Forgejo was initially created in December 2022 as a
fork of
Gitea. The fork occurred after a for-profit
limited corporation run by the lead maintainer of the project, Lunny Xiao, silently transferred Gitea's trademarks and operations to the company and began to establish an
open-core model. After it became public, Gitea contributors signed an open letter asking for the project's trademarks and domains to be placed under community management. After that was rejected, the project was forked. While initially being synchronized with the Gitea codebase, Forgejo eventually abandoned the practice and split from Gitea following version 1.21 in February 2024, In August 2024, Forgejo moved from the
MIT license to the copyleft
GNU General Public License. While the original code is still MIT, the overall project is licensed under the GPL. One of the main goals for the future of Forgejo is their plan to implement
interoperability between different installations. While repositories can be mirrored from any other Git forge, the project has begun work on implementing support for the
ActivityPub protocol, allowing users to collaborate with each other using Forgejo's features. The project has received funding from the
NLnet organization for both the protocol extension needed to accommodate the feature subset, dubbed as "ForgeFed", and its implementation into Forgejo. As of 2025, the ability to
federate "stars" on repositories across Forgejo installations has been built, while other forge packages such as
GitLab have also begun work on implementing support for ForgeFed. == Users ==