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Comment by jasonvorhe | Hacker News Reader

I'm still undecided if I want to self host either gitea or forgejo. Can someone who used both or is particularly experienced with one of them tell me which project to settle with?

Most comparisons I found were all written with someone who didn't seem all that ideologically neutral on the matter.

To my understanding forgejo (the gitea fork) is run by the people behind Codeberg whereas Codeberg is running a customised version of forgejo. If Codeberg can just pull the rug like this, shouldn't I expect similar behaviour from forgejo in the future?

I really don't need all that "holier than though" drama when I self host my stuff. Perhaps I better settle for gitea then?

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I'm not sure either, the forgejo/gitea fork seems to also involve a lot of activism and interpersonal drama. And codeberg shares a lot of the people involved in that drama on the forgejo side. The gitea/opencollective side has it's own share of "difficult" people.

So I know of no technical reason why any should be better. And the potential for drama and conflict inherent in the developers of both projects make me wary. In the end I decided to use forgejo, because absent a corporation at least the possibility of a corporate rugpull is reduced.

If your goal is to just store your repos, even Gogs will do. I self-host Forgejo on sqlite and it‘s been great thusfar. I do not yet use runners, so can‘t say much about that. The Docker registry they offer is a bit awkward to use but better than nothing. My instance is only intranet visible, so I only push to http:// remotes. I have my repos docker volume backed up automatically, so I feel like I got a pretty solid setup right now.

(Disclaimer: I use Gitea daily for work and Codeberg daily for personal stuff. I prefer Codeberg)

Gitea is developed by a for-profit organisation while Forgejo is developed by a non-profit.

Ability for rug pull is much greater for gitea imo. Gitea (organisation) already develops non-foss software to sit on top of Gitea (software). Gitea requires copyright attributions for contributions so is more able to change the Gitea license to something non-free in the future.

Codeberg can make up whatever rules they want for their Forgjo instance but you can do what you like on your self-hosted instance so I dont think that the governance of codeberg should concerning for self-hosting.

If Forgejo somehow enshittified, I would expect a popular fork immediately. If Gitea enshittified, I expect most people who would have forked already went to forgejo

I threw my lot in with Forgejo. After the fork, most of the maintainers went along with it.

In any case, it has a FOSS license and can’t be restricted against certain uses the same way Codeberg is. By analogy, my own instance is way more restricted: only a couple of people are allowed to write to it at all.

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