Lethio

A Royale with Git

aug 2026 · opinion · self-hosting

You know what they call a distributed version control system in Lyon?

They call it Framagit.

Worth learning the name now, rather than during the next GitHub incident, when your pipeline is face down in the water and the status page has gone a tasteful shade of yellow.

Don't get me wrong. GitHub is a phenomenal service. It's the global backbone for a generation of developers, and the amount of secure automation they hand you for absolutely nothing is incredible. Cloudflare is the same story. TLS, a world-class CDN, no egress bill, free DDoS absorption, and it's bloody easy to set up. Both are excellent. I use both. I'd recommend both.

Both are also American corporations, and one of them is Microsoft.

You can read that off an org chart. GitHub holds your source, your CI secrets, your identity, your issue history, and increasingly the AI assistant reading all of it. Cloudflare terminates your TLS, which means it sees your traffic decrypted. Both of those are the products working correctly. It just means the trust boundary around your infrastructure is drawn in someone else's jurisdiction, and you didn't draw it.

I'd like my backups and my configs in Europe. Which brings us back to Lyon.

Framagit is run by Framasoft, a French non-profit that has been at this since 2004. Nine employees, a few dozen volunteers, and infrastructure serving over two million people. If the name doesn't ring a bell, the software might: PeerTube and Mobilizon are both theirs. Their own servers sit in a Hetzner rack in Germany, which is roughly where this site lives.

Codeberg does the same job out of Berlin. And if you'd rather own the whole stack, Forgejo on a cheap VPS is an afternoon's work. None of these has to replace GitHub tomorrow, and none of them will. A second remote is enough to start. git remote add takes four seconds. Nobody's storming a barricade here.

But sovereignty isn't free.

Framasoft runs on donations. 94% of their budget, the overwhelming majority of it from individuals. Not EU grants. Not a foundation with a Silicon Valley endowment. Individuals, in small amounts, about half of it arriving in the last three weeks of December. Codeberg is in the same boat. The alternative to a trillion-dollar company is a dozen underpaid people and a server bill they have to crowdfund every December.

I'm a notorious cheapskate. I ship pay-once software specifically because I resent subscriptions on principle, and when I opened Framasoft's donation page I took the one-off option over the monthly one, which will surprise nobody who has bought anything I've made. Five euros. About what a beer costs down here.

That on its own doesn't keep a server running. A few thousand people doing the same is most of their annual budget, and it's how the association has lasted twenty years on nine salaries. The other contribution costs nothing at all, and it's the one I'm making right now: most developers I know have never heard of Framagit or Codeberg.

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