If not Github, where would you host your projects?

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45047387

Title…

I’m kinda disgusted with Microsoft and Github has been declining into an AI-Centric hellhole, to the point my recommendations are almost exclusively AI related… And let’s not forget, the new Copilot Training enabled by default (which honestly, how do you get rid of this thing, VSCode also feels intrusive with AI-First bullshittery)

I’ve been wondering about moving to Gitlab but…. “Finally, AI for the entire software lifecycle.” is literally plastered in the landing page. So.. that feels like a no-go.

Codeberg is very decent, it’s based on Forgejo so ActivityPub is also a thing (but is cross-instance contributions possible?) but it’s exclusive for Source-Available and Free Projects, which, by all means, totally fine! Half of my “active” projects are for free, and are open source (does that make them FOSS even though I’m basically the only dev?)

And last but not least, Forgejo and Gitlab themselves are self-hostable, but…how expensive (price and storage) would it be to self host a Git Forge??

And maybe I’m being narrow-sighted… For FOSS projects in Github, sadly I’ll have no choice but to contribute there, if that’s the only place where the project resides, same for Gitlab, and Codeberg* (unless cross-instance contrib is a thing)

For now, I’m thinking of moving FOSS/OSS projects to Codeberg, but for personal projects? What are some good options?

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Note - you can completely disable all the AI features in Gitlab. In fact, they’re disabled by default unless you explicitly enable them by configuring model integrations. I think its one of the better self hosted options because it had a clear maintenance and path to profitability.

I run my own GitLab on a NUC with no issues.

Disclaimer: I have contributed open source code to GitLab before.

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sourcehut, codeberg or self-hosting (cgit, forgejo, gitea, which ever suits your needs)

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Locally I run forgejo. Anything I want available to me away from home, Codeberg now. Before I would use Gitlab because I’ve used that a lot more than Github since like 2014

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I’ve exclusively been using gitlab.com and self hosted gitlab ce for years. So that would be my choice.

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Already do; Codeberg is great.

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Just upload ye olde tarballs onto your static raw-HTML-coded site like the classic programmers (like the legendary Monsieur Bellard) do.

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Codeberg.

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If you actually read his message you can see he is interested in hosting projects that aren’t open source.

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I’m not a programmer, but I have my dotfiles and bash scripts I like to keep in private repos. I just moved my dotfiles over to Codeberg, gonna do my scripts here soon…

But been relatively painless. I can see how bigger and public projects will take some coordination and planning but…it’s probably worth it?

Codeberg has been fun and simple to use, but again, I’m just a hobbyist.

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Personally, I use a combination of Codeberg (cloud backups) and a self-hosted Forgejo instance (local backups). Redundancy is always good, if one goes down I still have my projects saved in the other!

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I prefer sr.ht, but I admit it’s a bit too spartan for some people with its original git pull request style via emails.

On a positive side, it’ll keep you from getting as many dumb PRs and issues.

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I use Codeberg for public stuff. I also run a self hosted forgejo on coolify on a Hetzner cloud instance but realistically that’s overkill.

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Self-hosted gitea. Free, runs on a potato, built-in actions support, optional wiki and package hosting, etc.

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Some alternative self-hosting options (besides full-fledged “forges"):

If you don’t need issues and stuff, you could just use git and back it up (by copying or cloning/updating to some other machine).

You could deploy soft-serve, which is a self-contained git/ssh server with cool cli (beware: it’s not super performant on large repos, so don’t host a clone of the linux kernel on it). Since you’ll use it via ssh, you don’t have to bother with https, certificates, reverse proxies and stuff.

If you are willing to put some effort into it, the (imho) coolest option would be to use radicle, which is a p2p forge (beware: documentation is not great, and - even if the “core” is solid - the cli tools are very much beta still).

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I went with the simplest self-hosting I could think of for my private repos:

ssh my-server 'git init --bare git/foo.git'
git clone my-server:git/foo.git

You don’t get a web UI or anything but that’s OK for me, I just want the repo.

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Radicle, codeberg, gitlab, sourcehut, tale your pick. Github isn’t the only option. Far from it.

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Radicle is tied to crypto nonsense.

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Seems weird nobody even mentioned Bitbucket

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Is it really weird? Bitbucket is owned by Atlassian.

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It’s weird to me since it exists and it works but there’s not even something like “there’s Bitbucket but, you know, yuck”.

Maybe I missed a requirement that it be open source? If so, then I’d fully agree with you - not weird at all.

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It works. As long as it’s not a Thursday. Or any other day with a 5% chance or so.

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I self-host forgejo on a spare machine in my home. I also set up automatic encrypted backup using Restic on Backblaze (but any S3 compatible host will work). It might not be a perfect backup strategy, but it’s good enough for me, and perfectly manageable with my limited skills. Using wireguard, I can easily access it from outside my home. I also get much better uptime than Github lol

Importantly, I do NOT share this with anyone. It’s purely for my own private development and personal projects (I have a ton of these). Even when contributing to something on github, I work in a mirror on my private forgejo, and only push to github to create the PR when it’s ready.

Any open source projects I’ve released (I only have a few) go on Codeberg, but I still have a lot of projects I contribute to and rely on that are on Github. That’s really the hard part: getting other people to migrate to something else.

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GitLab. You can’t be emotional about ai., it’s a tool

When github puts ads in commits, you say “fuck no” but gitlab giving you ai devops tools is fine. If you don’t want to use it, don’t.

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No.

GenAI is a breeding ground of ethical and moral problems that go way way way beyond ads in commit messages.

You can absolutely be emotional about a tool that boils away all our water, ruins people’s health and sanity by building enormous light, noise, and polution sources next their houses, and steals our intellectual property to increase the wealth consolidation of the few even further.

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I just selfhost in my own computer. 100% uptime when I need it (I don’t need it when my computer is turned off). And as a bonus, it’s not on the public internet so I’m not training slop scrappers.

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Codeberg, and because I already have a VPS (server), I’d check for Forgejo packages (I would only use them if security updates automatically update/install).

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svn

I still use it, it works great and I don’t have fucking AI bullshit polluting my stuff.

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OP is looking for a forge (Github, Gitlab, Forgejo, etc.), not a version control system (git, svn, mercurial, etc.)

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