There is an effort (https://forgefed.org) but I don’t think there’s anything usable yet.

Interesting idea, but just thinking out loud… Would this only work for public repos? What about private ones? For private repos how would one ensure that admins can’t just open the database and read the repository? How would you ensure the correct collaborators are the only ones who can push / merge? If a server goes down, are you stuck with a read-only repo? Do you have to just fork that repo and start again?

While this idea might have legs, one of the key aspects with Git and places like GitHub / GitLab is backups. Personally I have my local repo on my dev-box, a self hosted server running gitbucket and finally a copy on GitHub. So I can in theory loose any two of those and still have a copy of my code somewhere.

Now what could be interesting is if using federation we could maybe auto publish to these other off-site locations? But again how do you deal with access rights? Most of my repositories are private while I work on the MVP. So making sure that those repos are secure and undiscoverable while initial develop is underway and ensuring that only those that I authorize to make changes to it can do so. And then finally if I lose access to my “user” because a server went down, how do I make sure I can still contribute?

Interesting idea, just needs some questions answered, in my opinion.

but I do not feel comfortable with depending on Microsoft for this service.

Why don’t you feel good about it? When Microsoft acquired Github, the worst things were predicted by some users. That was in late 2018 if I’m not mistaken. Now it’s 2023, what terrible things have happened so far? From my point of view, Github has actually developed very positively since then.

Sure, Github could delete repositories at any time. But so can any other provider. However, this is not a big problem for the code alone, since you always have at least one current version stored locally. Issues and pull requests can be exported, albeit unofficially. Corresponding scripts for this are even offered directly on Github.

What else could Microsoft do? Use the code that is available in a repository. Microsoft can also do this if the code is stored by another provider. Git clone <repo> is already sufficient for this.

So I personally see few problems to use Github. Especially since there are the most users and therefore the probability is higher to find people who participate in a project.

But apart from that, I host a few projects at Codeberg.org. Responsible for this is a non-profit organization in Germany. Except for some technical problems when switching to better hardware a few months ago, I can’t complain.