The forge we deserve

lloydatkinson

> Or perhaps everyone moves to some hot-new-AI-first-forge, and then we go through the same cycle of enshittification in 10-20 years. I don't think it would take years for an AI first platform to enshittify, it would be instant.

bestouff

I'm way more hopeful in a fully decentralized protocol like Forgefed* than some AT still-centralized thing. * https://forgefed.org/

throwwwll

The forge we deserve is the one that is built for jj and local review.

hkt

I'm pretty sure the actual forge we deserve at this point is one that is a membership organisation, eg, owned by its (paying) members. Members elect the board which chooses the CEO. A cooperative, in other words. The tech is a solved problem, with lots of open source around to do it. Enough members means paid operations and development staff, or outsourcing one or both, or grants to open source devs, etc. The possibility is there. That's how we prevent cultural drift: by actually controlling the company.

BrenBarn

> So, what’s next? There are a lot of Git forges out there. How about some non-Git forges (like Mercurial forges)? That's what I'd like to see.

OhSoHumble

I personally just self-host. The project that I'm working on right now uses Gitea internally with an action runner. I use Digital Ocean and run a Nomad cluster on top of that. Gitea and its action runner builds container images and then pushes nomad job definitions to the cluster. I have zero downtime deployment and rolling deploys. Dagger.io is in there somewhere to make local CI mirror what happens in the action runner. Setting up Gitea was honestly just an afternoon of work. The sqlite database is backed up to Cloudflare R2 and the code is mirrored. It's unlikely that my project will take off to the point that I'll need to upgrade Gitea to something else, but it's extremely easy to setup, maintain, and build CI/CD on top of.

MadsRC

I would love to see a forge that consists of composable components, self-host able with federated identities and maybe a few centralized indexers

preya2k

It seems ironic, that in the social media space, AT protocol based instances are basically centralised (Bluesky) and ActivityPub based instances (Fediverse, Mastodon) have a much healthier grade of federation. Whereas in the "forges" space, it seems Tangled drives federation forward much faster than the ActivityPub-based federation features of Forgejo/Gitea (which are progressing really slow).

sshine

Tangled and Radicle are both really cool, but add too much mental gymnastics compared to just running Forgejo. What I like about (the idea of) ForgeFed is that it lets existing forges speak to each other. In practice I probably just need Forgejo and GitLab to be able to speak to each other. I believe the future of GitHub, for me, is to solve two problems: - Discoverability for public open-source projects - Backup since self-hosting is fragile long-term So many times when I try to visit the source code of some package uploaded to crates.io, the self-hosted git no longer exists. GitHub repos sit stale for decades. For day-to-day reliance, my self-hosted Forgejo and CI runners have better uptime. Only pet peeve with Forgejo: - It's a highly active project, RFCs, tons of PRs and issues. - Becoming a daily user, I want to extend it, and in its beautiful simplicity, it's not highly extensible. - So to avoid maintaining a fork of a very active project, extending it in unison is a social commitment. What a luxury problem, but still. I'd like to see more hosted Forgejo solutions pop up; it's very low-resource cost.

znnajdla

Very timely as I just set up Forgejo yesterday. There were immediate unexpected benefits moving off GitHub. It’s hosted on an Orbstack VM on a Mac Mini M4 on my local Tailscale network and the UI is incredibly snappy and quick to browse. Because it’s located inside my tailnet with no public access I don’t need to setup authentication, so agents running inside our network can clone a repo with no fuss (I just protect master branch pushes with a config rule). Github auth is a pain to securely distribute, when you self-host the problem just disappears. Also because it’s running inside our tailnet we can use Forgejo actions for infrastructure-related tasks: Ansible scripts that provision or maintain Mac Minis or Linux servers on the same tailnet over Tailscale SSH. Much simpler than Kubernetes which would be overkill for a small homelab/startup. And the Orbstack VM is literally two clicks to backup and restore or move to another host — I setup the VM running Forgejo on my local MacBook then a few minutes later exported the VM image and transferred it to a Mac Mini server in a few clicks. Backup and restore an entire server to a single file — that is the fastest and easiest server migration I ever performed. I literally can’t think of a single reason I would want to go back to GitHub. Forgejo is a joy to use.

Levitating

Forgejo is mentioned, but its federation goals aren't. I guess the author isn't aware of them. https://forgefed.org/

AbstractH24

I thought this was gonna be an article about Sourceforge Anyone remember that? It used to be such an important website and went down the tubes.

lavela

To me being VC funded is the opposite to "structurally resistant to the lock-in". I'm not against VC funding everywhere, but I don't want it at the core of my development stack.

inigyou

The forge we need is git-http-backend and a mailing list. KISS and focus on the actual work instead of bikeshedding.

drdexebtjl

I really don’t see the benefit of forge federation. Why do people care that completely separate projects run in completely separate forges? A project’s issues and pull requests are only useful for that project. The author mentions avoiding multiple logins and searching across forges. The former is already addressed by social logins / federated identity. The latter is not very useful today, on a centralized GitHub, aside from finding leaked credentials and vulnerable code. In fact, the tiny barrier of entry for contributing in a new forge might be a desirable quality, to filter out low-effort contributions.

chriswarbo

I've switched my git projects to push their objects into IPFS and their refs to pkkarr. That feels more distributed than the sorts of HTTP servers mentioned in TFA. Anybody who cares about my repos potentially disappearing can contribute to their hosting by re-providing those repos from their own machines. (Note that only someone with the private key can create new records for a pkarr address). That's mostly a side-benefit though: I mostly wanted something I can `git push` and `git pull`, that is self-hosted, and self-organises across a bunch of underpowered machines with unreliable network connections, with minimal coordination.

jauntywundrkind

How do folks feel about the htmx based front-end?

hannasm

I'm currently looking to piece together a kubernetes native "forge" and there are major gaps in the ecosystem. Why do we need everything in one application like every single "forge" claims to be? What about when I want something that's not supported. How about Forge compatible components? Or forgeables? Naming is hard but hopefully you get the point... I'm an expert, I'll go to harbor freight and weld some stuff together. It will still break down in 5-10 years but maybe I will at the very least have some control over the way I pivot.