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.

All software should be open source.

Yeah!

Classic: modern policies, prehistoric execution.

I agree there are cases where sensitivity matters, like national security or systems tied to critical infrastructure. But when it comes to publicly funded software developed specifically for government use, the default should be open by principle. Exceptions can exist, but they must be justified — not the other way around. With COTS products like Microsoft Office, it’s different because the government is just a customer, not the owner of the development.

Absolutely!

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).

Fun fact: you didn’t have to reinstall; you can actually boot up a live usb and chroot into your install to fix things.

That’s what I tried! But I couldn’t do it! I should have asked for help.

You probably should not use number of users or amount of content as the deciding factor (that leads to centralization, remember the entire point of federation is to DE-centralize), that said…

The instance list does allow sorting by number of users or number of videos, phijkchu.com has the most users and Videovortex has the most videos.

Wow, you made me think! P.S.: I’m still new here on the Fediverse.

I completely forgot that grub could be themed… brb

lol

Nicely done. Im always too scared to break my machine by messing with grub. :)

Yeah, the first time I tried it (alone) I broke GRUB and had to reinstall Arch (but I have backups of everything and my dotfiles). Then I followed the tutorial and everything worked out!

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.

I don’t. It’s bad enough that people spend too much time on social media. Why the fuck would i introduce another one?

I’m practically only here because rif died. Its not because it’s enjoyable. I open the app to maybe see one good post among the thousands and thousands of “same”-posts.

You made me think.

interesting!

I’m sure you could have fixed it with GRUB Rescue. It’s slightly annoying, but it isn’t that hard to get booted from that. Once you get it to boot then you can fix things.

Don’t give up so quickly next time. It’s useful to learn how to fix it instead of just accepting failure and resetting everything.

Yeah, man, I even went into live mode to try to undo what I did, but I still couldn’t manage it (I should have looked for help). But since I have backups of everything and my dotfiles, I didn’t worry too much (though I was pissed, I won’t lie).

I have my system select the default option really quickly, so I don’t see GRUB. This makes it tempting to not do that, but I think I’ll accept the convenient option instead of the cool option still.

On mine, it’s already set to boot into Arch automatically. It shows in the bottom right corner: “Joining world in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.” It’s really cool, man!