I actually just installed forgejo in My Home lab and loving it. Thinking about moving the companys code hosting to it next.

If you move the company too, what would make you pay someone to run forgejo instead of self-hosting it? Disclosure, I run Fjord, a managed dedicated forgejo provider.

I've moved from gitlab -> gitea+drone -> forgejo+woodpecker

Works great for small-medium scale

Yes

But GitHub, in its heyday, was a centre. Created a sense of "community"

It has taken a while, but since MS bought it it has been shirking that. I expected honest enshittification, but instead it has been technical collapse

What ever.

IMO we need a federation protocol for Git that can rebuild some sort of "community", but on solid foundations.

So we can find one another on our self hosted instances

There was never a "sense of community", there was only low friction on issue reporting and especially, commenting on an issue you had nothing else to do with. Every time an issue hit HN it would be flooded with bystander comments.