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Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

jorijn.com

151–160 of 380 posts

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#151
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#152
> 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.

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#153
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 think you should take many steps back and seriously reevaluate your life.

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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 be…

> "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...

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#155
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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",

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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"!

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#157
post #85

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.

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#158
post #15

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.

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.

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#159

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…

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.

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.

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#160

“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.

it's about GitHub's issues in general, including outages. every section gets somewhat equal amount of attention
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