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#github#forgejo#code#git#source#open#don#more#self#https
Discussion (183 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Git is decentralized, GitHub is just another place you can host your code in, but you can push your code to multiple remote servers.
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".
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.
Laws should make it a double-edged sword, make distillation explicitly legal.
Not much else they can do.
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.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/github/copilot#fa...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
One issue is that issues tend to be monotonically increasing numbers, and references to old issues vs. new issues get confusing over time.
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.
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.
https://tangled.org/
Agree, I feel like a true alternative should focus on this missing piece to bridge the gap.
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 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.
[0]: https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/
[1]: https://marlam.de/msmtp/download/
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 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.
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.
Gitlab it’s getting to heavy for my needs
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.
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.
It's a shame that all these companies that benefited from open source have poisoned the industry like this
- 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.
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.
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...
Rough times out there for transparent organizations.
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.
Is it a danger to anyone, or damaging in any way? I think not.
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.
+ 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.
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.
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.
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.
If the projects I am interested in are elsewhere I’ll meet them where they are.
When/if you need to change hosting providers, you get to lose zero data in Fossil because of it.
[1] https://fossil-scm.org/
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 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.
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!
There is no difference between what you say people cry for and what you say they actually want.
>I moved my code from GitHub to a self-hosted Forgejo
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.
What do you think, what is the business for GitHub in providing limitless private and public repo hosting?
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.
Has anyone tried this?
[0] https://tangled.org/
[1]: https://tangled.org/mitchellh.com/tack
I like using radicle.xyz instead.
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.
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.
Something similar from them or digital ocean or linode or Hetzner would be a win.
Pika does offer Forgejo and Gitea.
I’m thinking about making public instance and use it with https, but minimize the attack surface, any recommendations especially about gitea/forgejo?
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?
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.
What keeps you using Gitea? I'm wondering if I should try it over Foregejo now.
https://vale.rocks/micros/20260511-0440
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.
As a long term GitHub customer, I see many practical and personal reasons to move away from the platform. I've seen a handful of similar posts lately. A few years ago this would have felt totally fringe, but now all of a sudden it really doesn't. For now, for me and many others GitHub still works great, and is very convenient. But the alternatives are getting even easier to self implement all the time.
GitHub pulled it off for 5ish years before that began to change, and it was only last year when they stopped having their own "CEO".
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
With my American accent, I don't quite say it exactly like the recording, but pretty close: "for-JAY-oh"
You piqued my curiosity :)
edit: Ah, I was beaten to the punch :(
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.
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 :)
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.
Issue tracking though...
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.
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.
also: releases, packages, actions... its all very convenient