions. Some, but not all, actions are even interchangeable or at least portable from GitHub without much fuss.
- import 5mo ago
  It’s act runner. So you can continue using GitHub actions with minor changes
- epistasis 5mo ago
  I keep CI/CD super super simple, but was able to set it up for my Python repos in 15 minutes, with compatibility with GitHub actions (using the same yaml file at the same path)
- tagraves 5mo ago
  We just released support for Forgejo with RWX CI/CD: https://www.rwx.com/docs/getting-started/forgejo https://www.rwx.com/docs/getting-started/forgejo
delf 5mo ago
In "What I gave up" section author mentions his social graph. It is possible to take your social graph and collaboration history using GitSocial. It also allows cross-forge pull requests between any git hosts. All without 3rd party dependencies.
- jorijn 5mo ago
  TIL. Thanks!
  - delf 5mo ago
    You're welcome! I'm the creator of GitSocial, happy to answer any questions.
    - xrd 5mo ago
      I'm very interested. I run my own public instance of forgejo. Is this software I run on my own that syndicates other users' commits? GitHub *was* good for discovery; does GitSocial offer something similar? Are there ways I can push more of my contributions into GitSocial, or does that happen automatically when I start using it? I think the GitSocial website would benefit from a "features and benefits" section rather than just a timeline view and demo, and I advise you to emphasize the benefits. I can see a TUI and a timeline of commits, but it seems like GitSocial is MUCH more exciting than just that. To me, GitSocial offers freedom from corporate control and surveillance of my open source work, and that's really intriguing.
      - delf 5mo ago
        Discovery is still in the works, but the core idea is that all collaboration data is stored in git itself (be that the project or a fork). It's git all the way down :)
- bigfishrunning 5mo ago
  Thank you for this, GitSocial is a very cool piece of software!
import 5mo ago
I’ve moved to self hosted gitea a year ago running in my homelab and not publicly accessible. No https, registrations disabled and repos are not public. I’m thinking about making public instance and use it with https, but minimize the attack surface, any recommendations especially about gitea/forgejo?
- eblume 5mo ago
  Yup, I’ve done this. I use a fly.io proxy that runs nginx, fail2ban, and that forwards to my tailnet where Caddy resolves to the actual instance. It’s critical that you disable local registration - I have authentik (only available on the tailnet) as an IdP but you can also just disable reg after making your own account of course. I also have a robots.txt that disables some stuff like all the individual rendered git commit views otherwise scrapers get stuck in an endless loop and also I strictly forbid access to the forgejo package repository since I have some private packages and the permission granularity there is not what I want it to be, still dialing that in. I’m keeping an eye on it and so far nothing terrible has happened. docs.eblu.me if you would like details… I could also link straight to the infra code if you like.
  - import 5mo ago
    Hey thanks for the answer and link to docs. I don’t use tailscale, it’s running in a NUC, accessible with wireguard for now. (Docker + 4 runners) I try to keep things simple in the homelab and thinking only using fail2ban and caddy reverse proxy and expose it. Package registry isn’t private by default and accessible with PAT. Or am I mistaken?
    - eblume 5mo ago
      You’re welcome! I only ran in to this last week and I might not have this straight yet because I haven’t had time to sit and untangle it. I have a private repo that has a release workflow that publishes a Python package to the forgejo package repository using my public user profile. I mistakenly assumed that because the repo was private the package would be as well but that link is not enough to set public/private and it is instead fully public. Listable and everything, no PAT needed. This is where I’m less clear: I think I could make my user profile private and this would hide the packages, but I want my profile public. So I just black-holed the entire packages api outside of the tailnet.
keyle 5mo ago
For self hosting... and personal code repo, why not just git... and expose something like Stagit for the web?
- import 5mo ago
  CI/CD, package registry, issue tracking in one place?
  - keyle 5mo ago
    Fair enough for the formers. Issue tracking though...
jdw64 5mo ago
People constantly cry out for decentralization. In reality, however, most systems eventually end up centralized. Perhaps when people ask for decentralization, they are actually seeking a new center where they can become the new pioneers. It seems that when they feel they have no chance of winning under the existing rules, they use decentralization as a pretext to overturn the board.
- ses1984 5mo ago
  If only you bothered to read the first line of the article, directly under the title: >I moved my code from GitHub to a self-hosted Forgejo
  - jdw64 5mo ago
    I did read it. What I meant is that trying to isolate oneself using alternative platforms often looks like chasing a new trend. The ultimate irony is that the sheer complexity of the author's setup—KVMs, weekly rebuilds, isolated networks—is exactly the kind of burdensome infrastructure people were running away from in the first place. To clarify, my point was that specifically mentioning 'Forgejo'rather than just a generic personal 'home server'makes it come across as acting like a trendsetter
  - jdw64 5mo ago
    My ponit was not against self-hosting. It was more about the symbolism. If the goal is decentralization, “I moved to a personal forge I control” is the post's core idea. But framing it as “leaving GitHub for Forgejo” inevitably creates a new flag to gather around. That may be useful and even necessary, but it also shows that decentralization movements often produce new centers, names, and identities.
    - ses1984 5mo ago
      It's software, which can be infinitely and freely copied, people are going to copy it, and they should, because not everyone should write their own service from scratch (on top of an scm they wrote from scratch (on top of a language and operating system they wrote from scratch too)).
finegrainlabs 5mo ago
One of my friends made fremforge.com (an EU-sovereign CI/CD with Git included). It's currently in closed beta but goes live next week (tm). It is built upon Forgejo and EU-based services using T-Cloud as the underlying hyperscaler. Have a look! I don't make any money from it, by the way. And yes, it will cost a little bit, but rest assured: because you are paying for it, you will not be the product.
- touristtam 5mo ago
  Their website is unavailable: https://www.frem.sh/ https://www.frem.sh/
- F3nd0 5mo ago
  Website says €30 per seat/month, which is significantly more than Sourcehut and slightly more than GitLab.
henrydark 5mo ago
I now use syncthing for the .git directory, excluding HEAD file and a few others, between my few devices and a vps on hetzner. Most of git is append only immutable blobs - just sharing these between devices just works for me. "users" and authentication is handled by syncthing. I have pre and post hooks to make sure no device tries to change HEAD of branch owned by another device, just to be safe, be it hasn't been activated once yet.
- diath 5mo ago
  If you have a VPS that's always running, you can just use it as a git remote through SSH without moving things around or any third party software, just put the Git repo on the VPS and clone it via "git clone ssh://user@host/path". You get authentication, encryption and synchronization out of the box with just ssh/git.
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    Had to vouch for your comment, not sure why it was marked as dead. Definitively the easiest way to approach this, and the most standard way too. If you already have ssh, which I'm guessing you do if you managed to setup syncthing on it in the first place, then you can literally just point git to host+path and it'll use whatever ssh authentication you already have in place. Can hardly get simpler :)
    - henrydark 5mo ago
      I don't put ssh keys on all devices. With syncthing, in contrast to git, I don't have too. Also syncing is automatic and immediate, I don't have to initiate push and pull.
- j-bos 5mo ago
  Super interesting, mind sharing your exclusions and hooks?
  - henrydark 5mo ago
thehwang 5mo ago
[flagged]
ninjahawk1 5mo ago
Didn’t realize the Dutch government was rad until I read this. Frankly, the modern internet as a whole is scary. Google has so much power, Github, Meta, etc., they all control such fundamental parts of society now and get to run free since they’re private companies. Not saying they should be government owned, that would drastically worse, but some more detailed oversight would be nice.
sc68cal 5mo ago
I have also moved my git repositories to a self-hosted NUC. I have not yet bothered with a HTTP frontend to share it with the world, mostly because I don't want to provide AI scrapers with content and don't want to put the work in to block them. It's a shame that all these companies that benefited from open source have poisoned the industry like this
- echelon 5mo ago
  > It's a shame that all these companies that benefited from open source have poisoned the industry like this Open Source and the OSI are an industry plant. Look at who sponsors it. The monopoly hyperscaler conglomerates get free labor and use it to build the world we despise: tracking panopticons, phones we can't install things on, device attestation, browser monoculture with no adblock, etc. etc. Google made people fall in love with BSD/MIT, and look what it did. Just a few of the classic plays: "That Belongs to Us Now" - (1) vendors build stuff like Elasticsearch and Redis, (2) the hyperscalers yoink it into their proprietary offerings and take all the profits, (3) original authors and their companies starve. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" - (1) vendors take an open source project like KTHML or Linux and build their version, (2) they flood the market with their offering, pushing out the competitors, (3) they use anti-competitive means to get their thing in front of all eyeballs, (4) once they have marketshare, they do evil things like add tracking and remove freedoms Open Source needs to replaced with "freedom for the people, companies must pay". Source available shareware with anti-hyperscaler teeth. Even Richard Stallman's licenses are not strong enough. CC BY-NC-SA is better. "Pure" Open Source is corporate welfare. It was a mistake. It enabled giants to hang us with our own rope.
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    Why can't others just be "Others I disagree with"? Why it has to be some grand conspiracy? I'm all for open source, most of what I do is released as MIT, almost never "Free Software", still doing the same thing since LLMs appeared, regardless of everything else. I'm a real person, have nothing to do with OSI but willing to explain my position, as long as you take it as real opinions held by a real person, instead of going into conspiracy theory land. Ask me anything, I'll give you my honest perspective.
luxuryballs 5mo ago
Question for anyone, why do people use GitHub or an alternative rather than just spinning up your own Gitea docker container or similar?
- p2detar 5mo ago
  I got my own Forgejo, but I'm still on Github. That's the easiest way to check what the people I follow push, comment or star. I like this part of Github a lot.
Finnucane 5mo ago
"The Dutch government's choice of Forgejo, not GitLab, was deliberate." And since Gitlab seems to have looked over at what is happening at Github and decided, we want some of that, that was probably the right choice.
OuterVale 5mo ago
I'm making my jump over to Tangled, which is built on the AT Protocol (so it uses the same account as Bluesky and others). I'm finding it lovely. https://vale.rocks/micros/20260511-0440 https://vale.rocks/micros/20260511-0440
epistasis 5mo ago
I have been using my self hosted forgejo in May, and liking it just fine, I recommend it for anybody who is curious. I don't really trust GitHub to keep things private anymore. The hardest parts of switching to forgejo: 1) coming up with a comfortable way to pronounce "forgejo" in my head, and 2) adapting to not having the same GitHub v3 API and needing to switch to a different CLI for PR creation, repo creation, etc. The pronunciation thing is probably the more difficult of the two.
- epicide 5mo ago
  They make it rather easy by providing an audio pronunciation: https://forgejo.org/static/forgejo.mp4 https://forgejo.org/static/forgejo.mp4 With my American accent, I don't quite say it exactly like the recording, but pretty close: "for-JAY-oh"
  - epistasis 5mo ago
    This is probably a personal problem, honestly. The spelling is hardwired to short-circuit away from that pronunciation in my head, meaning every time I have to type it out I have a pretty big mental split. It would actually be easier for me if it was in Cyrrilic or Greek letters, Форджеьо or Форджеджо or Φορτζέγιο don't have the blockers on pronunciation that Forgejo does.
    - F3nd0 5mo ago
      The name ‘Forgejo’ is derived from the Esperanto word ‘Forĝejo’ (a forge), but alters the spelling while leaving the original pronunciation. The result is a kind of a Frankenstein’s monster, so confusion is in order.
      - a96 5mo ago
        I'll just keep rhyming it with Jorge (-o).
- baggachipz 5mo ago
  Apparently it's pronounced (phonetically) as for-JAY-oh, an audio sample is here: https://forgejo.org/faq/ https://forgejo.org/faq/ You piqued my curiosity :) edit: Ah, I was beaten to the punch :(
hperrin 5mo ago
I moved all my repos (well, I have two left to move) to https://forge.sciactive.com https://forge.sciactive.com which is also a self hosted Forgejo instance. It was a really easy process, and I’m really impressed with Forgejo.
pluc 5mo ago
At this point I really don't think this needs to be justified. I'd be more curious as to why people are staying on GitHub.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  > I'd be more curious as to why people are staying on GitHub Vanity metrics. GitHub initially tried to shy away from this, I remember conversations with early GitHub engineers trying to make sure "Stars" and "Followers" numbers were going into the direction of being just for vanity and popularity. Then eventually the profile READMEs appeared, which people now use for showing even more vanity metrics and brag about how much code they can produce in how little days. Since employers also ask you for a GitHub profile, it ends up being needed for new developers to make an entry into the industry, without it companies will basically ignore you. Unless you're really, really good, which to be honest, most of us aren't.
nottorp 5mo ago
What if you don't want to self host? Who offers low feature git hosting for a small price? Something like the old $7 account before github was bought by MS? All I want is hosting and a read only web interface, plus access control in case I have collaborators. All the offerings are enterprise priced because they offer "minutes of CI", "AI assistants" and other icing on the cake.
- epicide 5mo ago
  SourceHut sounds very close to what you describe: https://sr.ht/ https://sr.ht/
  - nickzelei 5mo ago
    I’ve had my eye on this platform. Generally like their design and ethos too. However I find their code viewer/navigation a little hard for my eye. But maybe I’m just too used to GitHub.
    - epicide 5mo ago
      Sure. If you really wanted to, I think the pages are simple enough that you could add your own CSS tweaks via a basic browser plugin (or whatever is the current go-to plugin for doing this). For me, I only use a forge's viewer/navigation for cursory glances or sharing links to others. If I need to spend any real time digging, I'll clone the repo.
  - nottorp 5mo ago
    No one notices the part about private repos and access control...
    - jorams 5mo ago
      You didn't mention private repos in your comment, but I guess that was implied in the $7 thing. That said: SourceHut has private repos and access control.
felixsebastian 5mo ago
some of my identity is built around github, i think im in love with the github brand also: releases, packages, actions... its all very convenient
_stiofan 5mo ago
It was a sad day when Microsoft bought GitHub, we all know eventually it will go the way of Hotmail and Skype.
satvikpendem 5mo ago
I've also heard of Tangled [0] which is decentralized and built on the AT Protocol like Bluesky but also has some genuinely useful features that GitHub has been dragging its heels over in implementing, like PR stacking, such that entire companies have sprung up to add that feature in GitHub. Has anyone tried this? [0] https://tangled.org/ https://tangled.org/
- mgrandl 5mo ago
  I would love to use it, mostly for the jj compatibility and the nice CI implementation, but I need private repos so sadly this is not yet for me.
- rirze 5mo ago
  It's too decentralized for my taste IMO. I like using radicle.xyz instead.
  - KolmogorovComp 5mo ago
    can you expand on what makes you think being too decentralised is a negative?
- tao_oat 5mo ago
  Yes -- it's definitely alpha software, but usable for open source. There are interesting experiments like tack[1] to wire in custom CI. I imagine they'll be able to support private repos eventually once ATProto supports private data, but that may take some time. [1]: https://tangled.org/mitchellh.com/tack https://tangled.org/mitchellh.com/tack
- nicce 5mo ago
  They just got a big VC funding. There is still no mention about the business model. I really wonder what it will be.
  - satvikpendem 5mo ago
    Damn, there goes my interest.
jviotti 5mo ago
GitHub Actions is indeed the hard one to replace. I need Windows, Linux, Linux-ARM, macOS ARM, and macOS Intel runners. How do you guys using Forgejo and/or Codeberg do to get a similar matrix, hopefully at a low cost?
- dboreham 5mo ago
  Use gitea which has github actions compatibility.
- mamcx 5mo ago
  CircleCI?
- bombcar 5mo ago
  Can you push from Forgejo to GitHub for actions until you can find a replacement?
- 8organicbits 5mo ago
  How much utilization do you have? For low scale, it's hard to beat GitHub Actions as they offer free runners for public repos and include a bunch of free hours for private repos. Once you start paying for it, GitHub Actions runners are very expensive. I've used both Jenkins and GitLab before to self-host CI/CD, and you save so much using on-demand (or at higher scale, reserved) cloud instances. I do freelance DevOps work and I've helped clients with these sorts of challenges.
  - jviotti 5mo ago
    I use it pretty heavily on C++ stuff at GitHub.com/sourcemeta. i.e. take https://github.com/sourcemeta/blaze https://github.com/sourcemeta/blaze and this example recent run: https://github.com/sourcemeta/blaze/actions/runs/25751796502 https://github.com/sourcemeta/blaze/actions/runs/25751796502. 12 jobs per PR for up to 30 minutes running Linux, macOS, and Windows jobs on LLVM, GCC, and MSVC in static and shared builds with also some sanitiser configurations. And consider across projects we might send dozens of PRs per week. Right now it's somehow all fully free on GitHub Actions. I wonder what the same would cost on i.e. CircleCI
Fraterkes 5mo ago
I do mostly enjoy all this moving to European tech because the thing being replaced is usually owned by Microsoft. I do kind of worry though: there's a broad trend of countries trying to become less reliant on eachother, and in my mind the long period of peace we've had in much of the west this past half century has partly been because we're all in business together.
- cjs_ac 5mo ago
  They said that the First World War was impossible due to increasing trade dependencies between the European powers, and look how that turned out. ‘This is a terrible idea,’ is sadly not the deterrent to starting a war that it ought to be.
chknkachunga 5mo ago
I wish Microsoft would treat GitHub a little differently. Leave it alone and let it be it's own thing. Maybe if enough customers leave they will backtrack. As a long term GitHub customer, I see many practical and personal reasons to move away from the platform. I've seen a handful of similar posts lately. A few years ago this would have felt totally fringe, but now all of a sudden it really doesn't. For now, for me and many others GitHub still works great, and is very convenient. But the alternatives are getting even easier to self implement all the time.
- _heimdall 5mo ago
  Microsoft did that for a lot longer than I expected honestly. Historically they would take a year or so before giving up on the "you're an independent company" bit and merge the team into MS orgs. GitHub pulled it off for 5ish years before that began to change, and it was only last year when they stopped having their own "CEO".
OhNoNotAgain_99 5mo ago
[dead]
ramshanker 5mo ago
I wish it offered a windows binary as well, since the original project gitea from which it was forked, does so. Sometime you need to go where many customers ahem enterprise are. As a developer of an engineering application, windows is the way to go 1st hand. It would have been easier to adopt one more application on the daily driver enviornment. Till than, I am on GitHub only.
- dboreham 5mo ago
  Wasn't gitea a fork of forgejo?
  - mfenniak 5mo ago
    The other way around; Forgejo is a fork of Gitea.
chungy 5mo ago
Consider Fossil[1], which packages the entire repository state—code history, wiki, tickets, forum—into a single file, and that state gets cloned. When/if you need to change hosting providers, you get to lose zero data in Fossil because of it. [1] https://fossil-scm.org/ https://fossil-scm.org/
- booleandilemma 5mo ago
  I considered Fossil several years ago and while it's really cool (everything being integrated is awesome), I don't like Fossil from a philosophical perspective. There's no way to clean up history, it preserves everything as is. If that's what you want, great, but as part of my git workflow I like to mess around and then go back and clean up and organize my commits before pushing them.
- hackthemack 5mo ago
  I love fossil. Something about it's opinionated workflow that matches what I think. But network effects. I just can not bring my team to use fossil. They have to share code with others. Other departments. And everyone (99%+) uses git. It just feels like a disservice to force them to use fossil. It is a catch-22. It is similar to so many other things in the tech space. Trying to get fellow developers to use functional style idioms. Trying to enforce immutability. It is like something big (like a facebook or google project) has to force the community to get on board.
onesandofgrain 5mo ago
Why not Gitea mind me asking? Anything in particular?
- kstrauser 5mo ago
  Last I looked, Forgejo had more activity and more contributors than Gitea. Also, Forgejo eats its own dogfood: Codeberg runs on it, and hosts it, while Gitea runs on GitHub. It’s easy to make the case that Forgejo is good enough for public hosting. Gitea probably is, too, but there’s less direct evidence.
  - onesandofgrain 5mo ago
    gitea runs on github u mean the source or the hosting?
    - kstrauser 5mo ago
      Gitea uses GitHub to host the Gitea source code. In contrast, Forgejo hosts its code on Codeberg, and Codeberg is running the Forgejo software.
      - onesandofgrain 5mo ago
        Dont see a problem with hosting gitea on github and codeberg I dislike for numerous reasons.
onesandofgrain 5mo ago
https://sharemygit.com/ https://sharemygit.com/ let's you share forgejo repos privately through read-only share links for those that need an alternative to the github gitshare fei
booleandilemma 5mo ago
I just recently moved a couple tiny projects from GitHub to Codeberg. My review: really easy to set up and get going with. I noticed Codeberg isn't as snappy as GitHub, but it's barely noticeable and I'm not paying any money for it anyway so I can't complain.
lukassbrad 5mo ago
[flagged]
l5870uoo9y 5mo ago
> The CTO publicly apologised and said capacity needs to scale 30x to keep up with AI-driven load. I hope they don't start charging for regular use of GitHub, but when I see how some of the vibe coders make thousands of commits a day, I'm becoming more and more skeptical. Would be a real shame if we can't share and cooperate on code for free.
- bbor 5mo ago
  I feel like LLMs will help solve this problem they've created, TBH -- any human expert can tell in seconds when a repo has this problem, so it should be doable by a system that's tweaked over. The tricky part is writing a legal agreement that lets them apply vibe quotas! This is what Anthropic is already doing with CC, and tbh GitHub and GitLab are probably doing the same. The cost is some hate from devs on Twitter and random small subreddits ofc, but I bet that's well worth it! OTOH, it does kinda blow my mind how often I see people (on /r/vibecoding and elsewhere) paying for a $200/mo subscription to produce what amount to hobby projects and toy sites. I've been known to make some silly money decisions when I can afford it, but this feels different. I guess it's a $2400 annual subscription to a service providing Meaning and Purpose? If you're around 40 and realizing that you'll never be rich or famous, this might actually affordable compared to the alternatives!
  - warkdarrior 5mo ago
    > it does kinda blow my mind how often I see people (on /r/vibecoding and elsewhere) paying for a $200/mo subscription to produce what amount to hobby projects and toy sites People spend more than that on their (non-vibecoding) hobbies. Think of folks who do woodworking, 3D printing, sailing, car racing, etc. So $200/mo is not excessive if they get their enjoyment out of it.
- AlienRobot 5mo ago
  Just charge for commits per day after a certain number. Problem solved.
  - satvikpendem 5mo ago
sandebert 5mo ago
I really like Forgejo, I just wish the wiki was a bit better. I even tried sponsoring work on it, but apparently it's a challenging thing to improve.
wood_spirit 5mo ago
GitHub is becoming Sourceforge. Remember them?
achayala 5mo ago
I really like forgejo. I selfhosted it too, but then I go back to codeberg. Probably I will selfhosted it again. I really want a descentralized internet and https://forgefed.org/ https://forgefed.org/ gives me hope.
andrewzeno 5mo ago
I think this article is great, but it doesn't focus on the open source aspect. GitHub still has effective monopoly on open source, simply because of how much free resources they provide, let alone higher chances of getting your project discovered and fewer barriers for people reporting issues.
zuzululu 5mo ago
I'm kind of baffled why everybody is suddenly hating on github? I use it just fine. I'm actually impressed how well codex is able to interact with it. I virtually do not need to fret about git commands or managing github to respond to issues anymore. I don't see an alternative and its a bit of a stretch to expect people to follow you unless you are famous or have that audience reach already which many of us do not.
- 1123581321 5mo ago
  Frustration from the outages, anti-AI sentiment, and the anti-hosted-software sentiment are converging. On the positive side, HN has gone through multiple periods of enthusiasm for new code forges. There was even excitement for GitHub at one point. :) It’s good because all the forges generally add each other’s features if one takes off.
- epistasis 5mo ago
  There's a wide variety of reasons, so I can only describe my own, but it comes down to supply chain risk. Just as with the COVID supply chain problems reconfigured trust and assumptions, the actions of Microsoft and other large US software companies have become erratic and untrustworthy. In particular the sanctions against the ICC prosecutor in Europe have made it imperative to have zero dependence on Microsoft with easy exit paths at any given moment. Similarly, one cannot trust Google as they can disable your account one day, with zero recourse, zero ability to appeal, zero accountability to Google for disabling your email and SSO. Except maybe posting on HN and causing enough bad PR to get Google to act to suppress the bad PR. The US is no longer a nation of laws, it's a nation of whatever the president wants, and even impartial courts are likely to be overturned by an extremely partisan Supreme Court that has said that the president can not break the law while doing "official acts", whatever the heck that means. Audience is not a factor for me at all, if GitHub is a social network for you then it definitely makes sense to use it still. But I don't know anybody that needs the social aspects of GitHub. That's just the people I know and work with, however.
- overfeed 5mo ago
  I think your second paragraph alludes to the disconnect expressed in the first one. The people "hating on github" and leaving it today, regardless of their (lack of) fame do not mind not being followed to the new forge, which may be a dealbreaker for you (an educated guess, from your phrasing). Conversely, you use GitHub "just fine" under terms the leavers consider dealbreakers. What you are baffled by are differences in value judgements.
cdrnsf 5mo ago
I'm quite happy with Forgejo. I've moved all of my projects to my own instance and keep it accessible from Tailscale only.
Havoc 5mo ago
Moving from a selfhosted gitlab to forgejo too. Gitlab it’s getting to heavy for my needs
Myzel394 5mo ago
Can somebody recommend some good github alternatives that are available as a service, without having to self host it? I'm already self hosting my own gitea, but want a SaaS fallback to github
paol_taja 5mo ago
[dead]
shevy-java 5mo ago
Microsoft is losing the war here. It'll take a long time before GitHub will tumble, but the cracks are now noticeable for everyone. AI is killing AI-Hub I mean GitHub.
m3kw9 5mo ago
bespoke versioning system for my code? no thanks.
sathishmg 5mo ago
[flagged]
xvilka 5mo ago
The real game changer would be completed Federation[1] support. This is why I am donating both Forgejo[2] and Codeberg[3] and urge everyone doing the same, to give more time and resources for the Forgejo team to implement it properly. Another good contender is the Radicle[4][5] which is completely decentralized on top of the Git. [1] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/main/FederationRoadmap.md https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m... [2] https://liberapay.com/forgejo https://liberapay.com/forgejo [3] https://donate.codeberg.org/ https://donate.codeberg.org/ [4] https://radicle.dev/ https://radicle.dev/ [5] https://radicle.network/nodes/seed.radicle.dev https://radicle.network/nodes/seed.radicle.dev
- tempaccount420 5mo ago
  Federations are the worst decentralization model, they're too loosely cooperative.
  - afiori 5mo ago
    federations are the only decentralization model that scales, the issue is that most "federated" systems are actually just "distributed centralization" eg mastodon.
    - F3nd0 5mo ago
      What is federation if not ‘distributed centralisation’?
    - AlienRobot 5mo ago
      There's a technical difference between a "distributed" system and a "decentralized" system.
- dickywad 5mo ago
  [dead]
galaSerge 5mo ago
[flagged]
tiberious726 5mo ago
How does Forgejo stack up to Gitea nowadays?
merb 5mo ago
I do not need a new shiny code hosting platform. I just need a better way for managing merge requests/pull requests. Stuff that does not suck, especially a better diff, like semantic diff that is more clever than before. I do not care if my formatter changed stuff from 6 to 4 spaces because an html element was dropped. I want to have a more sane workflow for splitting things. I want to scale up reviews… its still so awkward to do it and ai makes it even worse
- jraph 5mo ago
  Being a shiny new code hosting platform is not really the point of forgejo though, it's at best a nice side effect. I suppose forgejo is meant to be a lightweight, low maintenance, feature-rich, self-hostable otherwise GitHub-like free software. But I suppose you could open issues to propose your ideas.
tonymet 5mo ago
Github is more than a UI and remote storage, it's a community and discovery tool for open source repos. Federating to self-hosted means you are depending on google for discovery, which will never rank. If you need a backup remote, just backup to Google Drive / iCloud. Private team collab? run a server. While I understand the frustration with github, the prescription to self host seems like cutting off your nose.
beanjuiceII 5mo ago
yea cool story bro
brendanml 5mo ago
Good riddance. I’m sick f Microsoft thinking they can ruin everything and people will stay.
the_ai_wizarrd 5mo ago
maybe after the exodus it will be usable again
denizay 5mo ago
GitHub? Forgejo bout it!
parijatmohor 5mo ago
[flagged]
bigcat12345678 5mo ago
I am very happy to discover this. Given the trending-to-zero software writing cost, a local self-contained source code management tool would be natural for delivering software, i.e., software becomes an agent with specialized code as its harness (in addition to its default ones) source control would be one default tool for the agentic software to manage its own evolution.
rudraneel93 5mo ago
[flagged]
kkfx 5mo ago
I'm curious why people do not choose Radicle in FLOSS...
- a96 5mo ago
  I've never heard of it and, if I were to guess, that might be one of the reasons.
sshrajesh 5mo ago
Forgejo based https://code.overheid.nl/ https://code.overheid.nl/ seems to be broken
- egorfine 5mo ago
  It is a government-ran web service. Of course it is broken.
egorfine 5mo ago
Related: GitLab's CEO post in Twitter[1] doesn't inspire confidence as well. A direct quote: "generational rebuild of git, the monolith giving way to composable, monetized services with agent-first APIs". Can you imagine /usr/bin/git rewritten into a set of composable, monetized services with agent-first APIs? [1] https://twitter.com/bstaples/status/2054227448204754963 https://twitter.com/bstaples/status/2054227448204754963
- fasteo 5mo ago
  You are missing some context. Full quote below.I believe it is just a fancy way to say that the are rebuilding their backend to make it more scalable >>>5a/ Machine-scale infrastructure. >>> Others are bolting AI onto platforms built for human-rate commits. Git itself wasn't designed for agent-rate work. >>> We're rebuilding the underlying infrastructure for machine scale: a generational rebuild of git, the monolith giving way to composable, monetized services with agent-first APIs.
  - egorfine 5mo ago
    > Git itself wasn't designed for agent-rate work /bin/ls wasn't designed for agent-rate work either.
egorfine 5mo ago
As obvious as it is that Microsoft is a predator never to be trusted, I believe that trusting a government-run web service is a choice even worse. We know that Microsoft at least acknowledges that GitHub being down is something they are ashamed of and aims to fix. At the same time, I feel like having an EU government-run service down over a weekend because there is no one to fix it outside business hours is something that should be expected, not frowned upon. It is actually down right now as I am writing this comment.
- askonomm 5mo ago
  Depending on the government. USA government? Yes, I'd trust that even less than Microsoft. Most EU governments? I'd trust a hell of a lot more. Especially my own (Estonian).
  - egorfine 5mo ago
    Trust is twofold. Will EU government service steal my data? Absolutely not, here the trust is at the highest. Will EU government screw up a commercial service? Absolutely yes. I fully trust EU governments to regulate itself to a full halt.
AbuAssar 5mo ago
Forgejo is pronounced as forjeyo
yesnomaybe 5mo ago
Have just switched my org to self-hosted forgejo. Handful of devs and users. Been great so far. Storage need be tamed, it's using minio S3 for the big items like artifacts. Auth using OpenID Connect working well, would recommend good security hardening. Runners are in EC2 auto scaling groups. Don't have to be though, there is also a K8s based solution out there I believe.
DanieleSalatti 5mo ago
Left GitHub for a self hosted Forgejo + mirrors on Coderberg for community access. At this point I just need to finish cleaning up my GH profile by deleting the few repos I still have there. GH was fun while it lasted…
gabazing 5mo ago
I did same for my personal projects and i am happy with forgejo

634 points by jorijn 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

Everyone seems to be leaving GitHub, and forgetting the entire spirit of what git is in my eyes. Git was always meant to be decentralized, the problem here is that all the tooling around git was centralized to GitHub because it was a cleaner experience, they scaled nicely, and were properly maintained. I would prefer to still see mirrors on GitHub that are auto-synched because I've seen projects for years either self-host or go somewhere niche, then the GitHub mirror dies or is removed, and said projects go poof to the sands of time for one reason or another, completely gone. Everyone seems to be picking some random git host alternative, and some of them are really simple to use. Git is decentralized, GitHub is just another place you can host your code in, but you can push your code to multiple remote servers.

limagnolia 5mo ago
Forgejo is doing a lot of work to make the tooling decentralized, too. They are using open protocols and standards to link self hosted forges together.
- hperrin 5mo ago
  I can’t wait for federation in Forgejo. With that, there’s honestly no reason not to host your own forge.
  - Ritewut 5mo ago
    The reason will be that not everyone wants to deal wit maintaining a self-hosted box.
    - trueno 5mo ago
      my eyes have been glazing over it feels like our infra/devops dudes have proverbially given up and they're just looking to buy cloud services to do everything now. security guy looks like he wants to jump off a bridge and i keep trying to nudge them into waking up to not needing 99.9% uptime we'll settle with 95% uptime and no one needs to be on call, and you can go to sleep at night knowing all the code lives behind your damn fort knox firewall company intranet and 75 layers of authentication. it's interesting because the more paid services these guys bring on board the more complex the security shit gets for them. the head of our IT is a fucking lunatic though and he is steering shit towards utter disaster, he's obsessed with being the guy who picks the next cloud service that "makes things so much better". my small team is actually considering just getting some mac minis and making a cluster of servers. we decided we don't need infinite uptime for hosting m-f office tools and we can just ... not interface with our infra/devops guys who have lost their damn minds and say no to everything now. they're supposed to be the compute tower under the tragedy known as TBM and they haven't approved a single VM in like 2 years.
      - lelanthran 5mo ago
        What would you use a cluster of mac minis for? I mean, if you're going that far, a couple of refurbished servers gives you far more compute and far more capacity and much better maintainability.
      - anarticle 5mo ago
        It's about offloading blame. If a server nukes, it's on infra to get a guy to unscrew it. If a service nukes, infra guy says "welp it's down", keeps on clicking. It doesn't matter what happens 6m-2y down the road, your odds of being laid off or job hopping are high in the current regime so this all makes sense. You pay some amount of your budget to make your life "easier" in the now. The trouble comes 2-5y down the line when the service is bought out by <insert MEGACORP here>, and you have to scramble to replace it or hold your nose and pay up. (tbh, migration is not that hard, but the org will act like it is) The matrix of authentications, compliances, and intranets will only go up as your company grows and often are enforced by people who do not suffer them daily.
  - donmcronald 5mo ago
    I would love to see it happen, but an internal service vs something exposed to the internet can be challenging. I think services like Cloudflare could play a role if they were able to provide some kind of forward auth and preferential treatment of core users during overload. My self hosted systems would have to be the source of truth and Cloudflare would have to be replaceable for me to consider using it. Think along the lines of automated pre-auth that coordinates with the origin based on some standard.
  - ranger_danger 5mo ago
    There is already federation support in radicle and vervis.
- spopejoy 5mo ago
  Plus as TFA notes, they went full copyleft: > As of v9.0 in August 2024 the project relicensed from MIT to GPLv3+, with the explicit goal of staying copyleft and resisting future commercial capture of the codebase. The value of copyleft for decentralization is too often overlooked.
gchamonlive 5mo ago
Yes, but GitHub is more than just git. The most important aspect of the platform that everybody seems to forget is the social component and how easy it made to create a persistent, off-site repository and collaborate across repos.
- MrFurious 5mo ago
  The "social component" is a big problem in actual FOSS.
  - rapnie 5mo ago
    People forget what FOSS is, and you get a world of unclear expectations. FOSS is code + a copyright license. How the code is created is an entirely different matter, and where FOSS projects often fall short. As FOSS projects come Forgejo is well-organized around a community governance model.
    - brunoborges 5mo ago
      Indeed, the fact that maintainers didn't have until only recently the control for disabling Pull Requests tab in a GitHub repo, is what drove a lot of issues in FOSS collaboration over the past decade. FOSS and open source licenses never ever granted entitlement for contributors to have their proposals reviewed/merged by maintainers. Neither it ever offered entitlement for users to ask for free support. FOSS is about giving people access to source code so they can do with it whatever they want, and maintainers/authors should have always had the ability to "publish and forget" the source code, without having to deal with those "entitlements".
  - bbor 5mo ago
    IDK, it's hard to criticize the community too much given how wildly, absurdly successful it is. If I arrived on Earth yesterday and you tried to tell me how much software is Free/free in an otherwise-capitalist economy, I wouldn't believe you! I really really am not trying to start a political argument, but just as food for thought: this is exactly why I have faith in socialism (read: 'prosocial institutions and norms'). And whether socialism is eu- or dys-topian, it certainly cannot happen in the first place without a "social component"!
_flux 5mo ago
I think you're forgetting issue tracking and CI.
- shimman 5mo ago
  Forgejo has both these things, I'd even argue Forgejo has a better runner than GitHub actions as it's less resource heavy and easier to debug when issues arise (only ran into one, and it was self inflicted).
  - _flux 5mo ago
    I have no trouble believing it is better :), but it is not as easy to mirror a Github issues, or CI configuration, to Forgejo or back as it is to handle the git side. I think Radicle is interesting. It doesn't solve the CI bit, at least not yet, but I suppose it's possible to hook up some local runner for it. There's also a bug tracker which I believe was called bug, but I can't find it ;), that tries to bridge different issue trackers and providing offline mode for working with them. People of course also love free CI capacity where they can run even untrusted code, so in that sense Microsoft resources might be difficult to compete against.
    - amusingimpala75 5mo ago
      Radicle CI does exist but it is admittedly fairly early on in development
    - xvilka 5mo ago
      There is some CI service in Radicle but it's still very barebones[1]. [1] https://radicle.network/nodes/seed.radicle.dev/rad:z3qg5TKmN83afz2fj9z3fQjU8vaYE https://radicle.network/nodes/seed.radicle.dev/rad:z3qg5TKmN...
  - treyd 5mo ago
    I really wish people would drop the GHA model because it's so bad and insecure by design. GitLab's CI is miles better and easier to use.
bayindirh 5mo ago
While I'm not forgetting the spirit of what Git is, I'm also remembering how GitHub used "all open repositories" to train their first Copilot without telling anyone. So, no thanks. I'll not be committing any personal code there anymore. And no, I don't care for the social aspects either. Discoverability, stars, and AI bot powered issue bombardment. I'm fine like this. Also, remember, "Open Source is not about You".
- dandellion 5mo ago
  Don't forget a achievement badges.
- PaulKeeble 5mo ago
  It did so in direct violation of the licenses of the code held there as well and then sold code snippets they had no rights to and still do.
  - rpdillon 5mo ago
    How did you draw those conclusions? They don't seem to be in line with court rulings (i.e. Anthropic), which hold that training is fair use. Code is being treated the same as any other copyrighted content that is used for training, from blog posts to PR announcements from companies and everything in between. Of course the blog posts are PR announcements have their copyright held by their authors, with no license provided at all, so if OSS code being used in training is a violation, then so would everything being trained on (to a first approximation...public domain works excepted). But no court has every taken that position to my knowledge. There's just so much confusion around this. In this thread alone: * Distillation is legal under copyright; the violations would come as ToS violations, which is contract law, not copyright law. * Training is legal as well, so long as the original material was obtained legally. * Moving code off of GitHub doesn't change any of this: AI companies are free to download your git repo no matter where it is hosted, just like they can any other content on a publicly accessible website. * Liability comes into the picture when the models are used to infringe copyright in their output. We'll have to see the outcome of the NYT case here, but that is proceeding at a glacial pace. I am not a lawyer; I'm an interested amateur that's been following the saga for years. I wish the discussion here on HN were more nuanced. If anyone has legal updates that render any of the above incorrect, I'd love a pointer to the decisions. One area I'm particularly weak is the legal status in countries that are not the US: I don't follow those laws nearly as carefully, nor the court cases brought.
dewey 5mo ago
I don't think anyone is forgetting that, but most people don't care that much about the decentralized part. They care about it being user friendly, free and for companies if it has all the enterprise features / SSO etc. that they need.
perkovsky 5mo ago
I agree with this. Moving the git repo is easy, moving the whole project surface is the hard part. Issues, releases, CI, docs, security advisories, search and discoverability all tend to get coupled to GitHub over time. For open-source projects, I like the idea of self-hosted as the source of truth, but still keeping a read-only GitHub mirror so people can actually find it.
- giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  ...Maybe that's the answer, we need a "hub" for the smaller missing things to start, you pop in your git repository when you join, and it can sit as a thin layer over your repo with issues, releases, etc... Sounds like a lot of work, but doing it piecemeal would do it. I think trying to re-host git itself might be more trouble than its worth. My kingdom for someone to build this so I don't have to use ADO boards anymore.
  - radlad 5mo ago
    Like some kind of UI over a database scraped by code which understands Github, Forgejo, Gitlab, sr.ht, etc? One issue is that issues tend to be monotonically increasing numbers, and references to old issues vs. new issues get confusing over time.
- cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
  The ideal situation is to eliminate thinking that the thought process for "actually finding" a project == GitHub. We let Microsoft parasitize our brains with this. The software community has long had alternate forums. GitHub isn't even a particularly good one, and it's recently just become a swamp of generated content, fake stars, and mining your content. In the last couple months at least once a week I get some LLM generated phishing spam from some bot that "found your projects on GitHub and want to collaborate" etc. And it's well documented now how you can just go out and "buy" GitHub stars. Please. Cut the umbilical.
pixlmint 5mo ago
GitHub centralizes 2 things: Authentication, as well as Repository Hosting. Does the code really need to be hosted in a central location like this? (Clearly not, which is why people are leaving GitHub in the first place) But the one part GitHub provides that's genuinely valuable is the social aspect, and when you get a PR from a user named torvalds you can trust that this is in fact Linus. This isn't the case with more distributed systems. That's why I'd really like to see some entity handle just the auth/identity providing. Forgejo/ Gitea/ Gitlab instances can then choose to use that. Then, for example if you want to take on another contributor and they have their own forgejo instances, you can invite them through this provider, when they fork your repo it ends up in their own forgejo, and they can easily create PR's into your repo.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- lorecore 5mo ago
  Signed commits could solve this in a more decentralized way if people post their public keys on their own domains.
  - skydhash 5mo ago
    Own domains is the real deal. My preffered model is tarball releases with checksums, or better yet, with signatures (like remind[0] or msmtp[1]). Such pages are trivial to host properly and loads quickly. [0]: https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/ https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/ [1]: https://marlam.de/msmtp/download/ https://marlam.de/msmtp/download/
    - account42 5mo ago
      I was confused for a bit what those two projects have to do with signatures but I guess you are just using them as examples of having (PGP) signatures for downloads?
- giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  > That's why I'd really like to see some entity handle just the auth/identity providing. Forgejo/ Gitea/ Gitlab instances can then choose to use that. Then, for example if you want to take on another contributor and they have their own forgejo instances, you can invite them through this provider, when they fork your repo it ends up in their own forgejo, and they can easily create PR's into your repo. Agree, I feel like a true alternative should focus on this missing piece to bridge the gap.
mamcx 5mo ago
"Git is decentralized" Because is a kind of filesystem. How a TEAM operate IS NOT. And that is the point of Github. There is no escape to the coordination problem! (And if you say mails, patches, and other asynchronous ways: same thing, more complex)
locknitpicker 5mo ago
> Everyone seems to be leaving GitHub, and forgetting the entire spirit of what git is in my eyes. And here lies your misconception: services such as GitHub are really not about git. That's a red herring. It's not about tooling either. People use services such as GitHub because of things like issue management, access control, release management, project pages, and CICD integration. You click on a button and you create a repository that's automatically added to your organization, with all access controls sorted out. You click on a button and you grant read access to someone. You click on a button and you onboard a whole team. Underneath it all, it's completely irrelevant if you are even using Git. Some people even use github's CLI interface instead. Does it matter if it's git or not? Do you even care? I have personal projects hosted and mirrored across GitHub, Gitlab, and BitBucket. That works, but only as far as backups are concerned. Even in projects that onboarded onto a third party CICD system, git is really not the reason for picking one service over another.
Daviey 5mo ago
This was the original model of launchpad.net, it was supposed to be a hub of Foss that pulled in from the decentralised VCS's, and provide them all via bzr. But bzr lost the battle, Canonical was slow to adopt Git, lack of investment in the platform, so it was another lunch that got taken from them.
- account42 5mo ago
  Canonical should just rename themselves to Not Invented Here. Their inability to work with others and instead reinventing the same thing badly is beyond comical at this point.
  - Daviey 5mo ago
    Interesting, got some examples of things they reinvented?
marxism 5mo ago
Something nobody's really calling out: Forgejo is genuinely hackable. I just added a "showcase" mode to my instance: private repos can show their README and root file listing publicly (so I can advertise that a project exists and what it does), but viewing actual code, cloning, issues, PRs are all locked behind group membership. About an hour of work, small and frankly trivial diff: https://peoplesgrocers.com/code/forks/forgejo/pulls/1 https://peoplesgrocers.com/code/forks/forgejo/pulls/1 I didn't have to fight the architecture at all, the seams were right where I needed them. Added migration adding a boolean column to the repo config table, a few tweaks in permission middleware, and voila, it just worked. Really excellent decoupling in the Forgejo codebase [1] You can't do anything like this with GitHub. That's the actual freedom! Separate from the where-do-I-host-my-git question. There is a big difference between software that "sure technically I can change it since I have access to the source" vs software that's been constructed specifically to be customized and changed. [1] Permission checks live in obvious places, the template system let me modify UI without touching unrelated code. Someone (many someones) clearly cared a lot about keeping this codebase modifiable by outsiders, and it shows. That's hard to do and should be more celebrated.
the__alchemist 5mo ago
I do not mean for this to come across as a nit, but think it's worth stating explicitly: > Everyone seems to be leaving GitHub A small minority is leaving Github; this group is more likely to write articles about the choice than those who still use Github.
- account42 5mo ago
  It always starts with a small minority. In this case, it already includes some very well known projects.
Dwedit 5mo ago
Is the tooling really centralized around Github? I use TortoiseGit, and that doesn't seem to care which service you are using. Although it does seem to have special authentication features specifically made to help you log in to Github.
cortesoft 5mo ago
A lot of the complains in the blog post would still be there, though, even if GitHub was just a mirror (the AI training stuff, the US jurisdiction concerns).
throw1234567891 5mo ago
Nobody’s forgetting anything. People want tooling around git bare repos. GitHub was cool because of forks and instant forked repos. That’s how they’ve established their moat.
mattlutze 5mo ago
[dead]
dark-star 5mo ago
That "everyone" is just a small, vocal community if you look at the total numbers of repos on GitHub (which is still climbing)[1] Yes, I understand that people are upset about the Copilot issues and maybe even the "frequent" outages (which usually only affect fringe parts of the site not everyone uses daily) It's good that there are other solutions (forge, sourcehut, whatever) but most projects are still alive and very well on GitHub and my guess is that this will stay for a while. Also, personally I have no issues with GitHub training AI on my (badly-coded and bug-ridden) code if they really want to :) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1snqyj3/is_there_an_official_count_of_daily_github_repos/ https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1snqyj3/is_there_an...
- account42 5mo ago
  Why do you think total numbers of repos is a relevant metric here? If anything, the slop spam on GitHub is a problem and a core part of why people are leaving.
  - dark-star 5mo ago
    that might be true, yes, but still: the burden of proof (that "github is dying") lies with the original poster. A statement like "last week, these 3 big projects left GitHub" is not that
f33d5173 5mo ago
Not everybody uses git because they're infatuated with "the spirit of git". Only a tiny minority have ever even used it with the patches-by-email model it's intended for, and I would guess the vast majority of the rest have no interest in learning. People use git basically because it's what github uses, or slightly more generously because it works well when paired with a centralized host like github. The model of developing code locally and dicussion issues and patches via a web portal is the model people are taken with. Only a small portion of that is provided by git proper.
- IanCal 5mo ago
  Although that only requires a centralised host per repo.
midtake 5mo ago
Everyone knows git is decentralized. What people are searching for is a space for the social component of development such as issue tracking. Being able to reference lines of codes in issues is a killer feature of github. Gitea and gitlab do it too but not as well. Also "just use multiple remotes" doesn't solve the problem. If you don't trust GitHub you shouldn't be pushing code there to begin with. So the ideal platform for hosting an equivalent platform as Github needs to be a trusted one as well.
tonymet 5mo ago
github's draw is the community and exposure.
HiPhish 5mo ago
> Git is decentralized, GitHub is just another place you can host your code in, but you can push your code to multiple remote servers. That's precisely what I have been doing for years, I still get to keep one foot in the GitHub ecosystem. I still get most contributions on GitHub, and that's fine by me. When a PR comes it I check it out locally, review it, and when it's done I merge locally to master, push to origin, and then origin pushes to GitHub which then automatically closes the PR and gives the author attribution. I never actually have to interact with GitHub after the initial pull.
- nijave 5mo ago
  Where do review comments go? What if changes are needed?
hk1337 5mo ago
While that is true, the real power of git being decentralized is that you have a local repo and a remote repo. Typically, you’ll have a dozen local repositories from developers cloning the project
dskoll 5mo ago
I will not put anything on GitHub for a couple of reasons. 1) MSFT is using our free labour to train its AIs. 2) Being Canadian, I do not want any dependence on a US-based company, seeing as the US can no longer be considered a trustworthy ally.

hosteur 5mo ago

I have been self-hosting Forgejo for some time now. It is impressively easy to maintain and operate. I can highly recommend giving it a spin.

jagged-chisel 5mo ago

“It’s not because of outages” - goes on to complain about outages. The outages might be due to AI load, but that’s to relevant because your leaving isn’t due to outages. Even though the article is primarily about outages. If you have a problem with your code being scanned for AI training, then write that article. But this article is about outages.

felooboolooomba 5mo ago
I think a lot of people within the US don't realize how badly US is seen from the outside, especially from "allies". Illegal tariffs, threatening tariffs, NATO sabotage, threatening invasion, abandoning Ukraine, supporting Russia. It's not just one guy doing this, he has a whole party behind him that could reel him in any second.
- GMoromisato 5mo ago
  I feel bad for Europe. They are pining for a world that no longer exists and lack the power (and, more importantly, the will) to do anything about it. I can imagine an alternate history in which Tim Berners-Lee founds an internet giant in Europe that dominates the 21st century. Imagine a European Google with a search monopoly, a smartphone (from Nokia), and a social network (Xing? Mastodon?). But of course, Sir Timothy never wanted that. Alas, we're on a different timeline. I wish I were a young man so I could live to see how it all turns out.
bpavuk 5mo ago
it's about GitHub's issues in general, including outages. every section gets somewhat equal amount of attention
- jagged-chisel 5mo ago
  The section named “Why outages aren't actually the reason” never tells me why outages aren’t the reason. It just continues taking about outages. I’ll admit I got tired of reading about outages and didn’t absorb the remainder of the article well.

sgt 5mo ago

Is Forgejo Actions any good? CI/CD would be cool.

xx_ns 5mo ago
From personal experience, there have been a few papercuts (mostly trying to figure out why runners aren't picking up jobs), but it isn't too hard to debug and the CI format is simple. When it works, it works well enough. It uses a similar workflow as GitHub actions. Some, but not all, actions are even interchangeable or at least portable from GitHub without much fuss.
import 5mo ago
It’s act runner. So you can continue using GitHub actions with minor changes
epistasis 5mo ago
I keep CI/CD super super simple, but was able to set it up for my Python repos in 15 minutes, with compatibility with GitHub actions (using the same yaml file at the same path)
tagraves 5mo ago
We just released support for Forgejo with RWX CI/CD: https://www.rwx.com/docs/getting-started/forgejo https://www.rwx.com/docs/getting-started/forgejo

delf 5mo ago

In "What I gave up" section author mentions his social graph. It is possible to take your social graph and collaboration history using GitSocial. It also allows cross-forge pull requests between any git hosts. All without 3rd party dependencies.

jorijn 5mo ago
TIL. Thanks!
- delf 5mo ago
  You're welcome! I'm the creator of GitSocial, happy to answer any questions.
  - xrd 5mo ago
    I'm very interested. I run my own public instance of forgejo. Is this software I run on my own that syndicates other users' commits? GitHub *was* good for discovery; does GitSocial offer something similar? Are there ways I can push more of my contributions into GitSocial, or does that happen automatically when I start using it? I think the GitSocial website would benefit from a "features and benefits" section rather than just a timeline view and demo, and I advise you to emphasize the benefits. I can see a TUI and a timeline of commits, but it seems like GitSocial is MUCH more exciting than just that. To me, GitSocial offers freedom from corporate control and surveillance of my open source work, and that's really intriguing.
    - delf 5mo ago
      Discovery is still in the works, but the core idea is that all collaboration data is stored in git itself (be that the project or a fork). It's git all the way down :)
bigfishrunning 5mo ago
Thank you for this, GitSocial is a very cool piece of software!

import 5mo ago

I’ve moved to self hosted gitea a year ago running in my homelab and not publicly accessible. No https, registrations disabled and repos are not public. I’m thinking about making public instance and use it with https, but minimize the attack surface, any recommendations especially about gitea/forgejo?

eblume 5mo ago
Yup, I’ve done this. I use a fly.io proxy that runs nginx, fail2ban, and that forwards to my tailnet where Caddy resolves to the actual instance. It’s critical that you disable local registration - I have authentik (only available on the tailnet) as an IdP but you can also just disable reg after making your own account of course. I also have a robots.txt that disables some stuff like all the individual rendered git commit views otherwise scrapers get stuck in an endless loop and also I strictly forbid access to the forgejo package repository since I have some private packages and the permission granularity there is not what I want it to be, still dialing that in. I’m keeping an eye on it and so far nothing terrible has happened. docs.eblu.me if you would like details… I could also link straight to the infra code if you like.
- import 5mo ago
  Hey thanks for the answer and link to docs. I don’t use tailscale, it’s running in a NUC, accessible with wireguard for now. (Docker + 4 runners) I try to keep things simple in the homelab and thinking only using fail2ban and caddy reverse proxy and expose it. Package registry isn’t private by default and accessible with PAT. Or am I mistaken?
  - eblume 5mo ago
    You’re welcome! I only ran in to this last week and I might not have this straight yet because I haven’t had time to sit and untangle it. I have a private repo that has a release workflow that publishes a Python package to the forgejo package repository using my public user profile. I mistakenly assumed that because the repo was private the package would be as well but that link is not enough to set public/private and it is instead fully public. Listable and everything, no PAT needed. This is where I’m less clear: I think I could make my user profile private and this would hide the packages, but I want my profile public. So I just black-holed the entire packages api outside of the tailnet.

keyle 5mo ago

For self hosting... and personal code repo, why not just git... and expose something like Stagit for the web?

import 5mo ago
CI/CD, package registry, issue tracking in one place?
- keyle 5mo ago
  Fair enough for the formers. Issue tracking though...

jdw64 5mo ago

People constantly cry out for decentralization. In reality, however, most systems eventually end up centralized. Perhaps when people ask for decentralization, they are actually seeking a new center where they can become the new pioneers. It seems that when they feel they have no chance of winning under the existing rules, they use decentralization as a pretext to overturn the board.

ses1984 5mo ago
If only you bothered to read the first line of the article, directly under the title: >I moved my code from GitHub to a self-hosted Forgejo
- jdw64 5mo ago
  I did read it. What I meant is that trying to isolate oneself using alternative platforms often looks like chasing a new trend. The ultimate irony is that the sheer complexity of the author's setup—KVMs, weekly rebuilds, isolated networks—is exactly the kind of burdensome infrastructure people were running away from in the first place. To clarify, my point was that specifically mentioning 'Forgejo'rather than just a generic personal 'home server'makes it come across as acting like a trendsetter
- jdw64 5mo ago
  My ponit was not against self-hosting. It was more about the symbolism. If the goal is decentralization, “I moved to a personal forge I control” is the post's core idea. But framing it as “leaving GitHub for Forgejo” inevitably creates a new flag to gather around. That may be useful and even necessary, but it also shows that decentralization movements often produce new centers, names, and identities.
  - ses1984 5mo ago
    It's software, which can be infinitely and freely copied, people are going to copy it, and they should, because not everyone should write their own service from scratch (on top of an scm they wrote from scratch (on top of a language and operating system they wrote from scratch too)).

finegrainlabs 5mo ago

One of my friends made fremforge.com (an EU-sovereign CI/CD with Git included). It's currently in closed beta but goes live next week (tm). It is built upon Forgejo and EU-based services using T-Cloud as the underlying hyperscaler. Have a look! I don't make any money from it, by the way. And yes, it will cost a little bit, but rest assured: because you are paying for it, you will not be the product.

touristtam 5mo ago
Their website is unavailable: https://www.frem.sh/ https://www.frem.sh/
F3nd0 5mo ago
Website says €30 per seat/month, which is significantly more than Sourcehut and slightly more than GitLab.

henrydark 5mo ago

I now use syncthing for the .git directory, excluding HEAD file and a few others, between my few devices and a vps on hetzner. Most of git is append only immutable blobs - just sharing these between devices just works for me. "users" and authentication is handled by syncthing. I have pre and post hooks to make sure no device tries to change HEAD of branch owned by another device, just to be safe, be it hasn't been activated once yet.

diath 5mo ago
If you have a VPS that's always running, you can just use it as a git remote through SSH without moving things around or any third party software, just put the Git repo on the VPS and clone it via "git clone ssh://user@host/path". You get authentication, encryption and synchronization out of the box with just ssh/git.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  Had to vouch for your comment, not sure why it was marked as dead. Definitively the easiest way to approach this, and the most standard way too. If you already have ssh, which I'm guessing you do if you managed to setup syncthing on it in the first place, then you can literally just point git to host+path and it'll use whatever ssh authentication you already have in place. Can hardly get simpler :)
  - henrydark 5mo ago
    I don't put ssh keys on all devices. With syncthing, in contrast to git, I don't have too. Also syncing is automatic and immediate, I don't have to initiate push and pull.
j-bos 5mo ago
Super interesting, mind sharing your exclusions and hooks?
- henrydark 5mo ago

thehwang 5mo ago

[flagged]

ninjahawk1 5mo ago

Didn’t realize the Dutch government was rad until I read this. Frankly, the modern internet as a whole is scary. Google has so much power, Github, Meta, etc., they all control such fundamental parts of society now and get to run free since they’re private companies. Not saying they should be government owned, that would drastically worse, but some more detailed oversight would be nice.

sc68cal 5mo ago

I have also moved my git repositories to a self-hosted NUC. I have not yet bothered with a HTTP frontend to share it with the world, mostly because I don't want to provide AI scrapers with content and don't want to put the work in to block them. It's a shame that all these companies that benefited from open source have poisoned the industry like this

echelon 5mo ago
> It's a shame that all these companies that benefited from open source have poisoned the industry like this Open Source and the OSI are an industry plant. Look at who sponsors it. The monopoly hyperscaler conglomerates get free labor and use it to build the world we despise: tracking panopticons, phones we can't install things on, device attestation, browser monoculture with no adblock, etc. etc. Google made people fall in love with BSD/MIT, and look what it did. Just a few of the classic plays: "That Belongs to Us Now" - (1) vendors build stuff like Elasticsearch and Redis, (2) the hyperscalers yoink it into their proprietary offerings and take all the profits, (3) original authors and their companies starve. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" - (1) vendors take an open source project like KTHML or Linux and build their version, (2) they flood the market with their offering, pushing out the competitors, (3) they use anti-competitive means to get their thing in front of all eyeballs, (4) once they have marketshare, they do evil things like add tracking and remove freedoms Open Source needs to replaced with "freedom for the people, companies must pay". Source available shareware with anti-hyperscaler teeth. Even Richard Stallman's licenses are not strong enough. CC BY-NC-SA is better. "Pure" Open Source is corporate welfare. It was a mistake. It enabled giants to hang us with our own rope.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  Why can't others just be "Others I disagree with"? Why it has to be some grand conspiracy? I'm all for open source, most of what I do is released as MIT, almost never "Free Software", still doing the same thing since LLMs appeared, regardless of everything else. I'm a real person, have nothing to do with OSI but willing to explain my position, as long as you take it as real opinions held by a real person, instead of going into conspiracy theory land. Ask me anything, I'll give you my honest perspective.

luxuryballs 5mo ago

Question for anyone, why do people use GitHub or an alternative rather than just spinning up your own Gitea docker container or similar?

p2detar 5mo ago
I got my own Forgejo, but I'm still on Github. That's the easiest way to check what the people I follow push, comment or star. I like this part of Github a lot.

Finnucane 5mo ago

"The Dutch government's choice of Forgejo, not GitLab, was deliberate." And since Gitlab seems to have looked over at what is happening at Github and decided, we want some of that, that was probably the right choice.

OuterVale 5mo ago

I'm making my jump over to Tangled, which is built on the AT Protocol (so it uses the same account as Bluesky and others). I'm finding it lovely. https://vale.rocks/micros/20260511-0440 https://vale.rocks/micros/20260511-0440

epistasis 5mo ago

I have been using my self hosted forgejo in May, and liking it just fine, I recommend it for anybody who is curious. I don't really trust GitHub to keep things private anymore. The hardest parts of switching to forgejo: 1) coming up with a comfortable way to pronounce "forgejo" in my head, and 2) adapting to not having the same GitHub v3 API and needing to switch to a different CLI for PR creation, repo creation, etc. The pronunciation thing is probably the more difficult of the two.

epicide 5mo ago
They make it rather easy by providing an audio pronunciation: https://forgejo.org/static/forgejo.mp4 https://forgejo.org/static/forgejo.mp4 With my American accent, I don't quite say it exactly like the recording, but pretty close: "for-JAY-oh"
- epistasis 5mo ago
  This is probably a personal problem, honestly. The spelling is hardwired to short-circuit away from that pronunciation in my head, meaning every time I have to type it out I have a pretty big mental split. It would actually be easier for me if it was in Cyrrilic or Greek letters, Форджеьо or Форджеджо or Φορτζέγιο don't have the blockers on pronunciation that Forgejo does.
  - F3nd0 5mo ago
    The name ‘Forgejo’ is derived from the Esperanto word ‘Forĝejo’ (a forge), but alters the spelling while leaving the original pronunciation. The result is a kind of a Frankenstein’s monster, so confusion is in order.
    - a96 5mo ago
      I'll just keep rhyming it with Jorge (-o).
baggachipz 5mo ago
Apparently it's pronounced (phonetically) as for-JAY-oh, an audio sample is here: https://forgejo.org/faq/ https://forgejo.org/faq/ You piqued my curiosity :) edit: Ah, I was beaten to the punch :(

hperrin 5mo ago

I moved all my repos (well, I have two left to move) to https://forge.sciactive.com https://forge.sciactive.com which is also a self hosted Forgejo instance. It was a really easy process, and I’m really impressed with Forgejo.

pluc 5mo ago

At this point I really don't think this needs to be justified. I'd be more curious as to why people are staying on GitHub.

embedding-shape 5mo ago
> I'd be more curious as to why people are staying on GitHub Vanity metrics. GitHub initially tried to shy away from this, I remember conversations with early GitHub engineers trying to make sure "Stars" and "Followers" numbers were going into the direction of being just for vanity and popularity. Then eventually the profile READMEs appeared, which people now use for showing even more vanity metrics and brag about how much code they can produce in how little days. Since employers also ask you for a GitHub profile, it ends up being needed for new developers to make an entry into the industry, without it companies will basically ignore you. Unless you're really, really good, which to be honest, most of us aren't.

nottorp 5mo ago

What if you don't want to self host? Who offers low feature git hosting for a small price? Something like the old $7 account before github was bought by MS? All I want is hosting and a read only web interface, plus access control in case I have collaborators. All the offerings are enterprise priced because they offer "minutes of CI", "AI assistants" and other icing on the cake.

epicide 5mo ago
SourceHut sounds very close to what you describe: https://sr.ht/ https://sr.ht/
- nickzelei 5mo ago
  I’ve had my eye on this platform. Generally like their design and ethos too. However I find their code viewer/navigation a little hard for my eye. But maybe I’m just too used to GitHub.
  - epicide 5mo ago
    Sure. If you really wanted to, I think the pages are simple enough that you could add your own CSS tweaks via a basic browser plugin (or whatever is the current go-to plugin for doing this). For me, I only use a forge's viewer/navigation for cursory glances or sharing links to others. If I need to spend any real time digging, I'll clone the repo.
- nottorp 5mo ago
  No one notices the part about private repos and access control...
  - jorams 5mo ago
    You didn't mention private repos in your comment, but I guess that was implied in the $7 thing. That said: SourceHut has private repos and access control.

felixsebastian 5mo ago

some of my identity is built around github, i think im in love with the github brand also: releases, packages, actions... its all very convenient

_stiofan 5mo ago

It was a sad day when Microsoft bought GitHub, we all know eventually it will go the way of Hotmail and Skype.

satvikpendem 5mo ago

I've also heard of Tangled [0] which is decentralized and built on the AT Protocol like Bluesky but also has some genuinely useful features that GitHub has been dragging its heels over in implementing, like PR stacking, such that entire companies have sprung up to add that feature in GitHub. Has anyone tried this? [0] https://tangled.org/ https://tangled.org/

mgrandl 5mo ago
I would love to use it, mostly for the jj compatibility and the nice CI implementation, but I need private repos so sadly this is not yet for me.
rirze 5mo ago
It's too decentralized for my taste IMO. I like using radicle.xyz instead.
- KolmogorovComp 5mo ago
  can you expand on what makes you think being too decentralised is a negative?
tao_oat 5mo ago
Yes -- it's definitely alpha software, but usable for open source. There are interesting experiments like tack[1] to wire in custom CI. I imagine they'll be able to support private repos eventually once ATProto supports private data, but that may take some time. [1]: https://tangled.org/mitchellh.com/tack https://tangled.org/mitchellh.com/tack
nicce 5mo ago
They just got a big VC funding. There is still no mention about the business model. I really wonder what it will be.
- satvikpendem 5mo ago
  Damn, there goes my interest.

jviotti 5mo ago

GitHub Actions is indeed the hard one to replace. I need Windows, Linux, Linux-ARM, macOS ARM, and macOS Intel runners. How do you guys using Forgejo and/or Codeberg do to get a similar matrix, hopefully at a low cost?

dboreham 5mo ago
Use gitea which has github actions compatibility.
mamcx 5mo ago
CircleCI?
bombcar 5mo ago
Can you push from Forgejo to GitHub for actions until you can find a replacement?
8organicbits 5mo ago
How much utilization do you have? For low scale, it's hard to beat GitHub Actions as they offer free runners for public repos and include a bunch of free hours for private repos. Once you start paying for it, GitHub Actions runners are very expensive. I've used both Jenkins and GitLab before to self-host CI/CD, and you save so much using on-demand (or at higher scale, reserved) cloud instances. I do freelance DevOps work and I've helped clients with these sorts of challenges.
- jviotti 5mo ago
  I use it pretty heavily on C++ stuff at GitHub.com/sourcemeta. i.e. take https://github.com/sourcemeta/blaze https://github.com/sourcemeta/blaze and this example recent run: https://github.com/sourcemeta/blaze/actions/runs/25751796502 https://github.com/sourcemeta/blaze/actions/runs/25751796502. 12 jobs per PR for up to 30 minutes running Linux, macOS, and Windows jobs on LLVM, GCC, and MSVC in static and shared builds with also some sanitiser configurations. And consider across projects we might send dozens of PRs per week. Right now it's somehow all fully free on GitHub Actions. I wonder what the same would cost on i.e. CircleCI

Fraterkes 5mo ago

I do mostly enjoy all this moving to European tech because the thing being replaced is usually owned by Microsoft. I do kind of worry though: there's a broad trend of countries trying to become less reliant on eachother, and in my mind the long period of peace we've had in much of the west this past half century has partly been because we're all in business together.

cjs_ac 5mo ago
They said that the First World War was impossible due to increasing trade dependencies between the European powers, and look how that turned out. ‘This is a terrible idea,’ is sadly not the deterrent to starting a war that it ought to be.

chknkachunga 5mo ago

I wish Microsoft would treat GitHub a little differently. Leave it alone and let it be it's own thing. Maybe if enough customers leave they will backtrack. As a long term GitHub customer, I see many practical and personal reasons to move away from the platform. I've seen a handful of similar posts lately. A few years ago this would have felt totally fringe, but now all of a sudden it really doesn't. For now, for me and many others GitHub still works great, and is very convenient. But the alternatives are getting even easier to self implement all the time.

_heimdall 5mo ago
Microsoft did that for a lot longer than I expected honestly. Historically they would take a year or so before giving up on the "you're an independent company" bit and merge the team into MS orgs. GitHub pulled it off for 5ish years before that began to change, and it was only last year when they stopped having their own "CEO".

OhNoNotAgain_99 5mo ago

[dead]

ramshanker 5mo ago

I wish it offered a windows binary as well, since the original project gitea from which it was forked, does so. Sometime you need to go where many customers ahem enterprise are. As a developer of an engineering application, windows is the way to go 1st hand. It would have been easier to adopt one more application on the daily driver enviornment. Till than, I am on GitHub only.

dboreham 5mo ago
Wasn't gitea a fork of forgejo?
- mfenniak 5mo ago
  The other way around; Forgejo is a fork of Gitea.

chungy 5mo ago

Consider Fossil[1], which packages the entire repository state—code history, wiki, tickets, forum—into a single file, and that state gets cloned. When/if you need to change hosting providers, you get to lose zero data in Fossil because of it. [1] https://fossil-scm.org/ https://fossil-scm.org/

booleandilemma 5mo ago
I considered Fossil several years ago and while it's really cool (everything being integrated is awesome), I don't like Fossil from a philosophical perspective. There's no way to clean up history, it preserves everything as is. If that's what you want, great, but as part of my git workflow I like to mess around and then go back and clean up and organize my commits before pushing them.
hackthemack 5mo ago
I love fossil. Something about it's opinionated workflow that matches what I think. But network effects. I just can not bring my team to use fossil. They have to share code with others. Other departments. And everyone (99%+) uses git. It just feels like a disservice to force them to use fossil. It is a catch-22. It is similar to so many other things in the tech space. Trying to get fellow developers to use functional style idioms. Trying to enforce immutability. It is like something big (like a facebook or google project) has to force the community to get on board.

onesandofgrain 5mo ago

Why not Gitea mind me asking? Anything in particular?

kstrauser 5mo ago
Last I looked, Forgejo had more activity and more contributors than Gitea. Also, Forgejo eats its own dogfood: Codeberg runs on it, and hosts it, while Gitea runs on GitHub. It’s easy to make the case that Forgejo is good enough for public hosting. Gitea probably is, too, but there’s less direct evidence.
- onesandofgrain 5mo ago
  gitea runs on github u mean the source or the hosting?
  - kstrauser 5mo ago
    Gitea uses GitHub to host the Gitea source code. In contrast, Forgejo hosts its code on Codeberg, and Codeberg is running the Forgejo software.
    - onesandofgrain 5mo ago
      Dont see a problem with hosting gitea on github and codeberg I dislike for numerous reasons.

onesandofgrain 5mo ago

https://sharemygit.com/ https://sharemygit.com/ let's you share forgejo repos privately through read-only share links for those that need an alternative to the github gitshare fei

booleandilemma 5mo ago

I just recently moved a couple tiny projects from GitHub to Codeberg. My review: really easy to set up and get going with. I noticed Codeberg isn't as snappy as GitHub, but it's barely noticeable and I'm not paying any money for it anyway so I can't complain.

lukassbrad 5mo ago

[flagged]

l5870uoo9y 5mo ago

> The CTO publicly apologised and said capacity needs to scale 30x to keep up with AI-driven load. I hope they don't start charging for regular use of GitHub, but when I see how some of the vibe coders make thousands of commits a day, I'm becoming more and more skeptical. Would be a real shame if we can't share and cooperate on code for free.

bbor 5mo ago
I feel like LLMs will help solve this problem they've created, TBH -- any human expert can tell in seconds when a repo has this problem, so it should be doable by a system that's tweaked over. The tricky part is writing a legal agreement that lets them apply vibe quotas! This is what Anthropic is already doing with CC, and tbh GitHub and GitLab are probably doing the same. The cost is some hate from devs on Twitter and random small subreddits ofc, but I bet that's well worth it! OTOH, it does kinda blow my mind how often I see people (on /r/vibecoding and elsewhere) paying for a $200/mo subscription to produce what amount to hobby projects and toy sites. I've been known to make some silly money decisions when I can afford it, but this feels different. I guess it's a $2400 annual subscription to a service providing Meaning and Purpose? If you're around 40 and realizing that you'll never be rich or famous, this might actually affordable compared to the alternatives!
- warkdarrior 5mo ago
  > it does kinda blow my mind how often I see people (on /r/vibecoding and elsewhere) paying for a $200/mo subscription to produce what amount to hobby projects and toy sites People spend more than that on their (non-vibecoding) hobbies. Think of folks who do woodworking, 3D printing, sailing, car racing, etc. So $200/mo is not excessive if they get their enjoyment out of it.
AlienRobot 5mo ago
Just charge for commits per day after a certain number. Problem solved.
- satvikpendem 5mo ago

sandebert 5mo ago

I really like Forgejo, I just wish the wiki was a bit better. I even tried sponsoring work on it, but apparently it's a challenging thing to improve.

wood_spirit 5mo ago

GitHub is becoming Sourceforge. Remember them?

achayala 5mo ago

I really like forgejo. I selfhosted it too, but then I go back to codeberg. Probably I will selfhosted it again. I really want a descentralized internet and https://forgefed.org/ https://forgefed.org/ gives me hope.

andrewzeno 5mo ago

I think this article is great, but it doesn't focus on the open source aspect. GitHub still has effective monopoly on open source, simply because of how much free resources they provide, let alone higher chances of getting your project discovered and fewer barriers for people reporting issues.

zuzululu 5mo ago

I'm kind of baffled why everybody is suddenly hating on github? I use it just fine. I'm actually impressed how well codex is able to interact with it. I virtually do not need to fret about git commands or managing github to respond to issues anymore. I don't see an alternative and its a bit of a stretch to expect people to follow you unless you are famous or have that audience reach already which many of us do not.

1123581321 5mo ago
Frustration from the outages, anti-AI sentiment, and the anti-hosted-software sentiment are converging. On the positive side, HN has gone through multiple periods of enthusiasm for new code forges. There was even excitement for GitHub at one point. :) It’s good because all the forges generally add each other’s features if one takes off.
epistasis 5mo ago
There's a wide variety of reasons, so I can only describe my own, but it comes down to supply chain risk. Just as with the COVID supply chain problems reconfigured trust and assumptions, the actions of Microsoft and other large US software companies have become erratic and untrustworthy. In particular the sanctions against the ICC prosecutor in Europe have made it imperative to have zero dependence on Microsoft with easy exit paths at any given moment. Similarly, one cannot trust Google as they can disable your account one day, with zero recourse, zero ability to appeal, zero accountability to Google for disabling your email and SSO. Except maybe posting on HN and causing enough bad PR to get Google to act to suppress the bad PR. The US is no longer a nation of laws, it's a nation of whatever the president wants, and even impartial courts are likely to be overturned by an extremely partisan Supreme Court that has said that the president can not break the law while doing "official acts", whatever the heck that means. Audience is not a factor for me at all, if GitHub is a social network for you then it definitely makes sense to use it still. But I don't know anybody that needs the social aspects of GitHub. That's just the people I know and work with, however.
overfeed 5mo ago
I think your second paragraph alludes to the disconnect expressed in the first one. The people "hating on github" and leaving it today, regardless of their (lack of) fame do not mind not being followed to the new forge, which may be a dealbreaker for you (an educated guess, from your phrasing). Conversely, you use GitHub "just fine" under terms the leavers consider dealbreakers. What you are baffled by are differences in value judgements.

cdrnsf 5mo ago

I'm quite happy with Forgejo. I've moved all of my projects to my own instance and keep it accessible from Tailscale only.

Havoc 5mo ago

Moving from a selfhosted gitlab to forgejo too. Gitlab it’s getting to heavy for my needs

Myzel394 5mo ago

Can somebody recommend some good github alternatives that are available as a service, without having to self host it? I'm already self hosting my own gitea, but want a SaaS fallback to github

paol_taja 5mo ago

[dead]

shevy-java 5mo ago

Microsoft is losing the war here. It'll take a long time before GitHub will tumble, but the cracks are now noticeable for everyone. AI is killing AI-Hub I mean GitHub.

m3kw9 5mo ago

bespoke versioning system for my code? no thanks.

sathishmg 5mo ago

[flagged]

xvilka 5mo ago

The real game changer would be completed Federation[1] support. This is why I am donating both Forgejo[2] and Codeberg[3] and urge everyone doing the same, to give more time and resources for the Forgejo team to implement it properly. Another good contender is the Radicle[4][5] which is completely decentralized on top of the Git. [1] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/main/FederationRoadmap.md https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m... [2] https://liberapay.com/forgejo https://liberapay.com/forgejo [3] https://donate.codeberg.org/ https://donate.codeberg.org/ [4] https://radicle.dev/ https://radicle.dev/ [5] https://radicle.network/nodes/seed.radicle.dev https://radicle.network/nodes/seed.radicle.dev

tempaccount420 5mo ago
Federations are the worst decentralization model, they're too loosely cooperative.
- afiori 5mo ago
  federations are the only decentralization model that scales, the issue is that most "federated" systems are actually just "distributed centralization" eg mastodon.
  - F3nd0 5mo ago
    What is federation if not ‘distributed centralisation’?
  - AlienRobot 5mo ago
    There's a technical difference between a "distributed" system and a "decentralized" system.
dickywad 5mo ago
[dead]

galaSerge 5mo ago

[flagged]

tiberious726 5mo ago

How does Forgejo stack up to Gitea nowadays?

merb 5mo ago

I do not need a new shiny code hosting platform. I just need a better way for managing merge requests/pull requests. Stuff that does not suck, especially a better diff, like semantic diff that is more clever than before. I do not care if my formatter changed stuff from 6 to 4 spaces because an html element was dropped. I want to have a more sane workflow for splitting things. I want to scale up reviews… its still so awkward to do it and ai makes it even worse

jraph 5mo ago
Being a shiny new code hosting platform is not really the point of forgejo though, it's at best a nice side effect. I suppose forgejo is meant to be a lightweight, low maintenance, feature-rich, self-hostable otherwise GitHub-like free software. But I suppose you could open issues to propose your ideas.

tonymet 5mo ago

Github is more than a UI and remote storage, it's a community and discovery tool for open source repos. Federating to self-hosted means you are depending on google for discovery, which will never rank. If you need a backup remote, just backup to Google Drive / iCloud. Private team collab? run a server. While I understand the frustration with github, the prescription to self host seems like cutting off your nose.

beanjuiceII 5mo ago

yea cool story bro

brendanml 5mo ago

Good riddance. I’m sick f Microsoft thinking they can ruin everything and people will stay.

the_ai_wizarrd 5mo ago

maybe after the exodus it will be usable again

denizay 5mo ago

GitHub? Forgejo bout it!

parijatmohor 5mo ago

[flagged]

bigcat12345678 5mo ago

I am very happy to discover this. Given the trending-to-zero software writing cost, a local self-contained source code management tool would be natural for delivering software, i.e., software becomes an agent with specialized code as its harness (in addition to its default ones) source control would be one default tool for the agentic software to manage its own evolution.

rudraneel93 5mo ago

[flagged]

kkfx 5mo ago

I'm curious why people do not choose Radicle in FLOSS...

a96 5mo ago
I've never heard of it and, if I were to guess, that might be one of the reasons.

sshrajesh 5mo ago

Forgejo based https://code.overheid.nl/ https://code.overheid.nl/ seems to be broken

egorfine 5mo ago
It is a government-ran web service. Of course it is broken.

egorfine 5mo ago

Related: GitLab's CEO post in Twitter[1] doesn't inspire confidence as well. A direct quote: "generational rebuild of git, the monolith giving way to composable, monetized services with agent-first APIs". Can you imagine /usr/bin/git rewritten into a set of composable, monetized services with agent-first APIs? [1] https://twitter.com/bstaples/status/2054227448204754963 https://twitter.com/bstaples/status/2054227448204754963

fasteo 5mo ago
You are missing some context. Full quote below.I believe it is just a fancy way to say that the are rebuilding their backend to make it more scalable >>>5a/ Machine-scale infrastructure. >>> Others are bolting AI onto platforms built for human-rate commits. Git itself wasn't designed for agent-rate work. >>> We're rebuilding the underlying infrastructure for machine scale: a generational rebuild of git, the monolith giving way to composable, monetized services with agent-first APIs.
- egorfine 5mo ago
  > Git itself wasn't designed for agent-rate work /bin/ls wasn't designed for agent-rate work either.

egorfine 5mo ago

As obvious as it is that Microsoft is a predator never to be trusted, I believe that trusting a government-run web service is a choice even worse. We know that Microsoft at least acknowledges that GitHub being down is something they are ashamed of and aims to fix. At the same time, I feel like having an EU government-run service down over a weekend because there is no one to fix it outside business hours is something that should be expected, not frowned upon. It is actually down right now as I am writing this comment.

askonomm 5mo ago
Depending on the government. USA government? Yes, I'd trust that even less than Microsoft. Most EU governments? I'd trust a hell of a lot more. Especially my own (Estonian).
- egorfine 5mo ago
  Trust is twofold. Will EU government service steal my data? Absolutely not, here the trust is at the highest. Will EU government screw up a commercial service? Absolutely yes. I fully trust EU governments to regulate itself to a full halt.

AbuAssar 5mo ago

Forgejo is pronounced as forjeyo

yesnomaybe 5mo ago

Have just switched my org to self-hosted forgejo. Handful of devs and users. Been great so far. Storage need be tamed, it's using minio S3 for the big items like artifacts. Auth using OpenID Connect working well, would recommend good security hardening. Runners are in EC2 auto scaling groups. Don't have to be though, there is also a K8s based solution out there I believe.

DanieleSalatti 5mo ago

Left GitHub for a self hosted Forgejo + mirrors on Coderberg for community access. At this point I just need to finish cleaning up my GH profile by deleting the few repos I still have there. GH was fun while it lasted…

gabazing 5mo ago

I did same for my personal projects and i am happy with forgejo