Disagree. Refering to GitHub as category-defining would be antithetical to the Forgejo spirit. Forgejo stands on its own.
Naming and creating descriptions is not trivial, I wish more complaints would also simply come with proposals of better taglines, so we can bash those ideas quickly in comments and cut that long feedback loop.
Imagine if Fedora presented itself as simply “an open source alternative to windows”.
Sure, that might be easier to understand for those less in the field, but really doesn’t help it’s own identity.
Not trying to be contentious, but I've got a 5-digit slashdot ID and I've never heard that phrase explicitly used in my entire life as a term of art by software devs, including at or around 1999.
Definitely not saying that nobody was using the term, but "widespread use" is a big claim that requires some substantiation. It absolutely does not align with my lived experience of the time.
I know whatever's written in Wikipedia doesn't necessarily have to be authoritative, but it's worth to check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)#History
According to this archived article[1], there is a quote saying: "It [BB] sports a feature-set much like Github." That is an indication of which one came first and was already a success story on the market and served as a blueprint for BB, which was made in its image with the difference of supporting mercurial, instead of git.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110317200833/http://code.djang...
(edit) forgot the link to the article
Of course there are plenty of elements from GitHub that existed in previous systems in some form of the other, and I'm sure the GitHub people looked at them. But the way GitHub implemented things was a marked shift from what came before (the most significant being the "source-first" view of projects – rather than "wiki first" view of Trac of listing of attributes of SourceForge – and their implementation of Pull Requests).