I've recently started hosting my own forgejo instance. It works so well! Free tailscale for connectivity. I expose mine over fly.io proxy, also free, but not to be done without caution.

Gitlab?

Microsoft services are tech debt. I moved the moment they were acquired and never regretted it.

It's a fair question, but if you need private repos, I think you need to start considering a paid option, or self-host.

If it's really important to you that the repo is private, I'd self-host.

Just spitballing, don’t use these tools myself, but isn’t this something that should be encrypted to really prevent them from training? I personally don’t trust anyone with my data when they pivot to building AI products yet claim my data wasn’t a part of that strategy. It’s too easy to hide/lie.

But it always seemed to me that the UI should run locally with encryption keys that are shared and the service just manages encrypted blobs of diffs that can roll from version to version of encrypted data and that’s about it. Granted I probably don’t know the full workflow, i typically am a single dev on simple projects where I don’t need 99% of the overhead these introduce.

I would've recommended codeberg but codeberg isn't the finest to be recommended for free private repos.

I definitely feel like more can be done within this space and that there is space for more competitors (even forgejo instances for that matter)

GitLab would be a good bet here. We started on their free tier and used that for a couple of years, I was very happy with it. Not sure how the tiers might have evolved since.

And according to their PM and privacy policy, they're not training their models on your code[0].

[0]: https://forum.gitlab.com/t/can-i-opt-out-from-my-code-being-...

It doesn't take much power or time to run your own local git server. My first one which lasted years was parts I mangled together from old computers from garage sales.

There's instructions on running a Git server in the git book: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The-Protoco...

Sourcehut comes to my mind: https://sourcehut.org/

I've been using gitosis to manage private repos for almost 2 decades now. It's extremely easy to host your own repositories.

I just looked up gitosis on github though and it was last updated 12 years ago.... still works for me though.

Overall, hosting your own repos is very easy.

I use Fossil for mine. Dead easy to set up, and while the workflow might not be great for public contributions like Github is, that doesn't matter on something where I'm the only user.

I've seen https://codefloe.com mentioned, can't say I've used it myself yet though.

BitBucket.org (Atlassian)

Any computer you have ssh access to.

A cheap mini-pc in your closet.