I'm wondering, now almost three years in after the Forgejo/Gitea fork, which side of the fork ended up better. Both still seem very active with thousands of commits each.
I run a Gitea server (since long before the fork, constantly updated) that handles issues, pull requests, signed commits, CI/CD, actions, and even serves my containers and packages. It's been amazing.
Of course Forgejo can do the same. For those who’ve followed both projects closely — which fork would you say has come out ahead? Codeberg being Forgejo's SaaS offering likely gives them more resources, but I also wonder if that means their priorities lean more toward SaaS than self-hosting.
> their priorities lean more toward SaaS than self-hosting
It was FUD when the fork was announced, it is FUD now. Look at commercial images and what differentiates them from MIT — it's pretty much just SAML and not much else. Their actual development policy is "you pay us for the feature you need — we build it under MIT and ship for everyone"; their collaboration with Blender is the most prominent example of this that I know of.
I've also been wondering whether to jump ship, and have been going by comparing release notes — how many features were shipped within the same period of time, which bugs were fixed, etc. I've seen no reason to migrate, Gitea continues to advance faster, even though Forgejo copies some of their commits that still apply relatively easily.
Forget about commit counts, issues closed, and other artificial metrics — they're significantly inflated on Forgejo's side by heavy use of bots (like bumping dependencies) and merge commits (which Gitea development process doesn't use). Look at release notes.
I always wonder what GitHub has that Codeberg doesn't. It's a shame this isn't as popular. It seems like developers, of all people, are willingly letting their code be AI piggybacked.
For many it isn’t easy to just up and abandon what they built on GitHub, especially if they have a big community and open issues and PRs. Familiarity also plays a big role, you can’t simply expect to open an account on a different forge and be done, it consumes time to get acquainted with the new stuff. Also GitHub may give access to more resources: For example, you can just use GitHub actions in your repo, private or public; to use the equivalent on Codeberg you have to request access and be approved.
> "They are so fanatical that many groups are unable to use them."
I had open-sourced stuff there licensed under Creative Commons, which was forcibly removed. They do spell the license requirements out in their terms, I just can't wrap my head around the obstinacy. Calling it unhelpful do-goodery would be flattering. Fanatical is indeed the right word.
That and I don't feel as guilty putting my hare brained nonsensical half baked at best personal projects that nobody other than me will ever clone on GitHub.
Saying that as someone who keeps my open source projects primarily on codeberg: Getting access to Codeberg CI is a bureaucracy, it has outages due to DDOS attacks every other week and there are a good number of open source developers who are making non-negligible money via GH sponsors.
If I was sufficiently motivated to leave GH for such idealistic reasons, it wouldn't be worth moving to another third-party host. That just means a few years later there will be some new idealistic reason to leave the new host, and I'll have to make the effort of switching all over again. If I ever leave GH, it'll be to self-hosting.
> I always wonder what GitHub has that Codeberg doesn't.
Aside from previously established dominance and associated network effects, a whole lot of individually little things which add up to a lot.
> It's a shame this isn't as popular. It seems like developers, of all people, are willingly letting their code be AI piggybacked.
So long as the AI firms operate under the assumption (and courts so far in the US at least seem inclined to favor this view) that training AI on copyright-protected material isn't infringement, any publicly-exposed code is going to be subject to AI piggybacking, not just code hosted on Github.
I really created a github account to star other people's project and my keepassxc had got deleted by me messing around in my linux so I had lost access to my codeberg previous account and I think even my previous github account too but I went around to create a new github account but never a new codeberg account untill just recently (literally 1 hour ago lol)
for me I could star a lot of projects and show support and there is even github donations. Its not as if I like github but I am giving my reasoning as to why I think the reason is that github won and codeberg hadn't.
There are still a lot of people which use codeberg but a lack of awareness is also one part and the lack of people on codeberg. To me, like, I thought that if my project is on codeberg then it would get less stars (I was really chasing stars back then lol) and it would get less visibility and less people contributing and so on I think...
Doesn't also help when you need a github account anyways to contribute to a git project in the sense that you ask them an issue.
IIRC I wanted to ask a github issue on some project and that's why I had created my original account but then started hosting some code between codeberg and github from exclusively codeberg to then all code on github...
Now I am starting to take back on that by hosting things on codeberg again from a fresh account.
It exists yes, but you need to request access to it (which is manually reviewed), comes with a bunch of restrictions and it’s a limited resource.
I have several projects I’d want to move over but thats enough of a barrier for me to lose interest. There’s also Forgejo Actions but I assume paying for your own runner is probably more expensive than GitHub.
No AI, EU based, so respects the GDPR for all users, regardless of where they live, you can send PRs to make it better, is 100% Free Software, has its own Actions system that is also 100% Free Software, the logo is nice, you can become a member of the Berlin based association and have a direct vote on policy/feature changes.
I too would like to understand why. Perhaps the only one I care for is that I would not like to give too much power to Microsoft in choosing who can contribute.
Others have issue with their code being used in AI training, but I find no issue in that myself, my code is not exclusively mine anyway and I have no say in how it is being used.
Worthless _to you_. Given that it's a free service, I think it's perfectly reasonable that they only want to host Free software. There are any number of other tools catering to businesses.
Wait really? is that the case, I didn't know that!
I actually went and found the source as I wanted to ask you but I felt like HN police might come saying to give a google search so I am going to paste it here to save someone else a google search but also here is the main thing
> Our mission is to support the creation and development of Free Software; therefore we only allow repos licensed under an OSI/FSF-approved license. For more details see Licensing article. However, we sometimes tolerate repositories that aren't perfectly licensed and focus on spreading awareness on the topic of improper FLOSS licensing and its issues.
Definitely network effects. For work, when I am interested in finding whether the authors of a research paper put up their code somewhere, I often type github in the search query. There are some others, of course, but its the default location. I'll be looking into this one though. I'd never heard of it.
Do we know the project which is the 300k project as I was making a pages and even a video on how to make codeberg pages about an hour ago and this post is 41 minutes ago and I would be mad in joy lol
Maybe you're eagerness to sing praises to the forgefed project overshadowed the common knowledge that git is already distributed but, git is already distributed. :P I think that's what parent was sarcastically trying to imply.
I'm wondering, now almost three years in after the Forgejo/Gitea fork, which side of the fork ended up better. Both still seem very active with thousands of commits each.
I run a Gitea server (since long before the fork, constantly updated) that handles issues, pull requests, signed commits, CI/CD, actions, and even serves my containers and packages. It's been amazing.
Of course Forgejo can do the same. For those who’ve followed both projects closely — which fork would you say has come out ahead? Codeberg being Forgejo's SaaS offering likely gives them more resources, but I also wonder if that means their priorities lean more toward SaaS than self-hosting.
When I checked a couple months ago, Forgejo was getting quite a bit more developer activity, which makes sense to me given the reason for the split: https://honeypot.net/2025/05/14/gitea-vs-forgejo-development...
How is Gogs, the original project doing these days?
> their priorities lean more toward SaaS than self-hosting
It was FUD when the fork was announced, it is FUD now. Look at commercial images and what differentiates them from MIT — it's pretty much just SAML and not much else. Their actual development policy is "you pay us for the feature you need — we build it under MIT and ship for everyone"; their collaboration with Blender is the most prominent example of this that I know of.
I've also been wondering whether to jump ship, and have been going by comparing release notes — how many features were shipped within the same period of time, which bugs were fixed, etc. I've seen no reason to migrate, Gitea continues to advance faster, even though Forgejo copies some of their commits that still apply relatively easily.
Forget about commit counts, issues closed, and other artificial metrics — they're significantly inflated on Forgejo's side by heavy use of bots (like bumping dependencies) and merge commits (which Gitea development process doesn't use). Look at release notes.
I remember when private repos cost $7/mo before they were free on GitHub
I always wonder what GitHub has that Codeberg doesn't. It's a shame this isn't as popular. It seems like developers, of all people, are willingly letting their code be AI piggybacked.
For many it isn’t easy to just up and abandon what they built on GitHub, especially if they have a big community and open issues and PRs. Familiarity also plays a big role, you can’t simply expect to open an account on a different forge and be done, it consumes time to get acquainted with the new stuff. Also GitHub may give access to more resources: For example, you can just use GitHub actions in your repo, private or public; to use the equivalent on Codeberg you have to request access and be approved.
https://docs.codeberg.org/ci/
None of this is a defence of GitHub. But if you want to enact change, you have to understand the reasons why people remain in the status quo.
> For many it isn’t easy to just up and abandon what they built on GitHub, especially if they have a big community and open issues and PRs.
it's really easy because the codeberg importer is really good
it correctly imports all your pull requests and issues, preserving usernames, everything
you then put the new URL in the GitHub description and archive the project
and then a year down the line you delete the GitHub repository entirely
I moved about 70 projects, half a dozen with several hundred stars and forks
and each major project that leaves does n^2 damage to GitHub, it's the network effect in reverse!
Codeberg suffers from the same problem as sourcehut.
They are so fanatical that many groups are unable to use them.
Sourcehut for example is hostile towards cryptocurrency related projects.
Coderberg is hostile towards private repos.
> "They are so fanatical that many groups are unable to use them."
I had open-sourced stuff there licensed under Creative Commons, which was forcibly removed. They do spell the license requirements out in their terms, I just can't wrap my head around the obstinacy. Calling it unhelpful do-goodery would be flattering. Fanatical is indeed the right word.
Where you see a problem, I see a market niche.
I pay for Sourcehut hosting. I like that I'm on a system which rejects cryptocurrency projects.
so on OSS bitcoin wallet (web, android, iOS, whatever) would be something you'd reject? why?
Since we are talking about SourceHut, I'll simply say I agree with the views its founder wrote in "Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster" at https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas...
See also the 248 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943408 from when that came out 4 years ago.
Or in pop culture terms, I would reject a FOSS version of the Torment Nexus too.
An incredibly generous free tier offering for CI/CD
That and I don't feel as guilty putting my hare brained nonsensical half baked at best personal projects that nobody other than me will ever clone on GitHub.
Saying that as someone who keeps my open source projects primarily on codeberg: Getting access to Codeberg CI is a bureaucracy, it has outages due to DDOS attacks every other week and there are a good number of open source developers who are making non-negligible money via GH sponsors.
If I was sufficiently motivated to leave GH for such idealistic reasons, it wouldn't be worth moving to another third-party host. That just means a few years later there will be some new idealistic reason to leave the new host, and I'll have to make the effort of switching all over again. If I ever leave GH, it'll be to self-hosting.
> I always wonder what GitHub has that Codeberg doesn't.
Aside from previously established dominance and associated network effects, a whole lot of individually little things which add up to a lot.
> It's a shame this isn't as popular. It seems like developers, of all people, are willingly letting their code be AI piggybacked.
So long as the AI firms operate under the assumption (and courts so far in the US at least seem inclined to favor this view) that training AI on copyright-protected material isn't infringement, any publicly-exposed code is going to be subject to AI piggybacking, not just code hosted on Github.
I had codeberg account before github account.
I really created a github account to star other people's project and my keepassxc had got deleted by me messing around in my linux so I had lost access to my codeberg previous account and I think even my previous github account too but I went around to create a new github account but never a new codeberg account untill just recently (literally 1 hour ago lol)
for me I could star a lot of projects and show support and there is even github donations. Its not as if I like github but I am giving my reasoning as to why I think the reason is that github won and codeberg hadn't.
There are still a lot of people which use codeberg but a lack of awareness is also one part and the lack of people on codeberg. To me, like, I thought that if my project is on codeberg then it would get less stars (I was really chasing stars back then lol) and it would get less visibility and less people contributing and so on I think...
Doesn't also help when you need a github account anyways to contribute to a git project in the sense that you ask them an issue.
IIRC I wanted to ask a github issue on some project and that's why I had created my original account but then started hosting some code between codeberg and github from exclusively codeberg to then all code on github...
Now I am starting to take back on that by hosting things on codeberg again from a fresh account.
"Everybody" is on GitHub. For Codeberg contributors, bug reporters, ... probably got to register first.
Also: GitHub is so established that for many people git and GitHub are the same thing.
People calling git GitHub is one of my pet peeves.
GitHub doesn't make your choice of content license their business.
> It seems like developers, of all people, are willingly letting their code be AI piggybacked.
Is Codeberg actually effective at preventing crawling of public code they host?
I think the point is more about GitHubs/Microsofts own Copilot
Lock-in for compliance? There's a ton of integrations into things like Vanta.
For me so far the biggest thing holding me back is the lack of CI/CD.
What do you mean? https://docs.codeberg.org/ci/
It exists yes, but you need to request access to it (which is manually reviewed), comes with a bunch of restrictions and it’s a limited resource.
I have several projects I’d want to move over but thats enough of a barrier for me to lose interest. There’s also Forgejo Actions but I assume paying for your own runner is probably more expensive than GitHub.
conversely, what's the purpose of using Codeberg over Github?
No AI, EU based, so respects the GDPR for all users, regardless of where they live, you can send PRs to make it better, is 100% Free Software, has its own Actions system that is also 100% Free Software, the logo is nice, you can become a member of the Berlin based association and have a direct vote on policy/feature changes.
I too would like to understand why. Perhaps the only one I care for is that I would not like to give too much power to Microsoft in choosing who can contribute.
Others have issue with their code being used in AI training, but I find no issue in that myself, my code is not exclusively mine anyway and I have no say in how it is being used.
It’s faster and FOSS.
Name recognition, and a stubborn belief that "stars" are a somehow useful metric in determining the quality of a project.
Codeberg doesn't allow any projects that aren't FOSS.
Personally I use Gitlab.
Not quite: Codeberg discourages you from having too many closed source projects, but you can absolutely have private repositories. I have several.
They explain the rules here: https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#how-about-pri...
How much they tolerate private projects and the specific rule you link is so vague it's worthless.
I want 100% certainty that if my side project makes money they're not going to come after me for breaking terms. Anything less is worthless.
Worthless _to you_. Given that it's a free service, I think it's perfectly reasonable that they only want to host Free software. There are any number of other tools catering to businesses.
It was a reply to the comment. My original comment merely stated the fact and that I use something else.
I'm saying vague promises are worthless, not the service if you do 100% FOSS.
> I want 100% certainty
this is completely unrealistic even if you're paying a company to host your stuff
It's not. If the terms of use unambiguously allow it, the law is on your side no matter what the host tries.
there's no law, it's a contract
you can be sued by anyone for anything at any time, regardless of your opinion of "unambiguous"
Are you being intentionally obtuse?
Yes, lawsuits are how contract disputes are settled. "The law is on your side" means a court will side with you in case of a lawsuit.
> Are you being intentionally obtuse?
are you?
need I remind you, you said:
> I want 100% certainty that if my side project makes money they're not going to come after me
there is NEVER any certainty that your counterparty won't come after you, even if you think your contract is "unambiguous"
because that not how the system works
Wait really? is that the case, I didn't know that!
I actually went and found the source as I wanted to ask you but I felt like HN police might come saying to give a google search so I am going to paste it here to save someone else a google search but also here is the main thing
> Our mission is to support the creation and development of Free Software; therefore we only allow repos licensed under an OSI/FSF-approved license. For more details see Licensing article. However, we sometimes tolerate repositories that aren't perfectly licensed and focus on spreading awareness on the topic of improper FLOSS licensing and its issues.
https://codeberg.org/magicfelix/Codeberg-Documentation/src/b...
Funny thing is that I found this through by copying the statement from the hackernews comment and I was only able to find this through HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35480056
That would be it. It's why I started with BitBucket. Because Github didn't allow for private repositories on the free tier at the time.
Network effects and a corporate offering, I'd think.
Definitely network effects. For work, when I am interested in finding whether the authors of a research paper put up their code somewhere, I often type github in the search query. There are some others, of course, but its the default location. I'll be looking into this one though. I'd never heard of it.
Also matthew affect, platforms that started early and got popular, tends to get more popular.
Codeberg might be getting more popular, but the slope of growth from Github is way higher than theirs.
Do we know the project which is the 300k project as I was making a pages and even a video on how to make codeberg pages about an hour ago and this post is 41 minutes ago and I would be mad in joy lol
Can I push my code here and have it deploy to Cloudflare? Currently using GitHub but I’d switch.
codeberg is great
the interface is far more responsive, despite each click loading a new page (vs. the disaster than is react)
and it is run by a charity, so it will never enshittify
which GitHub is doing more and more with each passing day (no I don't want your shit "AI", not now, not ever)
Nice, now we can centralize the decentralized version control on a different website. <eyeroll>
Actually, they want to implement federation using forgefed [1] into forgejo, the underlying software.
[1] https://forgefed.org/
Maybe you're eagerness to sing praises to the forgefed project overshadowed the common knowledge that git is already distributed but, git is already distributed. :P I think that's what parent was sarcastically trying to imply.
Mmh, that link is dead
In an ironic turn of events the main repo is on github: https://github.com/forgefed/forgefed (and even without any mirrors on codeberg). :)
No, the main ForgeFed repo is on Codeberg:
https://codeberg.org/ForgeFed/ForgeFed
The README in both repos links to the main Codeberg repo and says that the GitHub repo is a mirror.