Given how slowly it progresses in Forgejo, there are better alternatives - Radicle[1] (full decentralization, not a federation) and Tangled[2] (federation).
Radicle seems better in that regards, but instead is on top of their own cryptocurrency, which comes with its own issues.
Personally my best hope is still "real" federation across centralized services, ala ForgeFed, but ideally we can make all these approaches interoperate in the future, that would be really awesome.
I think the notion persists because they are seemingly still using a DAO as the governance structure, so the organization sits on top of a cryptocurrency (is the idea of DAOs at least, in practice it isn't always so).
Radicle is self-hosted? Not sure what you mean by this.
If one doesn’t want anyone working on it to be crypto-adjacent, then I guess it wouldn’t be a good fit, but you can host and use it just fine without touching crypto yourself.