Since yesterday a lot of users in Europe found their workflows failing due to Github seemingly randomly throwing HTTP/401 on git clone/git pull when interacting with public repos without authentication.
It was now confirmed by staff member that this indeed is intentional and no further steps are planned at this point.
Their SaaS is pretty good but of course you are running the same chain trust. You’re betting that gitlab doesn’t enshittify within the next 5 years which is hardly a guarantee.
Self-hosting gitlab is very resource-intense and complex from what I tried, though I did only try it two or three times.
I did set up forgejo which was way easier and less heavy but I haven’t tested it much so who knows.
I hosted GitLab Community Edition on-prem as a trial for a very small team, but switched to a Microsoft offering. Part of it was it being demanding, part of it was not. The point is you can host CE yourself and get an experience that’s very similar to their service, “for free,” where “free” translates to your hardware requirements and responsibility. I’d even say it’s worth it to go with GitLab, in that context, for the familiarity you can provide your team. “You’ll have to learn gitonator9000” turns into “you’ve used GitLab, right?”
Personal use? You could run it in a container and periodically backup your data. Is it proportionally more demanding than other things? Probably.