Yes, the main reason I’d want federation is for public access and decentralization. For personal or small-team use, running it privately is enough.

Is there something wrong with Gitlab?

Not inherently—GitLab works fine, but it’s corporate-owned, collects some data, and isn’t fully decentralized. If your goal is privacy, open source, and independence from Big Tech, that’s why people look for alternatives like Gitea, Forgejo, or federated solutions.

Not just storage costs — mainly for privacy, avoiding Big Tech control, and having an open-source, decentralized alternative where I’m not tracked or subjected to ads.

interesting!

I self-host forgejo, it’s one of the easiest systems I self-host.

But which features other than a plain git repo are you looking for? That will mostly determine your options. There are tons of git repos, and even just a plain git repo on a server with an ssh tunnel is enough if you don’t need anything beyond that.

My main goal is to stay independent from big tech and have full control over my data, but I’m still new to programming (2/8 in Software Engineering).

You probably should not use number of users or amount of content as the deciding factor (that leads to centralization, remember the entire point of federation is to DE-centralize), that said…

The instance list does allow sorting by number of users or number of videos, phijkchu.com has the most users and Videovortex has the most videos.

Wow, you made me think! P.S.: I’m still new here on the Fediverse.

I’m not a git expert. If we Primarily use private repos and use gitea why would this be good ? I presume it’s only good for public repos right?

Even with private repos, it can be useful for backups, CI/CD, or local mirrors. If you just care about public exposure, then yes, it’s mainly for public repos.

I don’t. It’s bad enough that people spend too much time on social media. Why the fuck would i introduce another one?

I’m practically only here because rif died. Its not because it’s enjoyable. I open the app to maybe see one good post among the thousands and thousands of “same”-posts.

You made me think.

Yes, codeberg, and it’s going to be decentralized soon when forgejo implements federation

amazing!

Lmao, exactly me!

@fajre @Codeberg ist “a non-profit, community-led organization that helps free and open source projects prosper. Our services include Git hosting (using @forgejo ), Weblate, Woodpecker CI and Pages.”

interesting man, i’ll try!

OMG, I didn’t know this site, thanks man!

“Its not filled with wankers and bots yet though so its got that going for it.”

hahaha I use Arch, btw

I normally just say, “I read [x] on Lemmy.”

If they ask and are genuinely curious what that is, I tell them it’s like a reddit offshoot, but the users control the network and servers with a high level of transparency in administration/moderation and run off software that can have tens of thousands of crowdsourced eyes helping to find and fix any bug or security issue.

interesting!

I don’t, because they’ll ruin it.

lmao

No, because the people hiring and the people working with you will be using GitHub.

maybe not! Life isn’t just work.

exactly!

interesting!

The whole thing with federating is irrelevant to most users.

I tell them it’s a social media built in a way that makes it impossible for any company to take over it in order to make profit. And then I show them to some instance I’ve hand-picked for them, without really telling them there are other instances as well. It’s not something they should worry about at that point. I can explain it later on, anyway. interesting!