Genuinely curious here for someone who has tried self hosting git and has found it a pita to maintain...i want to know what is it that devs are flocking to other platforms and how are we sure that they won't pull all the red card signals that github is said to pull off.
Forgejo is fairly simple to run – way lighter and simpler than GitLab even. (GitLab is quite okay, too!)
If you want a hosted service, go for Codeberg. It’s run by a German non-profit (so it’ll be hard to bite and switch OpenAI-style). Only free/open source projects are accepted, though.
Have been self-hosting GitLab for my org a few years by now, with quite a few users (>800 atm). Updates are automatic via the GitLab Omnibus package repos. Once or twice per year some update requires intervention. Otherwise, nothing bad happens. Very happy so far.
Biggest problem at the moment is that AI scrapers (curse them and their owners, pox be upon their houses!) sometimes bring things to a crawl. But nothing that a few firewall rules and anoubis won't solve.