Alright, nobody is allowed to use the word “quietly” in headlines anymore!
Some alternatives… codeberg.org sr.ht
Will it have blackjack and hookers?
git init blacjack
git init hookers
That’s the genius of git: it’s not tied to any website. Pull your repo from here and push it to there and you’re cooking.
The website around it is also just optional. You can dump git repos anywhere you want.
Of course the website is helpful and adds tooling, bit it’s an extra nonetheless
Yes, that’s true for the git repo itself, but a git forge can provide a multitude of related services, including issues and pull request management, CI/CD pipelines, wikis, static content hosting, package registries, etc. which are not as easily migrated.
I honestly think wiki, static hosting, package registries etc. don’t belong on a git repo. Github has continuously extended their feature-set, but its caused vendor lock-in which I think is the point. How hard is it to spin up a web service to host static content? There are loads of good open source wiki projects, etc.
Why do it yourself in a complicated way and poke holes in my firewall and security if I can use the existing infrastructure that is already a publiclly accessible web page to host just another one? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hup Holland Hup!
Wait scratch that…
Hub Holland Hub!
Isn’t gitlab open source? I recall it was MIT license too
From TFA:
GitLab made it further in the evaluation but didn’t survive it either. The issue was its open-core model, where the Community Edition is genuinely free software but the Enterprise Edition is not.
Next office replacement. I use excel a lot and lately it became a dog shit.
Last week, out of the blue, I got an error saying excel cannot save this file mind you I’m saving the file on desktop.
LibreOffice exists and works very well!
I use it at home and I was shocked when I knew it even runs VBA.
Unfortunately my work laptop has to be windows. I won’t touch Microslop product after working hours.
Edit: since they used forgejo, I meant by next is replacing Microslop Office with open source.
Unfortunately my work laptop has to be windows. I won’t touch Microslop product after working hours.
You mean that it has to be Microsoft? Cuz Libreoffice works on windows.
Yeah, it’s tough with work restrictions. Thankfully I was able to finagle my way out of windows at work and am in Linux now.
Just use Codeberg
Not all projects might be open source if they’ve got tools used by the police, military, etc. Codeberg doesn’t allow repositories that aren’t open source.
They’re using the same software (Forgejo)
When (if) they manage to add federation to it, then both sites could even work together.
More hosts better than one. I doubt codeberg will be able to sustain the load remaining as free as it is now when it will be popular enough that every cs student will be using it for their assignments (forgetting to gitignore their IDE cache files obviously). Or some smartasses start abusing it for free storage. I mean everything that github has to deal with currently.
IIRC their tos says it must only be used for opensource software (i don’t remember if it was enforced yet but expect that they can remove private repos at any time or make them paid feature). Same story with sourcehut
It should be a European project not only for NL
Just like the Fediverse, it’s actually better and healthier if more people/groups/nations host their own (whether public or private). More diversity, less centralization.
The lack of clean and transparent federation between them is certainly inconvenient but is not a permanent roadblock, it is simply a known and well-understood technical problem that work is ongoing to solve. git itself already has very mature support for complete decentralization and decentralized workflows, it’s all of Github’s feature layers like user accounts, PR management, issue tracking, CI/CD and the various other workflow and project management layers that may need to be connected and federated across the different Forgejo-based platforms (and hopefully other platforms too in the future). Users and permissions and PRs and issue reporting are among the most critical parts, and I think they are looking at Fediverse’s ActivityPub as a method for enabling much of that.
The more large organizations that choose to build their own viable, permanent and financially stable Forgejo platforms, the more attractive and necessary proper federation between them becomes, and the more assured it will become the first-class feature it needs to be.
We are not building a mere Github replacement that drops into its centralized place, wears its shoes and follows its same path to inevitable corporate capture and enshittification. We are building a decentralized standard to be the democratic foundation for future software development and collaboration that no one can, should, or will be able to exclusively control. It’s not done yet, but this the right way for it to start so that something like SourceForge (for those old enough to remember that trainwreck) or Github never becomes a problem again.
A) It’s forgejo, so any forgejo instance (including Codeberg) can access it (since it’s federated.
B) Coordinating something like this eu-wide is much more difficult than in just the netherlands.
I don’t think forgejo is fully federated yet. Unless they had a big release in the last week.
not yet, I guess it’ll take some time to arrive there
Another problem is language or languages, EU has what? 15 different languages and none of them will agree which language should be primary because not everyone speaks English, for me it wouldn’t be a problem i’m from the Balkans, i work and live in Germany and use German at home and at work and mainly use English on my phone, PC and while watching movies, shows, etc. so for me there is a choice of 3 different languages while my wife can speak only German so how would we all agree what language should be the primary for this project?
Oops, I read the headline like the neanderthals are building their own github and got really curious!
I’ve worked with the Dutch. There’s no functional difference
Krijg eens even gauw de graftyfus
Wat is het toch een mooi taaltje
Same same
As an American I would be very interested in this. Our repositories have been slower and had more errors since Microsoft took over
why not just use codeberg?
They do use the same software. I think it is a good idea they run a separate instance, so the hosting costs are automatically covered by the government for the code they develop. This also avoids the centralization on a single provider.
Digital sovereignty. Codeberg is funding development of forgejo. Forgejo will federate to other instances. So you can have your own repo and someone on another forgejo can interact remotely. So no need for centralized platforms anymore. Power of the Fediverse! :-)
I’m pretty sure it does not federate yet. Please correct me if I’m wrong though.
Correct. YET! Coming SOON! And powered by ActivityPub! It’s a super hero!
So ELI5, my projects are hosted on Codeberg - they can be accessed through the NL’s new instance? Are they mirrored there, or is it just a redirect to the Codeberg host? or???
This is going to federate via ActivityPub. My understanding if you’ll have a centralized repo under someone or some business. But you could have your own account and fork their repo to your federated server. You can work there, push changes and it goes up.
Being AP you can follow changes, get alerts on releases, etc.
"What about forge federation?
Federation is under active development, and is considered experimental. This is because many required features−notably moderation and access control−have not yet been developed.
The Forgejo project reserves the right to make breaking changes to its federation components with no prior warning. Such changes may be “backwards incompatible” and could result in the (sub-)domain used for your Forgejo instance to be “burned”. This means that the domain will no longer be usable for ActivityPub-based federation in the future, no matter whether you set up Forgejo from scratch or choose to use other software that uses ActivityPub.
For more information on implemented features and future federation-related plans, check out the federation roadmap.
If you are interested in working on federation-related code, consider joining our federation-focused Matrix room: #forgejo-federation:matrix.org (web link)"
https://forgejo.org/ https://forgejo.org/faq/#what-about-forge-federation https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/main/FederationRoadmap.md
Instead of a company owning the monopoly on the data and the infrastructure, the ActivityPub protocol allows for federated instances to communicate with one another so while you might sign in and join through one site, you might find something interesting coming from one of the interested. Same protocol that Lemmy, Mastadon, BlueSky, PeerTube, and some other platforms run that allows for Programming.dev to communicate with Lemmy.ML of Feddit.it
And… is that the present implementation of Codeberg? Are they running ActivityPub protocol? Is the infrastructure federated?
No, they expressed intent to implement it using ActivityPub and there has been some work, but it’s still far away from being useful.
Not yet, but it is their plan…
they wanna own their infra i guess. not being dependent is a good thing for a gov, and in choosing forgejo they’re basically choosing codeberg after all.
Nice! I just don’t like that only Git is supported. Mercurial also needs love.
If there is any such thing as perfect software, I would say Git is probably it.
Mercurial seems cool but I don’t think there’s a real reason to move away from Git unless they come up with some groundbreaking new feature that no one has even imagined yet.
Honest question: why use mercurial?
I wouldn’t personally go as far as saying you should use it. Using it, and it deserving love (and support) are all related but fundamentally different questions. I agree that Mercurial deserves love, I’m not sure if it actually deserves support (but because it deserves love, I am willing to entertain the possibility, and support the idea of supporting it). I don’t think anyone should use it as a primary tool, but it might be worth using out of love, and if people still love it, maybe that’s worth some support. I don’t know, I’m not anybody’s boss, I’m not telling anybody what to do, I’m just making suggestions.
Mercurial is frankly a lot nicer and more comfortable to actually work with, it has much better UX overall that fits into a much cleaner mental model with fewer exposed sharp edges you can cut yourself on, and can work pretty much transparently with git and can even use git as a backend in almost all cases. The downside is that like VHS vs. Beta, it is such a distant second place in popularity and adoption that it really has no realistic path forward, no matter how much better designed one could argue it is. Like @Holla@feddit.org suggested, the only thing better than being the actual best option, is being standardized, and git is basically completely and universally standardized at this point. And there are genuine benefits to that standardization, and there are genuine benefits to git itself too.
If you want to paper over git with some nice UX, Mercurial might be worth a shot, you might not like it at all… or you might love it, and it does deserve some love. But realistically, in a world where git is the standard, that isn’t going to reduce your cognitive load, it’s only going to add another layer of cognitive load. You have to love it to want that. And maybe you would love it. But git is not going away, even for those of us who love Mercurial, I think we have mostly all come to terms with the fact that git won the DVCS wars and that’s just the reality we live in now. Even having accepted that, I can still cheerfully sing Mercurial’s praises and wear my rose colored glasses when I look at it, despite not even using it anymore myself.
I gave up and converted all my personal hg repos to git and gitea (now forgejo) a couple years ago. It’s fine. I’m fluent in git now, I have to be for work, I can do powerful (sometimes dangerous and exciting) things with git and I wouldn’t give that up. I realistically probably speak git better than I speak hg nowadays, but like anyone who learned English as a second language and now uses it primarily, it is always a delight and a comfort to have any opportunity to return to the old mother tongue, no matter how briefly or simplistically, and hg still represents that delightful experience for me. Even when I start to forget native words and have to mix git phrases in that I can’t think of an hg equivalent for.
to anybody reading this, could you please be so kind and reply to my comment if the question is answered?
dont think we have @remindme on here. :)You are using piefed, so in the web ui you can click the three dot menu and select the remind me option. This isn’t in the api though, so it wouldn’t be in a third-party app unless they implemented it separately.
Whoa, thank you! I did not know about this. :)
@remindme@mstdn.social 24 hours
@jaybone Ok, I will remind you on Friday May 8, 2026 at 12:04 PM UTC.
One reason could be that Mercurial actually is rather good.
Having alternatives is always good! And BTW, Git won not because it was better than mercurial…
Sure, at the very beginning of the launch of Git, Mercurial was better/had more features/more mature/etc.
That’s just not true after 20 years of mainstream git adoption and development today.
Mercurial is also simpler than Git and the commands are more intuitive
Neither of those observations, even if true, are an incentive for someone to migrate away from git.
They are true (I bet you never used mercurial) and you must learn how to read: Where did I wrote to migrate from Git to mercurial? Having alternatives is good
The only thing better than perfect is standardised. Supporting two vcs-systems would mean that a lot of tooling would need to be duplicated for it
Definitely. The last time I checked, your only hosting options if you wanted to use Mercurial directly were Heptapod and ($DEITY help us) Sourceforge.
There’s also sourcehut.
Is
hg-gitlacking specific features that you need?Using
hg-giteverywhere reinforces the idea that Mecurial is a second-class citizen. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that an option for interoperability exists, but I wish it weren’t needed.)
I don’t at all see how this is relevant though? They are using another ‘standard’ already, Forgejo. And they are just hosting it themselves, so that they are in full control. If anything I’m actually astonished they didn’t already do something like this.
