People aren't on these hosted platforms only for the git experience, they are for the social aspects and discoverability too.

Forgejo is hard at work, defining and implementing federation, adding cross-forge interaction, social functionality and discovery: https://forgejo.org/faq/#is-there-a-roadmap-for-forgejo

Also check the ActivityPub protocol extension for forge federation at https://forgefed.org which may be on the roadmap [0] of the Forgejo federation support, after they have implemented basic ActivityPub protocol support. Right now ForgeFed needs to mature a lot further, but also needs the help of the developer community to achieve that.

[0] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...

For hosting and publishing your code maybe.

But the power of Github is more the social platform and collaboration at global scale.

In that sense the only mature alternative I know is Radicle

- https://radicle.xyz/

This is what people forget about GitHub. Its popularity isn't because it has the best tools on the market. It is popular because of the network effect. It's the social network of developer tooling.

I don't really want to be using a Microsoft product but I use github for the same reason I use Linkedin: because it benefits my career to be visible on these social networks.

Yes, that's why everyone is still on Sourceforge. I too check Freshmeat regularly for updates.

It's time to move on from Github, LinkedIn, and hell ideally NPM too. Microsoft is polluting the ground water.

> Yes, that's why everyone is still on Sourceforge. I too check Freshmeat regularly for updates.

Sourceforge and Freshmeat weren't social networks. Plus its not like other social networks haven't collapsed despite being popular, like MySpace.

> It's time to move on from Github, LinkedIn, and hell ideally NPM too. Microsoft is polluting the ground water.

As I said, I don't want to be using Microsoft products but it benefits my career to be visible on these social networks.

And this is a big part of the reason why it's pretty much a violation of professional deontology to use LinkedIn, GitHub (and Discord).

That kind of ideology is great in principle, but if you struggle to get a job because you have limited presence in an employer's market, then you're practising deontology without a profession.

I'm an opinionated MS-hater, like most of my peers who lived through 90s Microsoft, like I had. But I also have a family to feed and bills to pay. Sometimes pragmatism trumps ideology.

I have PRs open on five different OSS projects at the moment. My throughput is being limited by trying to remember all the details of PRs I filed 3-6 weeks ago.

I thinK I have to admit to myself that as little as I like github having all the projects, I'd be less effective having to track inboxes across half a dozen different hosting platforms.

If you made something like Mastodon, where alerts propagate across instances, I could probably deal. But without that? No, I'll pass.

The problem with a federation system like mastodon/activitypub is that relying on propagation hurts usability and discoverability. [tangled.sh](https://tangled.sh/) is to federated forgejo what bluesky is to mastodon, where it relies on atproto to have decentralization without sacrificing ux

There is an ActivityPub protocol extension that is specific to federation of code forges, called ForgeFed. It is an NLnet funded project, that receives funding through EU Next Generation Internet programs. But the project is struggling, because of a lack of community help and implementers giving feedback to help steer and mature the specs.

https://forgefed.org

It’s a great piece of software. I set it up in a Docker container, and have a few of their CI runners on a couple machines I own. Great experience so far.

OneDev (https://onedev.io/) is self-hostable, too, and works great.

Hosting costs for self-hosting a popular git repo are prohibitive for many people.

Forgejo is a fork of Gitea.