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Ask HN: Dumping GitHub for Forgejo for a free and open source project
5 points by th0th 132 days ago
Hey everyone,

My name is Gokhan, I built PoeticMetric, it is a free and open source web analytics tool. I need your opinion about something.

PoeticMetric is on github right now, but because I am not happy with M$ I am moving it (along with everything else I have on github) to a self-hosted forgejo instance. But I am worried that it is going to cause friction for people who might want to contribute (not that it happens too often but I don't want to discourage that rare kind of people).

I didn't enable registrations on forgejo, I don't have time to deal with spam. So using forgejo for issues and pull requests won't work, also even if I enable registrations I think it is too big of a hassle for people to create an account on a separate platform to contribute to a project.

What I am thinking of is that, I keep a mirror on github, utilize issues and PRs there. And when a PR is merged, I am going to manually sync the original repository. I am not 100% happy with this because 1. this way I don't totally leave github, 2. the syncing manually is tedious, 3. project's issues history is on github and it is going to be vendor-locked. But I can't think of any better way.

The only other way I can think of is that, I can use something like a forum for issues, but again, it is not going cover pull requests.

What do you think would work this case?

3 comments

Besides public forgejo instances [0] there are a couple of professional service providers [1] that you may look into for your setup.

[0] https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-forgejo/#public-...

[1] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/professional-services/issues

Thanks for the list, but I didn't really understand what you are suggesting. If I host on any of these public services, people will need to create an account there.
I may have misunderstood your need, but you might host issues/PR's from a Codeberg mirror, and use webhooks to sync with your self-hosted forgejo.

https://docs.codeberg.org/advanced/using-webhooks/

i’ve seen a few projects try to leave github completely and run everything self-hosted. the control is nice, but the contributor drop usually happens faster than expected.

Most people won’t create another account just to open an issue or send a small fix. even devs who agree with the idea still default to whatever is easiest.

Keeping a mirror on github seems to be what many teams end up doing. not perfect, but it keeps the door open for contributors while you keep your own setup running.

On forgejo you can set automatic sync period to 5 minutes or so avoiding manual sync
Last time I checked forgejo was allowing only pull or push syncs. Does it allow 2-way syncing as well? I need to check that.