Leaving GitHub for Forgejo • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#61

Post by jdw64 » Wed, May 13, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

cyanydeez wrote: post #50

jdw64 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#62

Post by nottorp » Wed, May 13, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

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.

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#63

Post by epicide » Wed, May 13, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #62

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.

SourceHut sounds very close to what you describe: https://sr.ht/

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#64

Post by felixsebastian » Wed, May 13, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

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

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#65

Post by 0xbadcafebee » Wed, May 13, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #62

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.

Unfortunately all the current managed offerings aren't very good. I'm still wondering why nobody starts a new startup

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#66

Post by perkovsky » Wed, May 13, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #2

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.

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#67

Post by maccard » Wed, May 13, 2026, 1:56 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #62

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.

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.

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#68

Post by senko » Wed, May 13, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #62

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.

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#69

Post by that_lurker » Wed, May 13, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #62

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.

There are multiple alternatives to Github for example Gitlab, Codeberg or sourcehut

Re: Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

#70

Post by pixlmint » Wed, May 13, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #2

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…

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.