Codeberg Reaches 300k Projects | Hacker News Reader

Codeberg Reaches 300k Projects

codeberg.org

215 pointswelovebunnies87 comments

I'm wondering, now almost three years in after the Forgejo/Gitea fork, which side of the fork ended up better. Both still seem very active with thousands of commits each.

I run a Gitea server (since long before the fork, constantly updated) that handles issues, pull requests, signed commits, CI/CD, actions, and even serves my containers and packages. It's been amazing.

Of course Forgejo can do the same. For those who’ve followed both projects closely — which fork would you say has come out ahead? Codeberg being Forgejo's SaaS offering likely gives them more resources, but I also wonder if that means their priorities lean more toward SaaS than self-hosting.

When I checked a couple months ago, Forgejo was getting quite a bit more developer activity, which makes sense to me given the reason for the split: https://honeypot.net/2025/05/14/gitea-vs-forgejo-development...

> their priorities lean more toward SaaS than self-hosting

It was FUD when the fork was announced, it is FUD now. Look at commercial images and what differentiates them from MIT — it's pretty much just SAML and not much else. Their actual development policy is "you pay us for the feature you need — we build it under MIT and ship for everyone"; their collaboration with Blender is the most prominent example of this that I know of.

I've also been wondering whether to jump ship, and have been going by comparing release notes — how many features were shipped within the same period of time, which bugs were fixed, etc. I've seen no reason to migrate, Gitea continues to advance faster, even though Forgejo copies some of their commits that still apply relatively easily.

Forget about commit counts, issues closed, and other artificial metrics — they're significantly inflated on Forgejo's side by heavy use of bots (like bumping dependencies) and merge commits (which Gitea development process doesn't use). Look at release notes.

How is Gogs, the original project doing these days?

I self-host forgejo but still want a way to publish open-source. I've been using GitHub for this and didn't realize that codeberg.org was an option. Glad to see them getting the press.

I remember when private repos cost $7/mo before they were free on GitHub

I always wonder what GitHub has that Codeberg doesn't. It's a shame this isn't as popular. It seems like developers, of all people, are willingly letting their code be AI piggybacked.

Network effects and a corporate offering, I'd think.

Definitely network effects. For work, when I am interested in finding whether the authors of a research paper put up their code somewhere, I often type github in the search query. There are some others, of course, but its the default location. I'll be looking into this one though. I'd never heard of it.

Also matthew affect, platforms that started early and got popular, tends to get more popular.

Codeberg might be getting more popular, but the slope of growth from Github is way higher than theirs.

Name recognition, and a stubborn belief that "stars" are a somehow useful metric in determining the quality of a project.

what other metric do you propose we use? fake download metrics?

> It seems like developers, of all people, are willingly letting their code be AI piggybacked.

Is Codeberg actually effective at preventing crawling of public code they host?

I think the point is more about GitHubs/Microsofts own Copilot

An incredibly generous free tier offering for CI/CD

That and I don't feel as guilty putting my hare brained nonsensical half baked at best personal projects that nobody other than me will ever clone on GitHub.

For many it isn’t easy to just up and abandon what they built on GitHub, especially if they have a big community and open issues and PRs. Familiarity also plays a big role, you can’t simply expect to open an account on a different forge and be done, it consumes time to get acquainted with the new stuff. Also GitHub may give access to more resources: For example, you can just use GitHub actions in your repo, private or public; to use the equivalent on Codeberg you have to request access and be approved.

https://docs.codeberg.org/ci/

None of this is a defence of GitHub. But if you want to enact change, you have to understand the reasons why people remain in the status quo.

> For many it isn’t easy to just up and abandon what they built on GitHub, especially if they have a big community and open issues and PRs.

it's really easy because the codeberg importer is really good

it correctly imports all your pull requests and issues, preserving usernames, everything

you then put the new URL in the GitHub description and archive the project

and then a year down the line you delete the GitHub repository entirely

I moved about 70 projects, half a dozen with several hundred stars and forks

and each major project that leaves does n^2 damage to GitHub, it's the network effect in reverse!

Why would you want to damage GitHub?

Saying that as someone who keeps my open source projects primarily on codeberg: Getting access to Codeberg CI is a bureaucracy, it has outages due to DDOS attacks every other week and there are a good number of open source developers who are making non-negligible money via GH sponsors.

Forgejo CI is really easy to setup, though. Just get a cheap VPS or Oracle Free Tier and you don't have to worry about freeloading.

Sure, for my private projects I already run my own Gitea and Woodpecker CI (and my own docker registry, and my own Taiga server for project management, and my own baserow server to replace airtable, etc...) but the moment you say "just get a VPS to run this service that is available for free at $BIGCORP", you lost 90% of the potential users.

> available for free at $BIGCORP

Is it really free, though? You get free service - MS gets everyone's code for free. Only a fool would believe that they don't use private repos for training.

And even if it was free, do you really believe it is sustainable to just offer unlimited service for free to anyone? They've created an environment where you're punished for using anything but github. This is not good.

You are preaching to the choir: https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/115300000651115849

You don't need to convince me, you need to convince the millions of people who prefer the convenience of "Free as in Beer SaaS" over the resilience and self-sufficiency that we get by hosting our own systems.

Codeberg doesn't allow any projects that aren't FOSS.

Personally I use Gitlab.

Not quite: Codeberg discourages you from having too many closed source projects, but you can absolutely have private repositories. I have several.

They explain the rules here: https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#how-about-pri...

How much they tolerate private projects and the specific rule you link is so vague it's worthless.

I want 100% certainty that if my side project makes money they're not going to come after me for breaking terms. Anything less is worthless.

> I want 100% certainty

this is completely unrealistic even if you're paying a company to host your stuff

It's not. If the terms of use unambiguously allow it, the law is on your side no matter what the host tries.

there's no law, it's a contract

you can be sued by anyone for anything at any time, regardless of your opinion of "unambiguous"

Are you being intentionally obtuse?

Yes, lawsuits are how contract disputes are settled. "The law is on your side" means a court will side with you in case of a lawsuit.

> Are you being intentionally obtuse?

are you?

need I remind you, you said:

> I want 100% certainty that if my side project makes money they're not going to come after me

there is NEVER any certainty that your counterparty won't come after you, even if you think your contract is "unambiguous"

because that not how the system works

all the usual arguments. I get where he's coming from, I thought like this for a long time as well. I wouldn't pride myself in having sold all my bitcoins in 2016. I regret having dabbled in stuff like ethereum around that time when I could've just stuck with bitcoin. I just didn't see it. conflating the nft/dao/web3/shitcoin sphere with bitcoin vibe with me either. good luck to him with paper money, I'm going with bitcoin, come what will. I'm not on a mission, do what feels right. I'm not judging. just weirded out by the thought of someone not wanting OSS software of that sort to be hosted on their platform. where does it end? ban users who are active in that area outside of your platform? people are using postgres unethically to store illegal data, stolen pii and credit cards. tor is used for csam. I have difficulties understanding this line of thinking and it feels more like an ethical way to exclude a group of people you just don't like. could be totally wrong of course.

This is a strange and random comment.

Worthless _to you_. Given that it's a free service, I think it's perfectly reasonable that they only want to host Free software. There are any number of other tools catering to businesses.

It was a reply to the comment. My original comment merely stated the fact and that I use something else.

I'm saying vague promises are worthless, not the service if you do 100% FOSS.

That would be it. It's why I started with BitBucket. Because Github didn't allow for private repositories on the free tier at the time.

Wait really? is that the case, I didn't know that!

I actually went and found the source as I wanted to ask you but I felt like HN police might come saying to give a google search so I am going to paste it here to save someone else a google search but also here is the main thing

> Our mission is to support the creation and development of Free Software; therefore we only allow repos licensed under an OSI/FSF-approved license. For more details see Licensing article. However, we sometimes tolerate repositories that aren't perfectly licensed and focus on spreading awareness on the topic of improper FLOSS licensing and its issues.

https://codeberg.org/magicfelix/Codeberg-Documentation/src/b...

Funny thing is that I found this through by copying the statement from the hackernews comment and I was only able to find this through HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35480056

Lock-in for compliance? There's a ton of integrations into things like Vanta.

conversely, what's the purpose of using Codeberg over Github?

It’s faster and FOSS.

I too would like to understand why. Perhaps the only one I care for is that I would not like to give too much power to Microsoft in choosing who can contribute.

Others have issue with their code being used in AI training, but I find no issue in that myself, my code is not exclusively mine anyway and I have no say in how it is being used.

I'm banned from GitHub because I didn't give them my mobile phone number, but I wouldn't switch to another provider that could easily do the exact same thing - "fool me twice"

No AI, EU based, so respects the GDPR for all users, regardless of where they live, you can send PRs to make it better, is 100% Free Software, has its own Actions system that is also 100% Free Software, the logo is nice, you can become a member of the Berlin based association and have a direct vote on policy/feature changes.

Not wanting to perpetuate a monoculture. Centralizing git repos is perverse.

For me so far the biggest thing holding me back is the lack of CI/CD.

What do you mean? https://docs.codeberg.org/ci/

It exists yes, but you need to request access to it (which is manually reviewed), comes with a bunch of restrictions and it’s a limited resource.

I have several projects I’d want to move over but thats enough of a barrier for me to lose interest. There’s also Forgejo Actions but I assume paying for your own runner is probably more expensive than GitHub.

> you need to request access

Codeberg has free Forgejo Actions instance that you can use without a request, but with limited resources[1]:

> own runner is probably more expensive than GitHub

You can rent a VPS for as cheap as $15/year or run it locally.

[1] https://codeberg.org/actions/meta

CI is an important feature of a project to give automated feedback to contributors.

However I would not trust external contributors' code on my server.

You can bring your own Woodpecker CI or Forgejo Actions runners. The cheapest solution is to just run them at home in a VM.

Codeberg is a community driven project, which provides CI for FOSS projects, and it's a bit unfair to expect them to provide free compute for random and/or private projects.

For what it's worth, I've had better experience with running self-hosted Forgejo Actions runners compared to self-hosted Github Actions runners.

For the record I don't think they have to support the same level as GitHub. It's just one of the biggest barriers for me and my projects is all.

"Everybody" is on GitHub. For Codeberg contributors, bug reporters, ... probably got to register first.

Also: GitHub is so established that for many people git and GitHub are the same thing.

People calling git GitHub is one of my pet peeves.

That is also a disadvantage, Github has a lot more grifters, people submitting fraudulent and malicious PRs, issues spam. In similar vain as "everybody is on windows" and Linux not being targeted by malware as often.

If a person really cares about your project and wants to improve it and not just boost their own GH stats - creating an account takes no time or they can always send you patches via email.

> I always wonder what GitHub has that Codeberg doesn't.

Aside from previously established dominance and associated network effects, a whole lot of individually little things which add up to a lot.

> It's a shame this isn't as popular. It seems like developers, of all people, are willingly letting their code be AI piggybacked.

So long as the AI firms operate under the assumption (and courts so far in the US at least seem inclined to favor this view) that training AI on copyright-protected material isn't infringement, any publicly-exposed code is going to be subject to AI piggybacking, not just code hosted on Github.

I had codeberg account before github account.

I really created a github account to star other people's project and my keepassxc had got deleted by me messing around in my linux so I had lost access to my codeberg previous account and I think even my previous github account too but I went around to create a new github account but never a new codeberg account untill just recently (literally 1 hour ago lol)

for me I could star a lot of projects and show support and there is even github donations. Its not as if I like github but I am giving my reasoning as to why I think the reason is that github won and codeberg hadn't.

There are still a lot of people which use codeberg but a lack of awareness is also one part and the lack of people on codeberg. To me, like, I thought that if my project is on codeberg then it would get less stars (I was really chasing stars back then lol) and it would get less visibility and less people contributing and so on I think...

Doesn't also help when you need a github account anyways to contribute to a git project in the sense that you ask them an issue.

IIRC I wanted to ask a github issue on some project and that's why I had created my original account but then started hosting some code between codeberg and github from exclusively codeberg to then all code on github...

Now I am starting to take back on that by hosting things on codeberg again from a fresh account.

Codeberg suffers from the same problem as sourcehut.

They are so fanatical that many groups are unable to use them.

Sourcehut for example is hostile towards cryptocurrency related projects.

Coderberg is hostile towards private repos.

> "They are so fanatical that many groups are unable to use them."

I had open-sourced stuff there licensed under Creative Commons, which was forcibly removed. They do spell the license requirements out in their terms, I just can't wrap my head around the obstinacy. Calling it unhelpful do-goodery would be flattering. Fanatical is indeed the right word.

Where you see a problem, I see a market niche.

I pay for Sourcehut hosting. I like that I'm on a system which rejects cryptocurrency projects.

so on OSS bitcoin wallet (web, android, iOS, whatever) would be something you'd reject? why?

Since we are talking about SourceHut, I'll simply say I agree with the views its founder wrote in "Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster" at https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas...

See also the 248 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943408 from when that came out 4 years ago.

Or in pop culture terms, I would reject a FOSS version of the Torment Nexus too.

> Coderberg is hostile towards private repos

Get real. It's a community project with limited resources. If they had the money for hosting I'm sure that would be offered for FOSS projects, which their bylaws requires to focus on.

A private repo doesn't cost more resources than a public one. The likeliest scenario is the exact opposite - popular public repos generate far more traffic and incur more costs.

> They are so fanatical that many groups are unable to use them.

> Coderberg is hostile towards private repos.

Disclaimer: I'm a member of Codeberg e.V., though not part of the presidium or any official representative position.

We're a non-profit (charitable) with the explicit goal of being host to free and open source projects. We run on donations, donations that are made with that specific goal. Why should we provide storage and git hosting for proprietary projects? That is not and has not been the goal of the entire organization. Yeah, I guess that makes us unusable to many groups, technically. But Codeberg was founded for that specific purpose, after all we're a nonprofit, not a business.

If you want to host proprietary projects, Codeberg isn't the place for it and it doesn't want to be.

Also, no you won't be immediately banned if you make 3 private repositories. I myself have a few private repos, mostly projects that never got anywhere close to finished but also personal notes or my nginx server config.

https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#before-i-star...

GitHub doesn't make your choice of content license their business.

If I was sufficiently motivated to leave GH for such idealistic reasons, it wouldn't be worth moving to another third-party host. That just means a few years later there will be some new idealistic reason to leave the new host, and I'll have to make the effort of switching all over again. If I ever leave GH, it'll be to self-hosting.

You're missing the point. We want AI to piggyback on our open source code, because then thousands of developers around the world can piggyback on that AI. That AI is a boon for users, and is just as useful as documentation and a discussion forum.

Why would any adult give so much power to a few people over their project for what would be a few $$ at most in GitHub if not free.

The idea that I would choose a company because is from Europe instead of America, is kinda insane to be honest, I'm from Spain, Europe and my only peeve with products from America is that sometimes the cost to send products here is a bit too much for products like kinesis, aeron, books from nostarch, etc.

Good for Codeberg for giving the hosting service for free to FOSS projects, but there is no way I'm giving so much power to a few volunteers over my projects.

I wish GitHub would implement a feature to hide/private the projects I follow/star, that's the only thing I miss in GitHub.

No activism, just code and solid infrastructure.

That said, what can codeberg really protect against if they’re just a European take on GitHub?

Do we know the project which is the 300k project as I was making a pages and even a video on how to make codeberg pages about an hour ago and this post is 41 minutes ago and I would be mad in joy lol

I self-host forgejo locally and use Codeberg for my blog and finding good FOSS projects. Here's to 300k more!

Can I push my code here and have it deploy to Cloudflare? Currently using GitHub but I’d switch.

It has CI/CD so yes

Ty!

codeberg is great

the interface is far more responsive, despite each click loading a new page (vs. the disaster than is react)

and it is run by a charity, so it will never enshittify

which GitHub is doing more and more with each passing day (no I don't want your shit "AI", not now, not ever)

Not that this matters a whole lot, but it actually works on mobile as well. GitHub is laggy as fuck on my phone.

Nice, now we can centralize the decentralized version control on a different website. <eyeroll>

Actually, they want to implement federation using forgefed [1] into forgejo, the underlying software.

[1] https://forgefed.org/

Mmh, that link is dead

In an ironic turn of events the main repo is on github: https://github.com/forgefed/forgefed (and even without any mirrors on codeberg). :)

No, the main ForgeFed repo is on Codeberg:

https://codeberg.org/ForgeFed/ForgeFed

The README in both repos links to the main Codeberg repo and says that the GitHub repo is a mirror.

OK, thanx for the clarification. :)

Maybe you're eagerness to sing praises to the forgefed project overshadowed the common knowledge that git is already distributed but, git is already distributed. :P I think that's what parent was sarcastically trying to imply.

The first 16 words of your comment makes it very smarmy,v and not including them would have improved it.

GP's snark is misplaced, version control is but a subset of what forges offer, git has no social layer[1], and GitHub has a monopoly on this. A distributed social layer via ActivityPub would be a vast improvement over what we have now - at best, non-comprehensive one way synching of issues from GitHub into mirror repos, by way of polling the upstream.

1. Except via email

GitHub must certainly does not have a monopoly on the social aspects of version control. But it does seem, from recent experience with e.g. Mastodon that the revealed preferences of users of social apps is for centralization. Even users (software developers) who likely have a higher familiarity with the pros and cons of centralization.

Also: Ask yourself why did Linus "solve" VC decentralization, but not social software decentralization. Probably because one is "easy" and the other is "not obviously possible". :)

> Ask yourself why did Linus "solve" VC decentralization, but not social software decentralization

Perhaps because it was out of scope? Linux kernel diffs are emailed, so Linus solved for email as the social layer, and it works well with mailing lists. If Pull Requests had predated git and the kernel had used them, Linus would have solved for

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