I am self hosting forgejo on my synology NAS. It is easier than it looks. Synology provides me access from the internet so I do not need static IP address. It took me at most 20 minutes to write (copy paste) docker compose file to make it run and another hour to import repositories from github and gitlab. Only maintenance I do is update to new version once a while which takes about 5 minutes. You can set it up to sync repositories back to code forges.

If you do not have a lot of users you can easily set it up too.

Codeberg and Gitlab exist though. The problem is the inertia. Tons of repositories in GitHub from way before MS acquired them, which makes most people use GitHub, which makes most software projects choose GitHub.

Heck, GH Stars are used as a vanity metric for a lot of projects.

I’m actively working on a free and open source alternative Frontend for Forgejo that I self host called Joui

Hosting forgejo on a cheap Hetzner server is the best and easiest trick that happened in my work life these last years !