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Hello everyone! It's been a while since I've posted an entry in this gemlog, so I've decided to dust it off and take the chance to talk about my recent migration to Sourcehut and my reasons for doing such a migration, considering I already host my own Git forge (Femgit) and have accounts on multiple others. There's quite a lot of stuff to unwrap here so bare with me.
For context I officially have accounts (at least from what I can remember) in Femgit, GitHub, GitLab, Akkoma's Gitea instance and Codeberg. I've created various projects in these accounts but I've never really specified a single location to centralize most of my projects. In other words, my body of work tends to be scattered across Git forges, which makes it hard for other people willing to take a look at what I've made to find my projects. The reason why I've tended to scatter them is simply issues arising with one Git forge making me want to try another one. GitHub was closed source, owned by Microsoft and they started using projects without the owner's permission for their Copilot service, so I decided to switch to GitLab. GitLab was hard to use and now very limited to anyone willing to use CI unless they pay for Pro, so I switched to my own Git forge. My own Git forge was getting limited for Linux kernel projects, so I switched to GitLab again, then to Codeberg for the CLI utility I made called "Vento". And now Gitea went corporate and want to use DAOs to make decisions over the software (spoiler alert: idea that will backfire immediately due to DAOs being by design antidemocratic structures), so I needed a new forge while community members fork Gitea and I switch to that for my Git instance... And when a friend of mine switched to Sourcehut it peaked my interest.
So I've known about Sourcehut for a while now, however I didn't try it at the time due to initial impressions of it being a strictly paid service. While in the future Sourcehut will switch business schemes, the alpha is currently free for project owners to work with. It makes sense from a business standpoint also, since the traffic Sourcehut receives needs to be handled with powerful enough hardware. And for the starting price of $2 a month what you'll get in the future on Sourcehut is a bargain. It includes:
While in some forges some of these services are already free, I haven't seen a forge include all of them packed for this cheap. The interface for Sourcehut is also very clean and, even more importantly, totally static. And, on top of this, if you can't afford to pay it officially, self-hosting is also an option! Projects are grouped in "project hubs" and they can also be totally independent. So you can group repositories, mailing lists and several issue trackers into a single big hub for users to explore. While getting started is a bit harder compared to the bigger forges, which are mainly web-driven, it pays off with a worthy, user-friendly service.
So I've already migrated Vento to Sourcehut, which you can find in the following link:
However, this won't be the last project I'll migrate. To be precise, the following projects will be migrated:
Other projects will be migrated if I ever need to update them, but for now they can be found on their original forges. Linux kernel projects will be kept on GitLab, due to their large size, and my active projects will be mirrored over on Femgit. Therefore, the only Git forges I'll be using for my own projects will be:
If I happen to change my opinion in the future regarding any of the choices I've published on this entry, I'll give you an update in this capsule, either through a new entry if it's major, or under this same entry if it's minor. I'll also be updating this gemlog more often now that I've graduated high school (fun stuff). So expect more content here soonish. In the meantime, stay safe and away from Microsoft!
Switching to Sourcehut was published on 2022-11-16