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.

Me: Imagine reddit for left wing, privacy obsessed, Linux nerds.

Anyone else: I really don’t want to.

/scene

lmao

Got my first ad (or at least, the first I noticed) after submitting this. How ironic

lol

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).

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.

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

amazing!

@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!

Before anything, I would check if there is an active community they are actually interested in, and give them that. Otherwise, there’s really not much reason why they should use it. It would be like gifting someone a box full of manga to someone who is not interested in Japanese stuff. I’m saying this because a lot of people including OP seems to think decentralisation/federation/FOSSness are some major selling points to a lot of people, but it really isn’t. Content usually is.

It even applies to you too. If an instance banned you for mentioning Linux or FOSS, you wouldn’t really care that they were running open-source Lemmy, you would ditch that instance. If that happened with every instance, you wouldn’t use Lemmy at all.

Now you made me think man!

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

maybe not! Life isn’t just work.

interesting!

This is how I do it.

Brief

Imagine if there were 5 clones of twitter, all owned by different companies, but they could all still talk to each other.

So, a person from Twitter could talk to people from threads and bluesky.

Why do it this way?

Each twitter clone could have its own quirks. Like one could have a dislike button where as the rest won’t.
If one of the clone owners decides to become a nazi, we can just migrate to another clone.
This makes sure power is not concentrated in one place!
If the system is open source, you can even start your own version of twitter where you rule!

Don’t care about talking to people on twitter!

But you say “I don’t want to have to talk to people from Twitter!”. Well, doing it this way allows you to choose not to do so. (There’s an option to block clones you don’t like!)

What is fediverse?

It’s the network through which all these different but similar apps can talk to each other.

Social media formats like reddit, twitter and Instagram have been replicated for fediverse and available for people to join or create their own version.

Lemmy is a fediverse alternative for reddit, there are 100s of lemmy apps that can talk to each other (or choose not to if they don’t want to).
Mastadon is alternative for twitter.
And there are more.

To get them to join

Join the biggest instance or join any instance! You can figure out what you want specifically later, easy migration allows that!

But if you want You can read about them before joining: Each is focused on different things like privacy, literature, tech, and even gaming.

Fun Extra

Unlike with instagram and twitter and reddit, fediverse apps like mastadon and lemmy can theoretically talk to each other. So you will be able to see your “tweets” with your “reddit feed”.

Notes

Emphasize pain points and incentives like:

being banned for no reason
free speech
safe spaces
like minded people
Tighter knit communities
Decentralisation, if they’re into some form of socialism or left leaning ideologies.

awesome man, thanks a lot!