Let's try Forgejo code forge

About 2 years ago I've moved my personal projects from GitHub to SourceHut. And now I think it's time to move to Forgejo. I still like how SourceHut works overall and its minimalism, but the community aspect is more important.

One of the big selling points of GitHub is that it acts like a social network, where it's very easy for contributors to open issues or pull requests. Nowadays it would be very hard to find a software engineer without a GitHub account, if only because it is required to search code within repositories. Gating search behind registration was a really clever tactic (but I digress).

The point is - GitHub has a really low-friction process for contributions, and alternative code forges don't. Now, you may argue that people who want alternative forges should just all get behind one vendor (like GitLab) and all use that one. But I will disagree with you. First because git is a decentralized version control system and making it a "walled garden" just feels wrong. Second, and more important reason is because trying to make a huge centralized forge is almost necessarily a for-profit business. And we all know how it goes if you have a monopoly or a duopoly.

The only reasonable solution to solving issues arising from fragmentation is federation, in the same sense it's implemented in Mastodon. Imagine being able to go to anyone's code forge and being able to open an issue or pull request there without an account, by using an already existing account on the forge you prefer yourself. This is similar to how you can comment Mastodon posts on certain instances.

Forgejo is one of the contributors currently driving the effort on code forge federation. See their FAQ. They are not the only ones, but at the current stages they are probably the best positioned to reach practical results. And this is the key reason I believe it's worth supporting them and trying out their product: if it works well - we will all benefit from a more diverse and less locked-down ecosystem.

To "walk the walk", I've copied my repositories to git.knazarov.com, my personal Forgejo instance. This is where my work will live from now on, unless I find any unsolvable critical problems.