> such a blatant clone of GitHub’s?

I'm guessing for the same reason all cars have the steering wheel and turn signal switch in roughly the same place.

> Why is their UI (which is Forgejo, fork of Gitea) such a blatant clone of GitHub’s?

because their project goal is to iterate on the ownership model, not to iterate on the web design.

I use a self-hosted forgejo instance now (as of like, a week ago, let's see if I stick with it haha). I like GitHub the piece of software just fine, but I don't like the idea of my code training copilot. I think the design of GitHub is fine and people already know it, so I like that. If the reason you would want to not use GitHub is the design, gitea or forgejo will probably not be to your liking.

We (Gitea) inherited the UI from Gogs, and iirc the UI choice was partially because Gogs was a one man show and partially because a familiar interface eases transition from GitHub.

We have talked about UI refreshes over the years, but it would be a huge undertaking while also keeping up with the rapid iteration.

> such a blatant clone of GitHub

It's not a bad thing per se. GitHub has an okay interface, why not copy the good parts instead of reinventing the wheel for the sake of it?

I'm guessing the Golang implementation and probably a smaller team working on the frontend?

GitHub is perceptibly slower than Codeberg, just open 2 tab side by side and try them out.

I mirror my repos to a bunch of services, and I've personally found `git push` to be much slower on codeforge than most places. I suspect they're having some short-lived scaling issues (that I am totally sympathetic to)