Git without a forge

This person obviously has their own way of doing things that works for them and that's great. Some of his views are patently absurd though. This is mostly commenting on his reasons against using a forge and not a comment that he should do something differently.

Trust

100% fair and I think this is the main take-away from the blog post. If you don't trust something, don't use it. Full stop, the post could have ended there and been fine. But then it goes on to say:

You get a workflow imposed on you

You mean like forcing people to use email to submit pull requests to your self-hosted git repos? It doesn't matter what you are doing, if you are working on an open source project you are going to have workflow limitations. This is arguing a fallacy.

In particular, your project automatically gets a bug tracker – and you don’t get a choice about what bug tracker to use, or what it looks like. If you use Gitlab, you’re using the Gitlab bug tracker. The same goes for the pull request / merge request system.

Nothing is forcing you to use these features so just don't use them. Plenty of teams use 3rd party tools but host their code in a forge site. Having options available to you automatically is not the same thing as being forced to use them. If it was, JIRA wouldn't exist because everyone would use github/gitlab/whatever's built-in issue tracking and project management.

The majority of the post comes across as someone who just doesn't like the forge sites and aside from the trust aspect, then spent a bunch of effort trying to create associations and limitations between things that don't exist.

Trust is 100% the main reason not to use a forge site and all the other things cited are superfluous and/or very subjective.

Interesting read, I learned some things that git can do and its’s cool to know it’s possible, but I get the sense that „I’m just used to doing it this way” is the author’s main reason. Making most project communication private is a huge sacrifice, and if all projects did things this way then open source development would be far worse off.

I could imagine an „account-less” git forge that uses email verification to create user sessions that then allow conversation and contribution under that email address and name. You’d have to click a magic link in your email every time you wanted to create a session, but they could be long-lived and you don’t have to manage a password.

I wouldn't mind doing a self-hosted git repo and only using cli if I didn't have to also use email to do so.

Seriously the worst part. Email is a technology that should be left in the past. It's just awful. There's no good way to do email.

and Sourceforge now has a pretty bad reputation

The bad reputation is largely obsolete. The owner had changed to a bad owner with bad practices, but that owner was eventually replaced by a better owner again.

I still hate the UI though. We have much better alternatives today, which is why I don't see any reason for anyone to go back to (or start) using Sourceforge. It's no longer an issue of owner and bad practices, but solely of the platform itself with its UI/UX.

I think it's an interesting idea, and I'd see it as fine for simple host + fetch. But as soon as you start interacting, I see it as far worse.

A personal support email may work, but as they write by the end, ticket tracking and collaborating on a platform with a shared web interface is much superior for information sharing and but also iteration (they talk about back and forth emailing earlier).

Self-hosting yet another platform/forge with its own account system is not viable to me either. (I'm still hoping for forgejo federation for a centralized account. Until then, GitHub seems like the best choice purely because it's the biggest and everyone has an account and can contribute and post without account barriers.)

The idea that it could be a hosted repo with an integrated mailing list (and potentially bug tracker) is interesting, but ultimately, almost/actually a full forge then anyway.