Why I use Gitea

There are some reasons why I decided to develop my projects outside of hosted Git services like GitHub or GitLab

How it all started for me

During my apprenticeship I learnt about the homelab community and the self hosted "movement". I had some old PC's I used as servers (with virtualization like ESXi, Hyper-V and Proxmox) at home and began to experiment with all kinds of software and stuff I could use to enhance my life and work.

I also started developing software during my freetime and needed some sort of versioning (prior I did that manually with individual folders for new versions). I encountered GitLab and started to love it, because it made everything easier and always had a solution for a new problem I came across. The only downside: hosting it yourself does requiere some computing power. I digged a bit deeper and that was due to Ruby and the workes in the background (GitLab bundles a lot of other sofware and the stack is pretty big).

After two years of using GitLab, I wanted to switch to a more lightweight solution. Some reasons were the complexities of the backup and updating processes, but mostly because I wanted to shrink my setup to a more consolidated one.

A few weeks of research led me to the decision to switch to Gitea. It is easier to administrate and runs on almost any hardware you can imagine (even on a Raspberry Pi), because of the language the project uses (Go) and it has a way smaller footprint. Updating is a piece of cake, because you only replace the binary and backups are as easy as zipping the folder of the programm.

Why selfhosted?

Security

Big websites like Google, Instagram, Your bank and GitHub/GitLab have a high potential reward for hackers, because the data that these companies have at their disposal, is very valuable. That's one of the reasons why there are data leaks almost every year of different sizes and severity.

I want to be as careful as possible with my data and I don't want to have my intellectual property at constant risk (or at least I want to decide what I want to risk).

Privacy

Kind of similar to the reason above, I want to have control about what I share with whom. I know that GitHub/GitLab do have "private repositories", but that doesn't mitigate the fact, that you store your data at somebody else's servers and hand over controll to them. Don't get me wrong, I am using cloud services from companies of my own, but only with data I want to risk.

There is also the fact, that GitHub is a company (which is owned by Microsoft), that means they will/want to analyze what the user do with their service or might want/expect. One new trend is AI and big data. The new copilot from GitHub is trained with user data and public repositories.

The bottom line is, that I think that some stuff simply doesn't belong into the "public" (or at least I decide what I share and not vice versa).

Independence

I am hosting myself, because I want to have some degree of independence. If my server goes down because of a electricity failure, that is my problem and my responsibility. If I can't access my resources at that given time, that is also my problem and also my responsibility. Both things I have control over.

If I can't access my resources, because some employee at a company did a mistake (which is ok, shit happens...) or a company goes bankrupt or simply wants to stop their operation or the operation of their service I am using, that is still my problem but nothing I have control over.

I know that you need to outsource things in your live. That will give you time and freedom to do something else. But some of the things that are important to you and you can do yourself, should be done by yourself.

Education

You learn a lot by doing stuff by yourself. Not everything is important and should be memorized, but it won't harm you, if you have experience. That is at lest my motto.