The Forge We Deserve

I thought this was gonna be an article about Sourceforge

Anyone remember that? It used to be such an important website and went down the tubes.

I personally just self-host. The project that I'm working on right now uses Gitea internally with an action runner.

I use Digital Ocean and run a Nomad cluster on top of that. Gitea and its action runner builds container images and then pushes nomad job definitions to the cluster. I have zero downtime deployment and rolling deploys. Dagger.io is in there somewhere to make local CI mirror what happens in the action runner.

Setting up Gitea was honestly just an afternoon of work. The sqlite database is backed up to Cloudflare R2 and the code is mirrored. It's unlikely that my project will take off to the point that I'll need to upgrade Gitea to something else, but it's extremely easy to setup, maintain, and build CI/CD on top of.

Forgejo is mentioned, but its federation goals aren't. I guess the author isn't aware of them.

https://forgefed.org/

Very timely as I just set up Forgejo yesterday. There were immediate unexpected benefits moving off GitHub. It’s hosted on an Orbstack VM on a Mac Mini M4 on my local Tailscale network and the UI is incredibly snappy and quick to browse. Because it’s located inside my tailnet with no public access I don’t need to setup authentication, so agents running inside our network can clone a repo with no fuss (I just protect master branch pushes with a config rule). Github auth is a pain to securely distribute, when you self-host the problem just disappears. Also because it’s running inside our tailnet we can use Forgejo actions for infrastructure-related tasks: Ansible scripts that provision or maintain Mac Minis or Linux servers on the same tailnet over Tailscale SSH. Much simpler than Kubernetes which would be overkill for a small homelab/startup. And the Orbstack VM is literally two clicks to backup and restore or move to another host — I setup the VM running Forgejo on my local MacBook then a few minutes later exported the VM image and transferred it to a Mac Mini server in a few clicks. Backup and restore an entire server to a single file — that is the fastest and easiest server migration I ever performed. I literally can’t think of a single reason I would want to go back to GitHub. Forgejo is a joy to use.

I'm way more hopeful in a fully decentralized protocol like Forgefed* than some AT still-centralized thing.

* https://forgefed.org/

It seems ironic, that in the social media space, AT protocol based instances are basically centralised (Bluesky) and ActivityPub based instances (Fediverse, Mastodon) have a much healthier grade of federation.

Whereas in the "forges" space, it seems Tangled drives federation forward much faster than the ActivityPub-based federation features of Forgejo/Gitea (which are progressing really slow).

Tangled and Radicle are both really cool, but add too much mental gymnastics compared to just running Forgejo.

What I like about (the idea of) ForgeFed is that it lets existing forges speak to each other.

In practice I probably just need Forgejo and GitLab to be able to speak to each other.

I believe the future of GitHub, for me, is to solve two problems:

  - Discoverability for public open-source projects
  - Backup since self-hosting is fragile long-term

So many times when I try to visit the source code of some package uploaded to crates.io, the self-hosted git no longer exists.

GitHub repos sit stale for decades.

For day-to-day reliance, my self-hosted Forgejo and CI runners have better uptime.

Only pet peeve with Forgejo:

  - It's a highly active project, RFCs, tons of PRs and issues.
  - Becoming a daily user, I want to extend it, and in its beautiful simplicity, it's not highly extensible.
  - So to avoid maintaining a fork of a very active project, extending it in unison is a social commitment.

What a luxury problem, but still.

I'd like to see more hosted Forgejo solutions pop up; it's very low-resource cost.

The forge we deserve is the one that is built for jj and local review.

I would love to see a forge that consists of composable components, self-host able with federated identities and maybe a few centralized indexers

I'm pretty sure the actual forge we deserve at this point is one that is a membership organisation, eg, owned by its (paying) members.

Members elect the board which chooses the CEO. A cooperative, in other words. The tech is a solved problem, with lots of open source around to do it. Enough members means paid operations and development staff, or outsourcing one or both, or grants to open source devs, etc. The possibility is there.

That's how we prevent cultural drift: by actually controlling the company.

> So, what’s next? There are a lot of Git forges out there.

How about some non-Git forges (like Mercurial forges)? That's what I'd like to see.

> Or perhaps everyone moves to some hot-new-AI-first-forge, and then we go through the same cycle of enshittification in 10-20 years.

I don't think it would take years for an AI first platform to enshittify, it would be instant.