u/avatar_one

I run MansionNET, a small privacy-first FOSS services platform self-hosted on my own home server. The latest addition is a public Forgejo instance, and I wanted to share it with you all! I also went into the direction of modifying the frontend, so hopefully it looks a bit more disctinctive :)

The setup is:

• Forgejo 11.0.14 LTS, native APT install (Codeberg repo), open registration with email confirmation + built-in image CAPTCHA
• Ubuntu 24.04 VM on Proxmox (4 vCPU / 4 GB RAM, 30 GB NVMe system + 1 TB HDD for repos/LFS)
• PostgreSQL 16
• Caddy LXC terminates TLS and reverse-proxies everything; Let's Encrypt certs auto-issued
• Daily backups to a Proxmox Backup Server

Edge hardening at Caddy:

This part was acually very interesting! As soon as the deploy was done, I saw a flood of /commits/, /blame/, /raw/commit/ requests, which ended up being a classic AI training crawler behaviour, targeting per line authorship data from blame views. So Caddy now 403s training crawlers by User Agent regex (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Bytespider, Meta-ExternalAgent, Applebot-Extended, Google-Extended, etc.) while explicitly allowing AI search/citation crawlers, so repos stay discoverable when someone asks an assistant a question. Forgejo logs went from continuous spam to occasional human visits actually :D

The theme:

This is the part I'm very proud of. The whole MansionNET aesthetic is terminal flavoured, with cream-on-near-black, MansionNET green accents, VT323 for branded surfaces, dashed borders.

What's distinctive vs. just another Forgejo:

• No corporate Git aesthetics, it looks and feels like a community computer, not GitHub-lite
• Built-in CAPTCHA, no third-party tracker pixels anywhere
• Sibling services footer links to the rest of MansionNET (search, radio, home), so the forge is one room in a larger house

Come use it / come hang out:

Open registration is live and you're genuinely welcome to host a project on it, be it personal stuff, small FOSS work, mirrors of things you'd rather not leave on GitHub. Or just mirror a GitHub repo, that's ok too :)

URL is: https://git.inthemansion.com

MansionNET is also a few other rooms beyond Git:

• IRC - the actual community hub. irc.inthemansion.com:6697 (TLS) from any client, or webchat at https://webirc.inthemansion.com if you don't have one set up. This is where I hang out and where you can ping me with questions about the setup.
• SearXNG - privacy-respecting metasearch at https://search.inthemansion.com
• Radio - community internet radio (AzuraCast) at https://radio.inthemansion.com, 320kbps, no listener tracking

MY whole self-hosting journey started few years back with a thought about degoogling and getting away from the usual "clouds" and now ended up in full public services that are free to use :)

Thank you for getting this far in the post and cheers!

Ahoy y'all!

Three years ago I started self-hosting at home, and somewhere along the way I spun up an IRC server, partly because teenage me dreamed of running one back in the dial-up days, partly because I wanted a chat platform that wasn't trying to monetize my attention.

What I didn't expect was that other people would actually show up. We're around 100 regulars now, on a network called MansionNET.

The thing that keeps surprising me is how efficient IRC still is compared to anything modern. The whole server runs on 2 vCPUs and 2GB of RAM and barely breathes.

No bloated client, no Electron, no constant polling, no algorithmic feed deciding what you see, and even if you use a bouncer you still chose when to be online, instead of getting spammed by notifications (unless you really want them of course).

The community has been really amazing too! Some folks are old timers who remember mIRC and DALnet and are happy to be back. Others have never used IRC before and are discovering it for the first time, which is honestly fun to watch :)

We mostly share music, talk shop, throw ASCII art at each other. There's a member building an LFS-based Linux distro and using the network as the hub too. Live DJ sets occasionally come through our community radio. Surprisingly, the server is pretty active, which really does remind me of the old days, the golden IRC era.

I also tried to give the project a face that matches the spirit of the protocol that turned into a landing page is built around a CRT/terminal aesthetic: scanlines, boot sequence, an interactive prompt you can actually type into, all that good stuff really :)

If any of this hits something for you, the door is open at:

• Webchat (no client needed): https://webirc.inthemansion.com
• Direct IRC (TLS): irc.inthemansion.com:6697
• /server irc.inthemansion.com 6697 in your client of choice
• Landing page: https://inthemansion.com

Drop into #lobby and say hi. We mostly we just throw ASCII at each other and slap each other with large trouts :D