gogs was more of a one-person-in-command project, not sure its status now, gitea is more of a team work. I use gitea, works great all around, perfect for small to middle-size needs, totally resource light when you self host,a $5 VPS will serve well, or a small local VM

I've setup gitea for myself. Both a fairly similar, just that gitea doesn't have a single point of failure. Gitea has a feature comparison chat on their site[1] if you wish to compare the two directly. The fork arose from the single maintainer not working to give some control to the community.

[1]: https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/comparison/

You can see when Gitea forked from Gogs at

https://public.gitsense.com/insight/github?r=gogs/gogs::go-g...

The following shows how active the two products are:

https://public.gitsense.com/insight/github?r=gogs/gogs::go-g...

Similar:

https://rhodecode.com/ Dual licensed AGPL / commercial

https://kallithea-scm.org/ GPL3 fork (pre-AGPL)

there's a pinch of humorous irony in this website url

Yeah no, they really need another name. Bitbucket is known. Everybody talking about gitbucket will have to make it twice clear that it's not Atlassian's bitbucket.

All these alternatives seem to use Github as the main code repository. That's a really bad smell. Why don't they host their codebase in their own service?

Gitlab's main codebase is in Gitlab, though.