It appears to me that the rationale was clearly stated in GP:
> resulting in missing upstream features and decreased security
I.e. it's a matter of technical superiority, which, to me, how the decisions should be made. Not by having friends in the community and all of us being Europeans and so on. (But, of course, I would be glad to hear more particular details/examples of Forgejo lagging behind.)
You should simply compare release notes over the same time period for both projects, what's been done and how much. There's lots of nonsense repeated on this site and others, just do the research yourself, it won't take long. They both have very predictable release schedules.
We've stuck with Gitea, after not being impressed by the extremely FUDish behavior of the main driver of the fork, and this has proven to be the right choice so far. In spite of what some people claim, all of the major contributors to Gitea have continued developing it, none of the "heavy hitters" have left. It shows.
The database can be downgraded anyway. I've been doing backwards migrations for each new version all the way back to 1.22 (which is the last Gitea version that is "side-gradable" to Forgejo).
i dont get this blindspot by lots of developers parroting this uber technocratic nonsense.
There's no such thing as some apolitical, objectively best approach to a technical problem. Instead of arguing about specific merits about specific issues people throw out this big wide handwave about how "idea X is simply technically the wrong choice", as if this is a legit position to have.
Take a philosophy course for god's sake before you engineer us all to death.
> resulting in missing upstream features and decreased security
I.e. it's a matter of technical superiority, which, to me, how the decisions should be made. Not by having friends in the community and all of us being Europeans and so on. (But, of course, I would be glad to hear more particular details/examples of Forgejo lagging behind.)