LarsVH

Forgejo is Great

TL;DR: I've been self-hosting a Forgejo instance to replace GitHub for my personal usage, and it's been great.

If you loosely follow stuff happening in tech, you might have heard about GitHub getting worse by the year. I'm not a hardcore user of GitHub, so I didn't feel strongly about any of it, but even as an infrequent user of GitHub I've had my gripes with the platform.

  1. Browsing files is slow: moving through a projects directories and files using their web file explorer is at times slow and finicky. When navigating to a directory or file, the on page loading bar might visually hang but when I refresh the tab it very quickly shows me the page I'm navigating too. So when this happens my first response isn't to wait out the loading bar because GitHub is doing something important, but to refresh the tab because something weird happened to the front-end.

  2. Outages: Like I've said, I don't use GitHub much, but even I've experienced a couple outages throughout the years which didn't take an insignificant time to be resolved.

  3. Owning your stuff: GitHub is free, but that comes at a cost. Not owning the infra your code is hosted on. AI training on your code which you have to opt out of instead of in (and they probably won't respect your decision anyway). And the possibility you might get banned by some automated system or because a person with power didn't like what you were up too (NightmareEclipse had to self-host Windows exploits because they got banned from GitHub because Microsoft owns GitHub and Windows).

Forgejo gets rid of all the listed pain points about GitHub:

  1. Browsing files is very fast and responsive!
  2. I haven't experienced an outage yet.
  3. I own my content.

Of course there are downside:

  1. You are responsible for the infra and its backups.
  2. The software might be free, but hardware isn't.
  3. Your time isn't free either, but you'll learn a thing or two.

Despite that though I think for most devs its worth it to at least give something like self-hosting a shot. There is an abundance of platforms and software that make it easy to get started nowadays.

For instance, I use Hetzner instead of my own hardware at home, I might do that one day but for now I think the trade-off I've made in convince vs independence is worth it.