Comment by catlifeonmars

There are two that I know of, and neither seem to do a better job at solving my problem of providing a place to host and distribute open source software.

I hosted my own forgejo server used by actual other people * very slightly* before it was cool, and just to get started I had to go through this giant list of configs governing important auth/cred stuff and also random ass features and everything else, then I set up auth using my existing reverse proxy, then I had to figure out how to use JWT for access via the git CLI because I wasn't going to give every client an ssh key to The Server with All the Code or coordinate all that.

Then, finally, it all worked and I thought I'd check out the CI or some of the other interesting features I had heard of/seen like static site hosting. After looking into those and how mature they were, I realized this was really only for hobbyists, or people who want to make hosting git repos a part time job but also don't use/care/know about the stuff that makes a "forge" more than just a git server.

Personally, I liked the idea of self-hosting a forge with the assumption I could trust it as a CI service, and maybe allow unauthenticated read access, and have good authorization/authentication for my collaborators. I had a ton of 3p git repos to host and 1p repos to test on so it made sense to try since Github is not meant for that use case. I also evaluated gitea and saw they were offering a commercial multitenant service where my 3p hosting wouldn't be welcome and even otherwise I'd basically be at odds with them, and gitlab but they wanted me to run a whole damn cluster and felt a little too 2018.

If you're Codeberg and run the project it could be worth investing in making it better, but then you're literally making it your full time job. I wasn't going to make mine doing container stuff for them though. To their credit I checked their docs on just now and it seems to be in much better shape.

I went back to github because I like paying $5 or whatever for something that works, has many people on it, a bunch of integrations and generally enough quality to put in front of paying customers, and is secure. It's an insane value for anybody who has priorities higher than hosting their own git forge. So I think pretty much nobody knows how to do Github better than Github.