Thank God GitHub is... oh.

https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

I think that's the moment when you choose to self host your whatever git wrapper. It really isn't that complicated to do and even allows for some fun (as in cheap and productive) setups where your forge is on your local network or really close to your region and you (maybe) only mirror or backup to a bigger system like Codeberg/GitHub.

In our case, we also use that as an opportunity to mirror OCI/package repositories for dependencies we use in our apps and during development so not only builds are faster but also we don't abuse free web endpoints with our CI/CD requests.

Philosophically I think it's terrible that Cloudflare has become a middleman in a huge and important swath of the internet. As a user, it largely makes my life much worse. It limits my browser, my ability to protect myself via VPNs, etc, and I am just browsing normally, not attacking anything. Pragmatically though, as a webmaster/admin/whatever you want to call it nowadays, Cloudflare is basically a necessity. I've started putting things behind it because if I don't, 99%+ of my traffic is bots, and often bots clearly scanning for vulnerabilities (I run mostly zero PHP sites, yet my traffic logs are often filled with requests like /admin.php and /wp-admin.php and all the wordpress things, and constant crawls from clearly not search engines that download everything and use robots.txt as a guide of what to crawl rather than what not to crawl. I haven't been DDoSed yet, but I've had images and PDFs and things downloaded so many times by these things that it costs me money. For some things where I or my family are the only legitimate users, I can just firewall-cmd all IPs except my own, but even then it's maintenance work I don't want to have to do.

I've tried many of the alternatives, and they often fail even on legitimate usecases. I've been blocked more by the alternatives than I have by Cloudflare, especially that one that does a proof of work. It works about 80% of the time, but that 20% is really, really annoying to the point that when I see that scren pop up I just browse away.

It's really a disheartening state we find ourselves in. I don't think my principles/values have been tested more in the real world than the last few years.

And pretty much all of them, ByteDance, OpenAI, AWS, Claude, various I couldn't recognize. I basically just had to block all of them to get reasonable performance for a server running on a mini-pc.

I was going to move to codeberg at some point, but they had downtime when I was considering it, I'd rather deal with that myself then.

> the worst thing ever for me as a developer is having the urge to code and not being able to access my remote.

Makes it seem like GitHub/Codeberg has to be online for you to be able to code, is that really the case? If so, how does that happen, you only edit code directly in the GitHub web UI or how does one end up in that situation?

[1] https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

Well, Codeberg doesn't have all the features I did use of Gitlab, but for my own projects I don't really need them either.

It's funny how we traded server maintenance for CI vendor lock-in and now keep circling back to which pain we hate more.

GitHub’s hosted runners support a grant total of two architectures.

The only forges which I’ve seen with more variety are distributios’ forges usually hosting their own runners.

The whole PR and code review experience is much more important to me. Github is striving to set a high bar, but is also hilariously bad in some ways. Similarly the whole issue system is passable on Github, but doesn't really reach the state of the art of issue systems from 20 years ago

Why? I know plenty of teams which are fine with repo and CI being separate tools as long as there is integration between the 2.

I think the real problem is we were sold all these complex processes that supposedly deliver better results, while in reality for most people and orgs it's just cargo culting, like with Kubernetes, for example. We can get rid of 90% of them and be just fine. You easily get away without any kind of CI in teams of less than 5-7 people I would argue - just have some sane rules and make everyone follow them (like run unit tests before submitting a PR).

[1] https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug

Wire transfer is €10

Stripe is €5

With PayPal you can send €0.01 if you want

Or Liberapay, as little as €0.01 per week

I assume this isn't optimal for a business setup, but for personal projects, I don't miss GitHub Actions at all.

The part of the FOSS community that embraces proprietary dependencies are there, but there’s a lot of the community outside of it.

Fortunately, GitHub is pushing hard for folks to want to move away.

It's worth $50 just this month, according to them, but I don't see anyone else offering the mac runners that account for most of it.

For all the complaints, I test my packages that actually need it across dozens of architecture and OS combinations with a mix of runners, nested virtualization and qemu binfmt, all on their free platform.

1: https://code.storage/

For how infrequent I interface with Codeberg I have to say that my experience has been pretty terrible when it comes to availability.

So I guess the answer is: the availability is bad enough that even infrequent interactions with it are a problem.

I can understand that work with other active contributors, but I agree with you that it is a daft state of affairs for a solo or mostly-solo project.

Though if you have your repo online even away from the big places, it will get hit by the scrapers and you will end up with admin to do because of that, even if it doesn't block your normal workflow because your main remote is not public.

Forgejo does support mirrors, just not codeberg.

Even with the best habits, there will be the few times a month where you forgot to push everything up and you’re blocked from work.

Codeberg needs to meet the highest ability levels for it to be viable.

[1]: https://huijzer.xyz/posts/55/installing-forgejo-with-a-separ...

[2]: https://huijzer.xyz/posts/55/installing-forgejo-with-a-separ...

Hence Tangled and ForgeFed (which I believe is integrating in Forejo)

It seems like to be a serious CI platform they really need to change Windows and Mac binaries for runners so you can build for those platforms.

And this is more of a Forgejo issue than a Codeberg issue specifically.

But also, I’d also throw out there the idea that CI doesn’t have to be at the same website as your source control. It’s nice that GitHub actions are conveniently part of the product but it’s not even really the top CI system out there.

I use Namespace (https://namespace.so) and I hook it up both to my personal GitHub as well as my personal Forgejo. I’m in the process of moving from the former to the latter!

And so we go, forever in circles, until enough of us move to other platforms regardless of where the existing community is. Just like how GitHub found its community in the early days, when most people (afaik) was using SourceForge, if anything.

"The community" will always remain on GitHub, if everyone just upload code to where "the community" already is. If enough of us stop using GitHub by default, and instead use something else, eventually "the community" will be there too, but it is somewhat of a chicken-and-egg problem, I admit.

I myself workaround this by dropping the whole idea that I'm writing software for others, and I only write it for myself, so if people want it, go to my personal Gitea instance and grab it if you want, I couldn't care less about stars and "publicity" or whatever people nowadays care about. But I'm also lucky enough to already have a network, it might require other's to build their network on GitHub first, then also be able to do something similar, and it'll all work out in the end.

It's a shame. The people who control the money successfully committed enshittification against open source.

Of course, that mostly goes for projects big enough to already have an indepedent community.

Hey, I’m building Monohub - as a GitHub alternative, and having private repositories is perhaps a key feature - it started as a place for me to host my own random stuff. Monohub [dot] dev is the URL. It’s quite early in development, so it’s quite rough around the edges. It has PR support though.

Hosted in EU, incorporated in EU.

Would be happy if you tried it out — maybe it’s something for you.

Edit: you can have a look at a public repository I have to see what it looks like now: https://monohub.dev/@tbayramov/efcore-audit-timestamps

Hmm all that operational overhead... Of an ssh server? If you literally just want a place to push some code, then that really isn't that hard.

https://docs.codeberg.org/codeberg-pages/

Mental note, make sure my robots.txt files contain a few references to slowly returning pages full of almost nonsense that link back to each other endlessly…

Not complete nonsense, that would be reasonably easy to detect and ignore. Perhaps repeats of your other content with every 5th word swapped with a random one from elsewhere in the content, every 4th word randomly misspelt, every seventh word reversed, every seventh sentence reversed, add a random sprinkling of famous names (Sir John Major, Arc de Triomphe, Sarah Jane Smith, Viltvodle VI) that make little sense in context, etc. Not enough change that automatic crap detection sees it as an obvious trap, but more than enough that ingesting data from your site into any model has enough detrimental effect to token weightings to at least undo any beneficial effect it might have had otherwise.

And when setting traps like this, make sure the response is slow enough that it won't use much bandwidth, and the serving process is very lightweight, and just in case that isn't enough make sure it aborts and errors out if any load metric goes above a given level.

They generate a URL for every version of every file on every commit and every branch and tag, and if that wasn't enough, n(n+1)/2 git diffs for every file on every commit it has exited on. Even a relatively small git repo with a few hundred files and commit explodes into millions of URLs in the crawl frontier. Server side many of these are very expensive to generate as well so it's really not a fantastic interaction, crawler and git host.

If you run a web crawler, you need to add git host detection to actively avoid walking into them.

The idea that you shouldn't need a code hosting platform because git is decentralized is so out of place that it is genuinely puzzling how often it pops up.

A contributor maintains a tested re-release of Forgejo Runner for Windows: https://github.com/Crown0815/Forgejo-runner-windows-builder

But, pull it down and build it, and it will work.

I think at this point the bigger barrier to me with leaving GitHub (professionally, at least) is all the non-GitHub stuff that integrates nicely with it and badly or not at all with other solutions. And like, I don't blame tool providers for making a rational economic choice in that regard, but if leaving GitHub means leaving seamless Sentry, Depot, Linear, editor plugins, AI integrations, etc that makes it a tougher pill to swallow.

I worked for years at a shop that had in-house GitLab and we felt this pain first hand all the time. GitLab tries to be a one-stop shop and own the whole project management and testing/deployment workflow by building everything in house, but there were always gaps and it was hard not to be jealous of places that just did everything on GitHub and could use whatever best in class saas stuff they wanted.

Gitlab has been tracking a federation feature since at least 2018 [1], and I expect bitbucket, sourcehut, gitea, and others would move quickly on something like this as well, but there needs to be a protocol defined and some kind of plan for handling spam/abuse.

[1]: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/work_items/16514

Granted, self-hosting git is not feasible for everyone, but GitHub + self hosted runners seems like a very good option.

Mine syncs a few repos to github to make them public, and planning to add Codeberg in as well ala POSSE [2].

1. https://forgejo.org/docs/next/user/repo-mirror/

2. https://indieweb.org/POSSE

That's what I do. Control your entire world yourself.

The parent post mentionned: "the worst thing ever for me as a developer is having the urge to code and not being able to access my remote."

Emphasis one "code", not triaging issues, merging other people's branches, etc.

Besides there are tools to sync forgejo repositories including PRs and issues.

SourceForge was abandoned due to UX issues and the adware debacle; at the same time, GitHub started making changes which made it more viable to use the platform to distribute binary releases.

The deficiencies of GitHub are not critical enough for me to care, and if it ever gets that bad, pushing somewhere else and putting a few "WE HAVE MOVED" links isn't a big deal.

And "the community" isn't moving to Codeberg because Codeberg can't support "the community" without a massive scale up.

I'm not trying defend github here. The largest platform could have been anyone who took advantage of the early opportunities in the space, which just happens to be Github. But discoverability is still a nagging problem. I don't think that even a federated system (using activitypub, atproto or whatever else out there) is going to solve that problem. We need a solution that can scour the entire code hosting space like search engines do (but collaboratively, not aggressively like LLM scrapers).

    # locally
    ssh git@example.com
    
    # server
    mkdir repo.git  
    cd repo.git  
    git --bare init
    
    # locally
    git remote add origin ssh://git@example.com/home/git/repo.git  
    git push origin master

And no, its not that hard once you learn. Except, now its a never ending chore when it was an appliance. Instead of a car you have a project car.

> If you do not contribute to free/libre software (or if it is limited to your personal homepage), and we feel like you only abuse Codeberg for storing your commercial projects or media backups, we might get unhappy about that.

Emphasis mine. This isn't about if it's technically possible (it certainly is), it's whether or not it's allowed by their platform policies.

Their page publishing feature seems more like it's meant for projects and organizations rather than individual people. The way it's described here indicates that using them to host your own blog/portfolio/what have you is considered to be abusing their services.

Until the AI scrapers[1] come for you at 5k requests per second and you're doing operations in hard-mode.

1. Most forges have http pages for discoverability. I suppose one could hypothetically setup an ssh-only forge and statically generate a html site periodically, but this is already advanced ops for the average Github user

I have website small enough not to attract too many bot, but sometime, something very innocent can bring my website down.

For example, I put a php ical viewer.. and some crawler start loading the calendar page, taking up all the cpu cycle.

I'm guessing you have SSH access between the two? You could just add it as another remote, via SSH, so you can push/pull directly between the two. This is what I do on my home network to sync configs and other things between various machines and OSes, just do `git remote add other-host git+ssh://user@10.55/~/the-repo-path` or whatever, and you can use it as any remote :)

Bonus tip: you can use local paths as git remote URLs too!

> but more than once I've lost work that way.

Huh, how? If you didn't push it earlier, you could just push it later? Some goes for pull? I don't understand how you could lose anything tracked in git, corruption or what happened?

They said they want to be able to rely on their git remote.

The people responding are saying "nah, an unreliable remote is fine because you can use other remotes" which doesn't address their problem. If Codeberg is unreliable, then why use it at all? Especially for CI, issues, and collab?

Not really. The point of git was to make Linus' job of collating, reviewing, and merging, work from a disparate team of teams much less arduous. It just happens that many of the patterns needed for that also mean making remote temporarily disconnected remote repositories work well.

Build Nix config into a VM image => Deploy VM to Proxmox via its API => Spin up Docker stack via Komodo

I've also trying to use it to sync my Obsidian vault via git to my phone, altho that flaked out on me recently (if anyone knows a reliable way to use git via the shell on iOS, please let me know).

I was self hosting gitlab for a long time. But forgejo is an order of magnitude less resource intensive.

It is a single very small go binary. You can use sqlite or postgres. But you can easily run it inside a small docker container on your local machine.

And it is fun to hack on it because it is so open. You build really fun workflows that are blocked by the corporate limits of Github.

> maga movement

Here you go: https://openheart.fyi

An overly ideological PoV can make it easy to overlook that some people are simply on Github from a practical standpoint. I myself host Forgejo and moved a lot of stuff there. I don't really find a good reason to host anything on Codeberg, yet. Github still offers me a nice set of repos to find via the people I follow there.

Codeberg is just a hosted instance of Forgejo (GPLv3).

They even support a workflow for migrating to a different Forgejo instance [1].

[1] https://docs.codeberg.org/advanced/migrating-repos/

Which is actually useful.

For me its providing uptime. Github is barely reaching one nine of availability these days.

and thus you discover the value of CI

Good luck implementing merge queues yourself. As far as I know there are no maintained open source implementations of merge queues. It's definitely not as trivial as you claim.

I'd say SourceForge was abandoned due to VA Linux going under. I remember the pain/panic as large numbers of OSS projects were suddenly scrambling to find alternatives to SF. I actually started a subscription to GitHub just to try and help ensure they had the money to stay in business, and we didn't have to go thru that again.

It's helpful to have a github mirror of your "real" repo (or even just a stub pointing to the real repo if you object to github strongly enough that mirroring there is objectionable to you).

One day maybe there will be an aggregator that indexes repos hosted anywhere. But in many ways that will be back to the square one - a single point of failure.

The Fediverse seems to dislike global search. Or is that just a mastodon thing?

People have a superficial knowledge of the space (I think this extends beyond Codeberg) but feel strongly that they need to advocate for something. Codeberg themselves seem to have opinions about what they want to do but people are suggesting they can do more simply because it gives them an outlet.

The constraints that Codeberg set seem to, on the surface at least, ensure they can scale based on their needs and protect them from external threats. Hosting random sites comes with a range of liabilities they probably understand and want to avoid right now. There are EU regulations which can be challenging to handle.

Can confirm.

Also, not everyone who wants to share content publicly has a domain name with which to do so, or the kind of Internet connection that allows running a server. If you include "hosting" by using a hosting provider... it's perfectly possible (raises hand) to not even have any experience with that after decades of writing code and being on the Internet. (Unless you count things like, well, GitHub and its services, anyway.)

     git init --bare foo.git

    git clone user@yourserver.com:~/foo.git

are you sure about that? I'm fairly certain my repos on codeberg are all private but I could be mistaken.

I wonder why they dont just offer unlimited private repos for (reasonably) paid accounts , I think maybe a 40 dollar per year (or 4 dollar monthly), is low and encouraging , and should be welcomed by many , I hope they consider it

[1]: https://codefloe.com/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487436

Just store the repo and access it with your account.

The whole git@ thing is because most "forge" software is built around a single dedicated user doing everything, rather than taking advantage of the OS users, permissions and acl system.

For a single user it's pointless. For anyone who knows how to setup filesystem permissions it's not necessary.

From the shape of the traffic it just looks like a poorly implemented web crawler. By default, a crawler that does not take measures to actively avoid git hosts will get stuck there and spend days trying to exhaust the links of even a single repo.

Maybe a hard blocker if you are pair programming or collaborating every minute. Not really if you just have one hour to program solo.

All it shows the world is why there needs to be a VAT like tax against US digital services to help drive a public option for developers.

There's no reason why the people can't make our own solutions rather than be confined to abusive private US tech platforms.

My 2 cents.

A bit like this? ( iocaine is newer)

I have abandoned github and even gitlab for all intents and purposes. But there's another side to consider in this.

It's always risky for the FOSS community to depend on a service that doesn't offer interoperability and freedom of migration. Ironically, Github is such a service built on a tool (git) that's built for maximum interop and migration. But the popularity of Github among the developer community isn't an accident. They worked really hard during their early stages as a startup, to gain the trust of community. Nobody foresaw Microsoft buying them at that stage (though you should really just assume that it would happen eventually).

The reluctance of a lot of them to abandon the platform can be attributed to lack of principles - IF it was an isolated incident. But we see the same story repeating with several development platforms. NPM is an example. PyPI and crates.io are still independent, as far as I know. But they aren't free of corporate influences either. No matter how much we try to avoid them, the companies just buy their way into these platforms when they become popular enough. I'm not happy with this. But I don't know a solution either.

I think Forgejo would work fine for smaller projects and teams. We really wanted to stop having to worry about GitHub going and not being able to do CD as well as get away from a lot of the action zero-days happening.

And yes, it's self-hosted and free! You can run a reference implementation pretty easily with non-production components (i.e. they won't backup or scale well).

Also now wondering about differences with forgejo.

I imagine they would argue that private repositories do not follow this purpose, as they are neither free content nor FOSS. I believe you could argue that charging a modest fee for private repositories to finance the hosting of FOSS repositories is in line with the purpose, but you get on thinner ice with that. It could quickly make them appear more like a company than like a nonprofit

It is a single binary and I think it is also very light on resources. At least compared to gitlab.

Keep in mind, I'm not saying Codeberg is bad, but it's terms of use are pretty clear in the sense that they only really want FOSS and anyone who has something other than FOSS better look elsewhere. GitHub allowed you to basically put up anything that's "yours" and the license wasn't really their concern - that isn't the case with Codeberg. It's not about price or anything either; it'd be fine if the offer was "either give us 5$ for the privilege of private repositories or only publish and contribute public FOSS code" - I'm fine paying cash for that if need be.

One of the big draws of GitHub (and what got me to properly learn git) back in the day with GitHub Pages in particular was "I can write an HTML page, do a git push and anyone can see it". Then you throw on top an SSG (GitHub had out of the box support for Jekyll, but back then you could rig Travis CI up for other page generators if you knew what you were doing), and with a bit of technical knowledge, anyone could host a blog without the full on server stack. Codeberg cannot provide that sort of experience with their current terms of service.

Even sourcehut has, from what I can tell, a more lenient approach to what they provide (and the only reason why I wouldn't recommend sourcehut as a GitHub replacement is because git-by-email isn't really workable for most people anymore). They encourage FOSS licensing, but from what I can tell don't force it in their platform policies. (The only thing they openly ban is cryptocurrency related projects, which seems fair because cryptocurrency is pretty much always associated with platform abuse.)

A better alternative would be to create the incentives so that companies like these can be born in Europe.

Sure, you might neglect to add a file to your commit, or commit at all, but that's a problem whether you're pushing to a central public git forge or not.

--------

[1] He did a lot more than type “help” - he was essentially trying to reverse engineer the product to produce a compatible but more open client that gave access to metadata BitKeeper wanted you to pay to be able to access² which was a problem for many contributors.

[2] you didn't get the fulllest version history on the free variants, this was one of the significant concerns making people discuss alternatives, and in some high profile cases just plain refuse to touch BitKeeper at all

Is iocaine actually newer though? Its first commit dates to 2025-01, while the blog post is from 2025-03. I couldn't find info on when Cloudflare started theirs. There's also Nepenthes, which had its first release in 2025-01 too.

`ssh remote "cd $src/repo ; git diff" | git apply`

(You'll need to season to taste: what to do with staged changes, how to make sure both trees are in the same HEAD, etc)

I mean, it is arguably much easier to just write the HTML page and upload it with FTP and everyone can see it. I never understood why github became a popular place to host your site in the first place.

1) Passive mode. What is it and why do I need it? Well, you see, back in the old days, .... It took way too long for this critical "option" to become well supported and used by default.

2) Text mode. No, I don't want you to corrupt some of my files based on half-baked heuristics about what is and isn't a text file, and it doesn't make any sense to rewrite line endings anymore anyway.

3) Transport security. FTPS should have become the standard decades ago, but it still isn't to this day. If you want to actually transfer files using an FTP-like interface today, you use SFTP, which is a totally different protocol built on SSH.

Easy: it was free, it was accessible to people that couldn't spend money for a hosting provider (read: high schoolers) and didn't impose arbitrary restrictions on what you were hosting.

Back then, your options as a high school student were basically to either try and reskin a closed off platform as much as you could (Tumblr could do that, but GitHub Pages also released in the time period where platforms were cracking down on all user customization larger than "what is my avatar") or to accept that the site you wanted to publish your stuff on could disappear at any moment the sketchy hosting provider that provided you a small amount of storage determined your bandwidth costs meant upselling you on the premium plan.

GitHub didn't impose those restrictions in exchange for being a bit less interactive when it came to publishing things (so no such thing as a comment section without using Disqus or something like that, and chances are you didn't need the comments anyways so win-win) That's why it got a lot more popular than just using an FTP server.

And if you already knew how to write/make HTML you'd for sure already know all of that too.

That's a completely false statement. My kid took very basic programming classes in school which covered HTML so they could build webpages, which is a fantastic instant-results method. Hooray, now the class is finished, he wants to put it on the web. Just like millions of other kids who couldn't even spell FTP.

I don't always have a server available to host an HTTP+FTP server on. Or want to pay for one, or spend time setting one up. I can trust that Github Pages will have reasonable uptime, and I won't have to monitor it at all.

> And if you already knew how to write/make HTML you'd for sure already know all of that too.

This seems unnecessarily aggressive, and I don't really understand where it's coming from.

BTW, you can absolutely host plain HTML with Github Pages. No SSG required.