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.
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 completely share your sentiment about feeling irked about open source code being used to train commercial AI models. However, I think the battle is already lost - the nature of copyright and open source code philosophy (currently) means that there isn't any real way of preventing your code being used to train AI. Look at the legal precedents being set in courts where many of the BigTechs have actually pirated copyrighted media to train their AI, and the court has said "that's acceptable". (Ofcourse, the actual act of piracy - like Facebook did by downloading copyrighted material through torrents - may not be legal, but the courts may be lenient here too as there seems to be an undercurrent of government approval to do anything to win the "AI Race").
And, even if you move your repository somewhere else, can you really prevent anyone from uploading it to Github? To do so, you may have to create your open source license.
> However, I think the battle is already lost - the nature of copyright and open source code philosophy (currently) means that there isn't any real way of preventing your code being used to train AI.
Laws should make it a double-edged sword, make distillation explicitly legal.
> Laws should make it a double-edged sword, make distillation explicitly legal.
Knowledge-distillation is already legal. Current case law says the none of outputs of any model is protected by copyright, so one could use it for whatever they want - including distillation. That is why the AI companies resort to ToS clauses to block distillation and/or training competing models.
What exactly did they train? Copilot is powered by claude, gemini, or ChatGPT these days.
Did they train autocomplete? I mean the code is open source so anyone can scrape it and train it too. I'm kind of glad they did train it because otherwise we'd still be stuck with Apple level AI models right now.
The whole reason we have so many models, including open weight models, that are all competitive with each other is because the data is free and anyone can be training off it. If the goal was to monetize the source code I guess the authors shouldn't make it open source.
> "GitHub Copilot is powered by generative AI models developed by GitHub, OpenAI, and Microsoft. It has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub."
Yeah have to agree here, Github Copilot itself doesn't have any first party models they use the frontiers. So, they didn't "train" using public repos but they probably allowed (or didn't prevent) the frontiers from pulling the repos along with the rest of the internet when creating their models.
I mean, I never put my code on GitHub, but other people put it there, as they use GitHub: you can't not use GitHub. (Hell: even closed source projects, even ones that were never distributed even as a binary, if the code leaks, end up mirrored on GitHub.)
The training on "all open repositories" is the only training we heard about. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't beneath these greedy companies to train on other data, and respond "oops! we didn't that would happen" (by which they mean get found out).
Leaving is still the right move. But this applies to all centralized large services: Our use of Google and Google Drive, any Microsoft products, Adobe products, etc.
> (...) I'm also remembering how GitHub used "all open repositories" to train their first Copilot without telling anyone.
This is a silly opinion to hold, isn't it? I mean, you release projects under a license with the express purpose of freely distributing your code among anyone in the world that may have any interest whatsoever, and even allow they themselves to share it with anyone they feel fit. But you are somehow outraged if people actually use said code?
Because there's no way the code is distributed properly according to any of the OSS licenses. In fact, it claims authorship with nonsense bylines saying the LLM wrote it.
> This is a silly opinion to hold, isn't it? I mean, you release projects under a license with the express purpose of freely distributing your code among anyone in the world that may have any interest whatsoever, and even allow they themselves to share it with anyone they feel fit. But you are somehow outraged if people actually use said code?
You're making things up: the outrage is not that people used it, it's that the licence requires attribution at least, and opening the derivative product at worst. Token providers that trained on open source did neither.
> Please make it make sense.
I am skeptical that you didn't know the reason for the outrage because it's been repeated in every single thread where this was discussed.
I myself repeated it multiple times each time this feigned confusion you display appears.
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.
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.
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".
> The "social component" is a big problem in actual FOSS.
You're confusing things. The "social component" refers to people interacting with each other. Such as two developers working on a bug or a feature. Or a tester reporting a bug.
This is a big part of actual professional software development work.
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"!
What on earth is the social component of GitHub? I assume I’m missing what’s useful to people here as it keeps getting brought up, but what is it? Is it the stars on a repo? Are people doing something else big with all of this?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would argue GitHub does a lot more centralization than just those two. It's an entire developer platform centered around Git. It does hundreds of other things that some developers use, and some don't.
GitHub also centralises abuse detection. I'm not thinking about sophisticated attacks here so much as dealing with plain old spam. That's fairly easy to deal with on a tiny scale, and possible on a huge scale, but it's a great pain at a medium scale.
I am very active on bsky and I also use some other ATProto applications like tangled. I think this is the first time I have seen anyone refer to ATProto with an '@'
> 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.
The "missing" piece is just everyone implementing OAuth Dynamic Client Registration. Then kernel.org could be its own OAuth provider, and Linus could log into someone's Forgejo with his kernel.org login.
Just like "log in with Google", you should be able to do "log in with OAuth", you type your email or domain (or your browser fills it), and it triggers a redirect flow for login. Then people can use GitHub or Google or Apple or their own provider, just like email. Every email provider could also be an OAuth provider.
GitHub is to git like Reddit was to forums. Centralized usernames and such were very nice, but it also has downsides that we’re now living with.
GitHub is still really, really nice in that it’s five seconds to throw up a repo that’s accessible worldwide (98% of the time lol) and everyone’s on there. Whatever replaces it (just like whatever replaces twitter) may be better in many ways, but it will be “worse” in others, even if just in splintering.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
True but GitLab is going to run into the same issues as GitHub, maybe even worse because GitLab doesn't have a trillion dollar multinational benefactor. Public corporation and developer tooling has never boded well, a current look at GitLab reflects this sentiment perfectly.
Which is why we should always champion FOSS for dev tooling as it's the only way a community can have a say in an industry dominated by unregulated tech behemoths.
> 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.
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
I also have a self hosted Foregejo on a Pi (but probably not much longer) that acts as a mirror of my GitHub. The main issues I keep facing are:
- Repositories seem to mirror fine for a few weeks and stop. Pretty useless. I have a PAT token for it that does not expire, and yet it seems to claim otherwise, despite the token working elsewhere when I test it.
- Sometimes there is nothing in the logs, sometimes it's the database being locked for some reason. The only thing that uses the database is Forgejo.
- So far I haven't been able to tell if this is Forgejo, crappy SD IO on the Pi causing database locks, or Forgejo sucking at being a mirror.
> 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.
> Open Source and the OSI are an industry plant. Look at who sponsors it.
This is ignorant to the history of Open Source software. Software has been open long before it was subsidized by large corporations.
"Computer software was created in the early half of the 20th century.[2][3][4] In the 1950s and into the 1960s, almost all softwares were produced by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration,[5] often shared as public-domain software." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...
You're talking about a different thing to OP. OP is talking about the OSI and the specific incarnation of 'open-source' that came with it, you are talking about the more general social pattern of open collaboration.
One problem with all of these licenses is that however the code is available, we can’t practically prevent the LLM companies from training on it (especially given that they don’t respect IP laws anyway). No idea what to do about this. Wonder if communities will have to move to some kind of fractured system where source is gated behind a login.
Rough times out there for transparent organizations.
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.
I find non-commercial licenses too extreme. People selling your free software or using it in a commercial way so long as they respect the license is a good thing
But our 25 year lax regulatory environment has created a world where the largest players abuse consumers and the competitive ecosystem.
Open source is one of the many strategies these companies have abused to create grave harm to our society. It's let them get further with our support and with less expenditure. It's given them an ethical smoke screen.
- Social media algorithms are the tobacco products of our century. Kids are growing up with a distorted sense of self worth, people are getting angrier and more polarized, and all of it is highly addictive - all to fuel corporate profits.
- The most popular and important computer form factor is controlled by a duopoly and we can't even own / repair / install / have rights to our devices.
- All hardware is becoming locked to device attestation, meanwhile companies are lobbying for "age verification" (read: full-on identity tracking).
- Distribution is being locked to monopolies. 92% of "URL bars" are owned by one company, and typing something into a computer goes through a bidding war protection racket.
I can go on and on about it. I shouldn't even have to. You know this.
A lot of this is because of a lack of proper competition. Since the DOJ / FTC / EU / ASEAN are being toothless (the latter are slowly waking up), the next best thing we can do is take away their open source abuse. Stop letting them use our work against us and the rest of the population.
I share your worries, but I don't blame open source for it. They would have done the same (or worst) without it.
Also, open source is one more justification on why we need to increase taxes on the very rich. At this point all of them have built their fortunes on it. Just like they do on the rest of public infrastructure.
Why would someone gladly provide their work as open source but draw the line at AI reading it and using that knowledge to help more programmers later? It makes no sense to me. I actively want all of my code to be read by AI.
+ they don’t want to help train a model that might ultimately put them out of work.
I don’t personally agree that AI are taking out jobs, but I do think it’s still a reasonable concern others have so I would sympathise if that were the rationale.
Doesn't seem inconsistent to me. I may want my code to be open source so that other humans can read it, understand it, build on it, and contribute to it.
I may also have a philosophical opposition to generative AI at the same time - there are plenty of environmental, societal, and intellectual-property costs that some may find unconscionable.
It's kind of breaking the social contract. Licences were drafted, conferences were held, and endless flamewars tried to codify what it means to collaboratively build, distribute, own and use open software.
Then came the model trainers, ignoring the entire discourse, reasoning: "if I can download it, it's mine too use". And then basically selling the resulting tech back to the community.
Not unlike big tech extracting money from open source, but at least the latter usually (somewhat maliciously) complied with the license.
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 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.
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 :)
> 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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is literaly just a bare repo over ssh, and a gitweb interface.
It's too trivial for anyone to be selling that. And I don't think there's a large market for $5-$10 barebones setup when GH is free and you can self host.
I've used Pikapods to host my Forgejo instance for about a year and have had absolutely no complaints. I use it for small Godot projects and have used the Git plugin in the Godot asset store to connect to it, so I don't even have to leave the editor to make commits or branches.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> I’m thinking about making public instance and use it with https, but minimize the attack surface, any recommendations especially about gitea/forgejo?
I've done this too in the past, I'm still running the internal/lan Forgejo instance, but not any public instance at the moment. But in the past, I've setup a public read-only instance, which mirrors my internal one, then one reverse-proxy connection from the internal to the public instance, which the public one uses for getting the git data. Then it mostly just kept on working by itself, whenever I changed anything in the internal Forgejo, the public one got updated, yet I could keep all issues, CI and more completely private and on lan.
Did you use some sort of intrusion prevention system? I'm using cloudflare's anti ddos service + crowdsec, but I'm still getting bombarded with hundreds of thousands of requests per month
When I adopted Foregjo I did so because I didn't like the sound of some political arguments across threads about some alleged security issues Foregjo raised with Gitea who allegedly ignored them.
What keeps you using Gitea? I'm wondering if I should try it over Foregejo now.
Nothing special. I am aware of the discussions for so long. I mostly spend my time making music with modular synths and migration to forgejo is not a priority right now, I don’t want to touch the setup. If you’re on forgejo I don’t think there’s any reason to try the gitea.
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.
People do want the advantages of decentralization, but they don't want to pay the price for it. Even worse, centralized systems are great for most of the time, the pain generally happens only in a short span, but then very intensely (imagine a merger and a sudden price spike). Decentralization is a little bit of pain all the time, for a lot of happiness only in the rare case where the centralized alternative collapses.
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.
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)).
I never suggested building everything from scratch. However, Forgejo is ultimately just a new dependency. Does abandoning GitHub Actions for Forgejo Actions eliminate lock-in? No, it’s merely a shift in dependency.
If the Forgejo core team announces tomorrow that their 'philosophy has changed' and overhauls the architecture, tens of thousands of 'independent' home servers will grumble, but they'll inevitably run git pull to update anyway. And eventually, they might migrate again. That cycle is inevitable, and I have no intention of denying it.
The issue in the context of this post is that it rejects dependency on GitHub while presenting Forgejo as the escape. If your defense is 'why reinvent the wheel,' you are essentially proving my point: we are just choosing a new center to depend on.
Beyond that, we might just be talking past each other at this point. I don't think you are wrong, and I have no intention of twisting your words. Your underlying point is likely this: GitHub's service quality has degraded, and with their aggressive AI strategies driving users away, it is strange to view the act of leaving negatively. I fully respect our difference of opinion there.
I honestly just got a bit annoyed earlier because you framed your reply as if I hadn't even read the article. Anyway, let's leave it at that. There is no reason to misrepresent your views, and no reason for us to argue further.
> If the Forgejo core team announces tomorrow that their 'philosophy has changed' and overhauls the architecture, tens of thousands of 'independent' home servers will grumble, but they'll inevitably run git pull to update anyway.
This is a hilarious - and wrong - thing to say considering Forgejo's raison d'être[1] and lineage.
If users just grumbled and ran git pull anyway, Forgejo would not exist, and neither would its fork-parent project (Gitea); everyone would be using Gogs under duress. Empirically, people care about the philosophy, which is why this particular fork of a fork is thriving.
What's the portability blocker with git? It's pretty easy to pull your repo and clone it to a new server, and you keep your history and everything I thought.
Nothing. That’s why SaaS providers like GitHub start to build up features like GitHub CI to lock people in. You can easily move the repo, but moving your full CI has a real cost that businesses will take into account when they are considering to move anything.
What do you think, what is the business for GitHub in providing limitless private and public repo hosting?
I think some people are mentally ill, and think decentralization is a libertarian ideal where they can have all benefits of society, but they don't have to pay for the roads, the fire department, etc. That some how, those things will spontaneously appear because of <free market babble>.
Others recognize there's some kind of more comfortable middle ground where decentralization means the same as a town/city/state type of social good that is independent and capable of working without larger centralized structures. Having to work towards it, pay money into it, etc, are expected but because the work that goes into maintaining the infrastructure has a clear line of derivation (taxes clearly go to X, Y, Z) would be a benefit.
It's typically the first class tho that dominates all conversations regarding decentralization, and that class includes the Epstein billionaires who just dont want laws to apply anywhere they want to do unethical, immoral and whatever. eg, money is the only law.
It could be a strategy, or it could be a sense of ethics. And your point makes sense, and I also agree with you. The first part of your comment is a bit harsh, but if you soften your reply a bit, it matches my thoughts. I'm giving you an upvote because I agree with your idea.
Thank you for taking the time to commen.
It's great to see someone who shares a similar mindset. Have a wonderful day, and I'll make sure to read the article you linked.
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.
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.
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.
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 (I'm guessing from your phrasing). Conversely, you use GitHub "just fine" under terms the leavers consider dealbreakers.
What you are baffled by are differences in value judgement.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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".
“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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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".
I completely share your sentiment about feeling irked about open source code being used to train commercial AI models. However, I think the battle is already lost - the nature of copyright and open source code philosophy (currently) means that there isn't any real way of preventing your code being used to train AI. Look at the legal precedents being set in courts where many of the BigTechs have actually pirated copyrighted media to train their AI, and the court has said "that's acceptable". (Ofcourse, the actual act of piracy - like Facebook did by downloading copyrighted material through torrents - may not be legal, but the courts may be lenient here too as there seems to be an undercurrent of government approval to do anything to win the "AI Race").
And, even if you move your repository somewhere else, can you really prevent anyone from uploading it to Github? To do so, you may have to create your open source license.
> However, I think the battle is already lost - the nature of copyright and open source code philosophy (currently) means that there isn't any real way of preventing your code being used to train AI.
Laws should make it a double-edged sword, make distillation explicitly legal.
Not much else they can do.
> Laws should make it a double-edged sword, make distillation explicitly legal.
Knowledge-distillation is already legal. Current case law says the none of outputs of any model is protected by copyright, so one could use it for whatever they want - including distillation. That is why the AI companies resort to ToS clauses to block distillation and/or training competing models.
What exactly did they train? Copilot is powered by claude, gemini, or ChatGPT these days.
Did they train autocomplete? I mean the code is open source so anyone can scrape it and train it too. I'm kind of glad they did train it because otherwise we'd still be stuck with Apple level AI models right now.
The whole reason we have so many models, including open weight models, that are all competitive with each other is because the data is free and anyone can be training off it. If the goal was to monetize the source code I guess the authors shouldn't make it open source.
> "GitHub Copilot is powered by generative AI models developed by GitHub, OpenAI, and Microsoft. It has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub."
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/github/copilot#fa...
Yeah have to agree here, Github Copilot itself doesn't have any first party models they use the frontiers. So, they didn't "train" using public repos but they probably allowed (or didn't prevent) the frontiers from pulling the repos along with the rest of the internet when creating their models.
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.
I mean, I never put my code on GitHub, but other people put it there, as they use GitHub: you can't not use GitHub. (Hell: even closed source projects, even ones that were never distributed even as a binary, if the code leaks, end up mirrored on GitHub.)
The training on "all open repositories" is the only training we heard about. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't beneath these greedy companies to train on other data, and respond "oops! we didn't that would happen" (by which they mean get found out).
Leaving is still the right move. But this applies to all centralized large services: Our use of Google and Google Drive, any Microsoft products, Adobe products, etc.
Don't forget a achievement badges.
> (...) I'm also remembering how GitHub used "all open repositories" to train their first Copilot without telling anyone.
This is a silly opinion to hold, isn't it? I mean, you release projects under a license with the express purpose of freely distributing your code among anyone in the world that may have any interest whatsoever, and even allow they themselves to share it with anyone they feel fit. But you are somehow outraged if people actually use said code?
Please make it make sense.
Because there's no way the code is distributed properly according to any of the OSS licenses. In fact, it claims authorship with nonsense bylines saying the LLM wrote it.
> Because there's no way the code is distributed properly according to any of the OSS licenses.
What are you talking about? There is no distribution, only read access.
> This is a silly opinion to hold, isn't it? I mean, you release projects under a license with the express purpose of freely distributing your code among anyone in the world that may have any interest whatsoever, and even allow they themselves to share it with anyone they feel fit. But you are somehow outraged if people actually use said code?
You're making things up: the outrage is not that people used it, it's that the licence requires attribution at least, and opening the derivative product at worst. Token providers that trained on open source did neither.
> Please make it make sense.
I am skeptical that you didn't know the reason for the outrage because it's been repeated in every single thread where this was discussed.
I myself repeated it multiple times each time this feigned confusion you display appears.
Like I am doing now, yet again.
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.
The "social component" is a big problem in actual FOSS.
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.
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".
Yes, what's one more reason to abandon the largest platform.
> The "social component" is a big problem in actual FOSS.
You're confusing things. The "social component" refers to people interacting with each other. Such as two developers working on a bug or a feature. Or a tester reporting a bug.
This is a big part of actual professional software development work.
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"!
What on earth is the social component of GitHub? I assume I’m missing what’s useful to people here as it keeps getting brought up, but what is it? Is it the stars on a repo? Are people doing something else big with all of this?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123524
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.
I can’t wait for federation in Forgejo. With that, there’s honestly no reason not to host your own forge.
The reason will be that not everyone wants to deal wit maintaining a self-hosted box.
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.
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.
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.
it's just a few clicks, starting at 2 bucks a month.
https://www.pikapods.com/apps
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I would argue GitHub does a lot more centralization than just those two. It's an entire developer platform centered around Git. It does hundreds of other things that some developers use, and some don't.
GitHub really doesn't have hundreds of additional working features beyond git.
GitHub also centralises abuse detection. I'm not thinking about sophisticated attacks here so much as dealing with plain old spam. That's fairly easy to deal with on a tiny scale, and possible on a huge scale, but it's a great pain at a medium scale.
Tangled is working on something like that. I believe they are federating on the @protocol.
https://tangled.org/
I am very active on bsky and I also use some other ATProto applications like tangled. I think this is the first time I have seen anyone refer to ATProto with an '@'
It's less used but the @ is the atproto logo. I default to saying aye-tee instead of at though. It just sounds better.
> 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.
The "missing" piece is just everyone implementing OAuth Dynamic Client Registration. Then kernel.org could be its own OAuth provider, and Linus could log into someone's Forgejo with his kernel.org login.
Just like "log in with Google", you should be able to do "log in with OAuth", you type your email or domain (or your browser fills it), and it triggers a redirect flow for login. Then people can use GitHub or Google or Apple or their own provider, just like email. Every email provider could also be an OAuth provider.
GitHub is to git like Reddit was to forums. Centralized usernames and such were very nice, but it also has downsides that we’re now living with.
GitHub is still really, really nice in that it’s five seconds to throw up a repo that’s accessible worldwide (98% of the time lol) and everyone’s on there. Whatever replaces it (just like whatever replaces twitter) may be better in many ways, but it will be “worse” in others, even if just in splintering.
Signed commits could solve this in a more decentralized way if people post their public keys on their own domains.
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/
[1]: https://marlam.de/msmtp/download/
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).
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.
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.
"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)
I think you're forgetting issue tracking and CI.
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).
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.
Radicle CI does exist but it is admittedly fairly early on in development
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.
True but GitLab is going to run into the same issues as GitHub, maybe even worse because GitLab doesn't have a trillion dollar multinational benefactor. Public corporation and developer tooling has never boded well, a current look at GitLab reflects this sentiment perfectly.
Which is why we should always champion FOSS for dev tooling as it's the only way a community can have a say in an industry dominated by unregulated tech behemoths.
> True but GitLab is going to run into the same issues as GitHub
Will they? Has Gitlab doubled down on "Agentic AI" and thus require 30x capacity to support current users, while being kneecapped by Azure?
> 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.
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
I also have a self hosted Foregejo on a Pi (but probably not much longer) that acts as a mirror of my GitHub. The main issues I keep facing are:
- Repositories seem to mirror fine for a few weeks and stop. Pretty useless. I have a PAT token for it that does not expire, and yet it seems to claim otherwise, despite the token working elsewhere when I test it.
- Sometimes there is nothing in the logs, sometimes it's the database being locked for some reason. The only thing that uses the database is Forgejo.
- So far I haven't been able to tell if this is Forgejo, crappy SD IO on the Pi causing database locks, or Forgejo sucking at being a mirror.
Probably the mirror? I have zero problems like that on my Forgejo Pi setup. I am not mirroring
SD card seems the likeliest culprit. Some of them are really bad quality.
> 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.
> Open Source and the OSI are an industry plant. Look at who sponsors it.
This is ignorant to the history of Open Source software. Software has been open long before it was subsidized by large corporations.
"Computer software was created in the early half of the 20th century.[2][3][4] In the 1950s and into the 1960s, almost all softwares were produced by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration,[5] often shared as public-domain software." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...
You're talking about a different thing to OP. OP is talking about the OSI and the specific incarnation of 'open-source' that came with it, you are talking about the more general social pattern of open collaboration.
One problem with all of these licenses is that however the code is available, we can’t practically prevent the LLM companies from training on it (especially given that they don’t respect IP laws anyway). No idea what to do about this. Wonder if communities will have to move to some kind of fractured system where source is gated behind a login.
Rough times out there for transparent organizations.
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.
I find non-commercial licenses too extreme. People selling your free software or using it in a commercial way so long as they respect the license is a good thing
When you come into a convo saying even Stallman isn't extreme enough, it's probably a good time to take a step back and evaluate your life.
I don't see a reason anyone needs to stop and evaluate their life for this reason.
Is it a danger to anyone, or damaging in any way? I think not.
Does one have to be a danger before they should evaluate their life? I sure hope not.
I don't feel comfortable telling anyone they should evaluate their life for such a silly reason.
Can? Sure. Should? Very questionable.
I'd call your statement more "extreme" than any of the stallman's statements on software.
surethingderbud
I'm actually a capitalist.
But our 25 year lax regulatory environment has created a world where the largest players abuse consumers and the competitive ecosystem.
Open source is one of the many strategies these companies have abused to create grave harm to our society. It's let them get further with our support and with less expenditure. It's given them an ethical smoke screen.
- Social media algorithms are the tobacco products of our century. Kids are growing up with a distorted sense of self worth, people are getting angrier and more polarized, and all of it is highly addictive - all to fuel corporate profits.
- The most popular and important computer form factor is controlled by a duopoly and we can't even own / repair / install / have rights to our devices.
- All hardware is becoming locked to device attestation, meanwhile companies are lobbying for "age verification" (read: full-on identity tracking).
- Distribution is being locked to monopolies. 92% of "URL bars" are owned by one company, and typing something into a computer goes through a bidding war protection racket.
I can go on and on about it. I shouldn't even have to. You know this.
A lot of this is because of a lack of proper competition. Since the DOJ / FTC / EU / ASEAN are being toothless (the latter are slowly waking up), the next best thing we can do is take away their open source abuse. Stop letting them use our work against us and the rest of the population.
I share your worries, but I don't blame open source for it. They would have done the same (or worst) without it.
Also, open source is one more justification on why we need to increase taxes on the very rich. At this point all of them have built their fortunes on it. Just like they do on the rest of public infrastructure.
I hope you find your peace.
This is all expected in capitalism as these are mechanisms to extract more profit.
We need more socialists in power...
I think you should take many steps back and seriously reevaluate your life.
Why would someone gladly provide their work as open source but draw the line at AI reading it and using that knowledge to help more programmers later? It makes no sense to me. I actively want all of my code to be read by AI.
A couple of valid reasons:
+ they don’t want to pay the bandwidth costs
+ they don’t want to help train a model that might ultimately put them out of work.
I don’t personally agree that AI are taking out jobs, but I do think it’s still a reasonable concern others have so I would sympathise if that were the rationale.
Doesn't seem inconsistent to me. I may want my code to be open source so that other humans can read it, understand it, build on it, and contribute to it.
I may also have a philosophical opposition to generative AI at the same time - there are plenty of environmental, societal, and intellectual-property costs that some may find unconscionable.
It's kind of breaking the social contract. Licences were drafted, conferences were held, and endless flamewars tried to codify what it means to collaboratively build, distribute, own and use open software.
Then came the model trainers, ignoring the entire discourse, reasoning: "if I can download it, it's mine too use". And then basically selling the resulting tech back to the community.
Not unlike big tech extracting money from open source, but at least the latter usually (somewhat maliciously) complied with the license.
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.
Thank you for this, GitSocial is a very cool piece of software!
github is a social network. git hosting is just a minor feature. thats why none of these alternatives ever take off .
People keep saying this, but I’ve never used the social aspects of GitHub beyond not having to create a new user for a new project.
If the projects I am interested in are elsewhere I’ll meet them where they are.
TIL. Thanks!
You're welcome! I'm the creator of GitSocial, happy to answer any questions.
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.
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 :)
> 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 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!
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/
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.
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.
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/
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
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.
It's too decentralized for my taste IMO.
I like using radicle.xyz instead.
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.
This is literaly just a bare repo over ssh, and a gitweb interface.
It's too trivial for anyone to be selling that. And I don't think there's a large market for $5-$10 barebones setup when GH is free and you can self host.
Just like pikapods supports running things like actual budget for you - https://actualbudget.org/docs/install/pikapods
Something similar from them or digital ocean or linode or Hetzner would be a win.
Pika does offer Forgejo and Gitea.
I've used Pikapods to host my Forgejo instance for about a year and have had absolutely no complaints. I use it for small Godot projects and have used the Git plugin in the Godot asset store to connect to it, so I don't even have to leave the editor to make commits or branches.
SourceHut sounds very close to what you describe: https://sr.ht/
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.
I think Gitlab is probably the best option, or gitea. Personally I'm not a fan of Codeberg - I think their licensing is a mess.
Which licensing?
Their filter for projects being on their site is "we'll know it when we see it",
SourceHut is good, and despite you not wanting to self host, self hosting a git repo is one of the easiest things to self host
Just hosting the code is hard now, right? The hosting company is signing up for a battle against infinite-appetite scraping organizations.
Unfortunately all the current managed offerings aren't very good. I'm still wondering why nobody starts a new startup
There are multiple alternatives to Github for example Gitlab, Codeberg or sourcehut
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?
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.
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?
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.
> I’m thinking about making public instance and use it with https, but minimize the attack surface, any recommendations especially about gitea/forgejo?
I've done this too in the past, I'm still running the internal/lan Forgejo instance, but not any public instance at the moment. But in the past, I've setup a public read-only instance, which mirrors my internal one, then one reverse-proxy connection from the internal to the public instance, which the public one uses for getting the git data. Then it mostly just kept on working by itself, whenever I changed anything in the internal Forgejo, the public one got updated, yet I could keep all issues, CI and more completely private and on lan.
Did you use some sort of intrusion prevention system? I'm using cloudflare's anti ddos service + crowdsec, but I'm still getting bombarded with hundreds of thousands of requests per month
When I adopted Foregjo I did so because I didn't like the sound of some political arguments across threads about some alleged security issues Foregjo raised with Gitea who allegedly ignored them.
What keeps you using Gitea? I'm wondering if I should try it over Foregejo now.
Nothing special. I am aware of the discussions for so long. I mostly spend my time making music with modular synths and migration to forgejo is not a priority right now, I don’t want to touch the setup. If you’re on forgejo I don’t think there’s any reason to try the gitea.
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.
People do want the advantages of decentralization, but they don't want to pay the price for it. Even worse, centralized systems are great for most of the time, the pain generally happens only in a short span, but then very intensely (imagine a merger and a sudden price spike). Decentralization is a little bit of pain all the time, for a lot of happiness only in the rare case where the centralized alternative collapses.
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
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.
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)).
I never suggested building everything from scratch. However, Forgejo is ultimately just a new dependency. Does abandoning GitHub Actions for Forgejo Actions eliminate lock-in? No, it’s merely a shift in dependency.
If the Forgejo core team announces tomorrow that their 'philosophy has changed' and overhauls the architecture, tens of thousands of 'independent' home servers will grumble, but they'll inevitably run git pull to update anyway. And eventually, they might migrate again. That cycle is inevitable, and I have no intention of denying it.
The issue in the context of this post is that it rejects dependency on GitHub while presenting Forgejo as the escape. If your defense is 'why reinvent the wheel,' you are essentially proving my point: we are just choosing a new center to depend on.
Beyond that, we might just be talking past each other at this point. I don't think you are wrong, and I have no intention of twisting your words. Your underlying point is likely this: GitHub's service quality has degraded, and with their aggressive AI strategies driving users away, it is strange to view the act of leaving negatively. I fully respect our difference of opinion there.
I honestly just got a bit annoyed earlier because you framed your reply as if I hadn't even read the article. Anyway, let's leave it at that. There is no reason to misrepresent your views, and no reason for us to argue further.
> If the Forgejo core team announces tomorrow that their 'philosophy has changed' and overhauls the architecture, tens of thousands of 'independent' home servers will grumble, but they'll inevitably run git pull to update anyway.
This is a hilarious - and wrong - thing to say considering Forgejo's raison d'être[1] and lineage.
If users just grumbled and ran git pull anyway, Forgejo would not exist, and neither would its fork-parent project (Gitea); everyone would be using Gogs under duress. Empirically, people care about the philosophy, which is why this particular fork of a fork is thriving.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33749757
Decentralized means no single center. Of course people want it because the single centralized management is insufficient for some reason or another.
There is no difference between what you say people cry for and what you say they actually want.
I think decentralization is the wrong answer for what people really need: portability.
What's the portability blocker with git? It's pretty easy to pull your repo and clone it to a new server, and you keep your history and everything I thought.
Nothing. That’s why SaaS providers like GitHub start to build up features like GitHub CI to lock people in. You can easily move the repo, but moving your full CI has a real cost that businesses will take into account when they are considering to move anything.
What do you think, what is the business for GitHub in providing limitless private and public repo hosting?
I think some people are mentally ill, and think decentralization is a libertarian ideal where they can have all benefits of society, but they don't have to pay for the roads, the fire department, etc. That some how, those things will spontaneously appear because of <free market babble>.
Others recognize there's some kind of more comfortable middle ground where decentralization means the same as a town/city/state type of social good that is independent and capable of working without larger centralized structures. Having to work towards it, pay money into it, etc, are expected but because the work that goes into maintaining the infrastructure has a clear line of derivation (taxes clearly go to X, Y, Z) would be a benefit.
It's typically the first class tho that dominates all conversations regarding decentralization, and that class includes the Epstein billionaires who just dont want laws to apply anywhere they want to do unethical, immoral and whatever. eg, money is the only law.
It could be a strategy, or it could be a sense of ethics. And your point makes sense, and I also agree with you. The first part of your comment is a bit harsh, but if you soften your reply a bit, it matches my thoughts. I'm giving you an upvote because I agree with your idea.
The first paragraph comes from the Epstein files. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/09/jeffrey-e...
Thank you for taking the time to commen. It's great to see someone who shares a similar mindset. Have a wonderful day, and I'll make sure to read the article you linked.
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.
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.
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.
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 (I'm guessing from your phrasing). Conversely, you use GitHub "just fine" under terms the leavers consider dealbreakers.
What you are baffled by are differences in value judgement.
I'm quite happy with Forgejo. I've moved all of my projects to my own instance and keep it accessible from Tailscale only.
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.
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
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.
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.
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'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.
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?
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.
Can you push from Forgejo to GitHub for actions until you can find a replacement?
CircleCI?
Use gitea which has github actions compatibility.
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.
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".
“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 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.
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.
it's about GitHub's issues in general, including outages. every section gets somewhat equal amount of attention
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.
Moving from a selfhosted gitlab to forgejo too.
Gitlab it’s getting to heavy for my needs
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
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.
Wasn't gitea a fork of forgejo?
The other way around; Forgejo is a fork of Gitea.
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.
They make it rather easy by providing an audio pronunciation: 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"
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.
Apparently it's pronounced (phonetically) as for-JAY-oh, an audio sample is here: https://forgejo.org/faq/
You piqued my curiosity :)
edit: Ah, I was beaten to the punch :(
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.
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.
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.
Super interesting, mind sharing your exclusions and hooks?
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
GitHub is becoming Sourceforge. Remember them?
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?
CI/CD, package registry, issue tracking in one place?
Fair enough for the formers.
Issue tracking though...
Why not Gitea mind me asking? Anything in particular?
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.
gitea runs on github u mean the source or the hosting?
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
Is Forgejo Actions any good? CI/CD would be cool.
We just released support for Forgejo with RWX CI/CD: https://www.rwx.com/docs/getting-started/forgejo
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.
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)
It’s act runner. So you can continue using GitHub actions with minor changes
Question for anyone, why do people use GitHub or an alternative rather than just spinning up your own Gitea docker container or similar?
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.
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