🐫Forge

Forge is a software suite for [software] project development. Well-known forges are Forgejo, Sourcehut, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, GNU Savannah. These days, they mostly handle Git.

Quick comparison

  • Microsoft GitHub has the most users and is respected by normies. This text used to state it had the best UI and a11y, but I'm not sure if it's true anymore.

    There is a common joke that programmers share their GitHub profiles upon acquaintance. Imagine if a person (such as an HR) expects you to have a ‘good’ profile, but you respond that you post your code to federated Forgejo only.

    From the ethic point of view, GitHub is really bad. Especially with that Copilot thing and political bans. I'm all for political bans, of course, but only if politics I like apply.

    These days, I'm only using it for aurafarming (stars). Developing free software on a non-free platform? What?

    I will never forgive them for making the newcomers and those who don't care confuse Git and GitHub. This tendency only makes Moloch stronger.

  • GitLab is like GitHub, except it's worse in every possible way. The UI is worse, there are less users, and it's just as unethical. I am talking about the main instance.

    If you self-host it, it's a different thing! First and second jobs I had used self-hosted GitLab. It's fine, but UI is still a bit confusing to me.

  • Gitea is a fork of Gogs. I kinda dismiss Gogs. No reason to use Gogs. It's like GitHub in UI, but a11y is reported to be much worse.

  • Forgejo is a fork of Gitea. There's no reason use Gitea, Forgejo is just better. The biggest instance is https://codeberg.org, and these days I'm using it for public collaboration a lot.

  • Sourcehut is opinionated, I respect that. It has cute UI, but is overall hard to use. It has the best ethics and good a11y. Do you know what I dislike? That's email and hardwrapped plain text. Sourcehut focuses on that. Argh. They offer a good IRC service that I used to use. I used to use it mainly, but later opted for Codeberg.

  • CGit and friends. Are they truly forges? Not sure.

Ditching GitHub

From Mastodon 2022-08-21, 4 stars

Moved 7 older (2017) unused repos from GitHub to SourceHut. Small projects that went nowhere. They are unlisted for now.

In the end, I think I'll probably end up having 6 repos on GitHub, which are:

  • mycorrhiza (for stars)

  • bouncepaw (to provide README for my profile)

  • bouncepaw.github.io (legacy website)

  • 3 wiki backups, one of them private

Still a dozen repos to go. Will get back to it. #GiveUpGitHub

Later, I moved even more repos. Агидель got republished as a result.