A great example of POSSE (Publish own site, syndicate everywhere)

Go Digitally Sovereign
,
1

I was just doing some housekeeping in my self-hosted forgejo when I stumbled across this great example of POSSE, a term @aschrijver introduced me to last week. I absolutely love this:

We left GitHub as the host for private and product repositories in 2026. GitHub remains useful for reach; it is no longer our source of truth.

They also moved to forgejo. :rocket: The POSSE practice makes so much sense across the board for folks concerned about digital sovereignty. This is just one example in an admittedly very technical context, but definitely worth taking on board and emulating. If we care about digital sovereignty and believe in self-hosting open source, then we should also be self-hosting our code on open source.

Here’s the part that touched me the most. I’ve tucked away the full text below for future reference.

1. Sovereignty, privacy, and speed

Self-hosting gives us:

  • Control over where data lives and who can access it
  • Predictable performance on our own infrastructure
  • Clear retention and backup policies we operate ourselves
  • Tighter integration with our deploy stack without coupling to an external SaaS API

For a European product, keeping project data on infrastructure we govern also simplifies privacy and compliance compared to relying on a U.S.-hosted platform by default.

2. Independence from a U.S.-led platform

GitHub is owned by Microsoft. Many teams are uncomfortable with long-term dependence on a single U.S. corporate host for code, issues, CI metadata, and contributor identity — especially when platform direction can shift toward proprietary AI tooling, enterprise monetization, or policies maintainers do not control.

Our view: that is a strategic risk. We prefer a forge whose roadmap and governance we can reason about without betting the product on one vendor’s commercial priorities, legal exposure, or jurisdiction.

1 Like
BoldlyType — Free Text Formatter & Style Generator
2
Full text of styxlab README.md announcing move of repos to forgejo

styxlab

Personal GitHub profile for Joost Jansky — maintainer of Energyausweis.

Product and private git no longer live on GitHub. Day-to-day development runs on a self-hosted Forgejo instance. This account stays on GitHub for public material, identity (OAuth / integrations), and achievements — not as the source of truth for the Energyausweis monorepo or deploys.

See also: Energyausweis on GitHub (org profile — public publishing surface).

Why we moved product git off GitHub

We left GitHub as the host for private and product repositories in 2026. GitHub remains useful for reach; it is no longer our source of truth.

1. Sovereignty, privacy, and speed

Self-hosting gives us:

  • Control over where data lives and who can access it
  • Predictable performance on our own infrastructure
  • Clear retention and backup policies we operate ourselves
  • Tighter integration with our deploy stack without coupling to an external SaaS API

For a European product, keeping project data on infrastructure we govern also simplifies privacy and compliance compared to relying on a U.S.-hosted platform by default.

2. Independence from a U.S.-led platform

GitHub is owned by Microsoft. Many teams are uncomfortable with long-term dependence on a single U.S. corporate host for code, issues, CI metadata, and contributor identity — especially when platform direction can shift toward proprietary AI tooling, enterprise monetization, or policies maintainers do not control.

Our view: that is a strategic risk. We prefer a forge whose roadmap and governance we can reason about without betting the product on one vendor’s commercial priorities, legal exposure, or jurisdiction.

Why Forgejo

We run Forgejo — a lightweight, self-hosted Git forge (issues, pull requests, wiki, webhooks, CI integrations).

Forgejo fits when governance matters: community-oriented, non-profit governance (Codeberg e.V.), after the Gitea project’s direction moved toward a for-profit structure.

One line: Forgejo for sovereignty, privacy, speed, and independence from U.S. corporate control.

Gitea — great for community projects

We recommend Gitea for community and OSS projects that want simple, low-maintenance self-hosted collaboration — repos, PRs, issues, wiki, webhooks — without heavy operations.

Forgejo Gitea
Governance Community / non-profit emphasis Pragmatic, company-backed in practice
Best for Sovereignty + community control Easy self-hosted “GitHub-like” forge

Also: Codeberg (hosted Forgejo in the EU).

Contribution graph (archived)

GitHub’s live contribution graph dropped after private and public product repos were removed in July 2026. Achievements on this account were kept; the activity heatmap on the profile tab no longer reflects years of work.

Below is a static screenshot of the profile and contribution graph from 2026-07-21, captured before deletion (warm archive).

GitHub contribution graph for styxlab, captured 2026-07-21 before repository deletion

Snapshot only — not updated. Historical repos are preserved in an offline warm archive.

Further reading

Post-script:

I reached out to styxlab via their employer because I am not able to find their self-hosted Forgejo, so that I can properly link upstream to the code that I forked from their GitHub originally. I don’t know why they didn’t link to it!

In the meantime, because of the MIT open source license the code lives on. Here’s my fork. It’s a self-hosted contact form for my website so I don’t have to trust some online service like formspree to provide it for me! (Hat tip to @jen for pointing it out to me! in Server Admins)

3

I was involved in the birth of Forgejo, and am very excited about its current popularity and uptake. One thing it does not have, which Github does, are the network effects around open source development. Ones self-hosted Forgejo sits alone on the internet, hard to be discovered, and providing the barrier of a signup just to participate with that one repo.

To solve this there’s ForgeFed, the forge federation protocol based on ActivityPub, that is able to make any code forge part of the fediverse. Forgejo intends to implement this through their community contrib federation project. And there’s a separate project ActvityForge. Unfortunately ForgeFed protocol itself is not maintained atm..

1 Like
4

Awesome! I appreciate you! :hugs: Just impressed by the amount of social organizing going on around open source these days. It takes alot of work to make open source and federation viable, and it’s not just programming that is needed!

This is legit. styxlab also said something similar and this is what had me thinking POSSE:

Like with all things these days, you have to find a balance between self-hosting and big tech. We have to start making thoughtful, intentional decisions about when to make your self-hosted the “source of truth”. We don’t want to just use big tech for everything we do because of the assumption that the reach it gives us will be beneficial.

Looks like styxlab and his team have decided to move the things that are only for them to forgejo but are going to keep their github accounts for the reach that it can give them.

I had a look and it looks like it’s still pretty much at the beginning stages. Hope somebody invests in it big time because it would be a big help, as you say. It should at least be possible to allow the following of a self-hosted project without making people give up their email address and create an account.

But I am not sure I agree that the ability to contribute code or to discuss a project on a self-hosted Forgejo should be possible without creating an account. The risks of noise and spam are quite high, imo. Maybe some sort of social login to reduce friction similar to id.discourse.org for Discourse would be sufficient.

Meanwhile it’s always possible to get the code from public forgejo repos without an account. Then if a fork is also made public then there will be a link back to the source repo. That will create some organic linkages. We can also talk alot about our own repos and those we use and benefit from!

I was prompted to also learn some more about Codeberg and to join. I am now also following them on mastodon. Really liked the blog post explaining their recent vote to prohibit vibe coded projects, which contains so many valuable insights.

Again, amazing to see the amount of social organizing involved.. they have a meeting of all their members to discuss and debate decisions, and then have an asynchronous vote. And then a succinct blog post explaining the outcome and how they gotthere. Awesome! :clap: