The only noteworthy list of forges lives here.

The trend of everyone piling onto MS Github is the classic network effect. People go where everyone else goes. Notice that the Lemmyverse is not a total disaster. The more meticulous brains choose non-Cloudflared decentralised nodes like sdf, slrpnk, europe.pub, etc.

Independent forges that run gitea, forgejo, and gitlab have missed the opportunity to build healthy communities. They just say “here is yet another general purpose forge”. This fails to create an attraction.

If you go down the list of forges, they are either general purpose or they are focused on one specific project.

• We need themes. Like a node that is for fedi/activitypub projects, or for mapping/satnav/gsm projects. (not arbitrary reg criteria like 0xacab.org gives)
• We need a dataset with more active contributions. The sdf list is barely noticed despite being the only community dataset of forges.

People have been waiting for federation to arrive in Forgejo for a while now. I think before that happens nothing much will change.

That’s interesting, though I don’t see why it would hold up having a good dataset of nodes and information about their missions and purposes.

Because the problem is network effects and not just a list of alternatives.