There was an article about moving to Codeberg on the orange website yesterday, and out of interest to get an impression of what average programmers think of the idea of moving, I took at look at the comments. (Yeah, I know …)
I’m going to write here my thoughts on a general impression of the comment thread as a whole. (Rather than respond to individuals.)
To begin by addressing what seemed to be a misconception underlying a lot of the comments:
Codeberg, the website, does not aim to replace GitHub. We poke fun at their recent foibles in our PR sometimes, but we do not want to become them.
We do not want to replace one single point of failure with another! (Admittedly, I think Codeberg.org, run by a non-profit, as SPOF would be better than GitHub.com, run by Microsoft, as an SPOF, but that’s not the goal!)
We are much more excited by the idea of creating an ecosystem of forges (and different forge software) than in becoming the new one place where absolutely everything is hosted.
I am, for example, very pleased that even while switching to Forgejo, Fedora decided to keep on self-hosting rather than jumping to us.
To be clear, we’re open for everyone who needs us, especially individuals working on their own smaller projects. But other forges are our friends, not our competition
Forge federation is something we’re actively pushing for because of this. Full federation support is still a few years ahead of us, probably, but you can already set up your own forge in a way that minimizes inconvenience to users by using Codeberg as a single sign-on provider for a self-hosted forge.
https://git.madhouse-project.org/, which hosts the Iocaine project, is a great example of this. If you set up Codeberg as SSO for your own site, almost all of our content rules are irrelevant to you.
(If someone’s forge were hosting completely objectionable, hateful content we might choose to turn their OAuth support off. But, for example, you can have as many private and non-free repositories as you like that way. More on that in a bit though …)
(Furthermore, this thread reflects only my own views and not those of the remainder of the Codeberg presidium, board – nor (most importantly) does it reflect the views of the members of Codeberg as a whole, who ultimately make the decisions.)
@n0toose @dpk Thank you for this post. It’s good to be reminded of the obvious.
I’m the developer of GitRoot @forge (an alternative forge that requires no registration and uses no database). If there’s anything I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to get in touch https://gitroot.dev/contact.html
@n0toose @dpk @forge Thanks! It’s an experiment, it’s still in its early stages, but I wanted to see if another approach might work. And so far, I haven’t come across any major obstacles.
The federation approach comes with three issues:
- registration: I don’t have, SSH manage it
- code sharing: Git is there for that
- data sharing (issues, etc.): everything is in Git
I don't work on federation right now (I focus on CI/CD and plugins) but can switch to it if it's help you.
@manland @dpk @forge If you manage to beat us to the federation (implementing forge federation seems to be easier when you are not dealing with a century and a half of legacy code - but there is an assumption of a presence of "actors" with signing keys required), power to you. Forgejo doesn't support "plugins" and that limits flexibility.
I find it very healthy that others try "different approaches" tbh.
Daphne Preston-Kendal
n0toose
Romain Maneschi 🇫🇷