alt Hacker NewsWhy I'm leaving GitHub for Forgejo
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Moving from a selfhosted gitlab to forgejo too.
Gitlab it’s getting to heavy for my needs
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I'm quite happy with Forgejo. I've moved all of my projects to my own instance and keep it accessible from Tailscale only.
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/ gives me hope.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
“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.
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.
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.
GitHub is becoming Sourceforge. Remember them?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I moved all my repos (well, I have two left to move) to 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.
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.
For self hosting... and personal code repo, why not just git... and expose something like Stagit for the web?
Why not Gitea mind me asking? Anything in particular?
It was a sad day when Microsoft bought GitHub, we all know eventually it will go the way of Hotmail and Skype.
"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.
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.
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
Question for anyone, why do people use GitHub or an alternative rather than just spinning up your own Gitea docker container or similar?
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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
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.