As you might have seen, we have been hosting a Forgejo instance on https://f-hub.org for a while now in a kind of soft-launch mode. Originally the idea was to wait for the Forge federation via ActivityPub to be available before the full launch and slowly add up additional features like CD/CI in the mean time.
However, it looks like the federation will still take considerable time to materialize and I also realized that people seem to be not actually all that interested in the code forge itself.
At least no one actively came to me and asked for an account so far and the people that I approached myself were either already self-hosting Gitea/Forgejo themselves, or did not really see the point of moving away from Github/Gitlab. And there was a third group that was interested in (gratis) CI/CD only.
My internal theory so far was that once forge federation would arrive, at least some of the Github/Gitlab people would be more willing to move, but given the above that this is still months if not years out, I am starting to think it might be better to reprioritize.
As for the CI/CD people, I think the options for that with Forgejo are not so great and mostly geared towards web-devs, and I also see a lot of complications with running multiple half-baked options both maintenance workload and security wise. But feedback on what kind of CD/CI would be useful to you or the project you are working on would be still appreciated.
So what I have been thinking about is to maybe re-focus a bit on other stuff for f-hub.org. Obviously the IRC network, XMPP & Matrix gateways plus bridging is a big part of it and could be expanded. Similarly the hosted Loomio group-forums could be improved a bit and made more accessible. I have some ideas for that, but nothing super concrete.
On the code hosting part, I would probably switch to an solution that is more integrated, likely Heptapod, which is a Gitlab soft-fork that adds Mercurial functionality. I am obviously not super happy about the open-core nature of Gitlab, but it comes with a lot of built-in features that with Forgejo require separate services out of the box (so more "bang" with hopefully less maintenance effort), and I hear the CI/CD features even of the Gitlab CE are quite nice (never used them myself). But again, feedback would be appreciated.
The other thing I have in mind for a while now, would be small hosted servers. I have a few ARM64 SBCs and capacity to run some small x86 VMs, but obviously that would be much more limited than a proper VPS with a dedicated IP and much higher bandwidth (sorry no Peertube/Owncast hosting). Sadly with my setup right now I can't even give dedicated IPv6, although it might be possible in the future with some significant rethinking of my network stack. But overall, I am not sure if people would be actually interested in this given the limitations, and while I would probably not ask for any direct compensation for it, donations to offset the electricity costs etc. would be highly appreciated to run these.
Any other ideas what would be actually useful for developers, not only for FOSS games, but in general? I am mainly thinking of projects that want to move from the lone-dev stage to some nicer collaboration features and maybe a slightly bigger team.
