Some thoughts on personal Git hosting

Summary

As part of my ongoing (and somewhat futile) efforts to ReDeCentralise, I'm looking at moving my personal projects away from GitHub. I already have accounts with GitLab and CodeBerg - but both of those sites are run by someone else. While they're lovely now, there's nothing stopping them becoming as slow or AI-infested as GitHub. So I want to host my own Git instance for my personal projects. I'm experimenting with https://git.edent.tel/ It isn't quite self-hosted; I'm paying PikaPod €2/month to deal with the hassle of hosting and updating the software. I get to point my domain name at it which means I can always change the underlying service if I want. For example, it uses Gitea and I might want to switch to Forgejo later. So far, it works. But there are a few significant drawbacks. A large service like GitHub has network effects which are incredible. It feels like 90%+ of all developers have an account there. That means if someone wants to leave a comment or send a PR there is no barrier to entry. That's huge! There are a bunch of popular FOSS projects which make me sign up for yet another service when all I want to do is send a simple bug report which I find deeply annoying. Luckily, Gitea has built in support for various OAuth providers. So I've set up single-sign-on with Gits Hub and Lab. I asked people how easy it was to use - most people were able to use it, although a few people wanted a local-only account. But is is still a bit of a faff. Even a little bit of hassle turns people away. Suppose you want to make a Pull Request or just take a copy of the code. At the moment, you have to create a fork on my server. There's no way to easily fork something to your GitHub or personal server. You can git clone the repo to your local machine, and you can manually move it elsewhere, but there's no way to send a PR from your repo to mine. There's also no way for users to find other forks. Perhaps the upcoming ForgeFed proposals will fix things - but it doesn't exist yet...