#Fjord Commons

Fjord Commons is a shared Forgejo instance that anyone with a Fjord Account can use, free. No card, no trial clock. Push a repository, open a pull request, run CI on a public repo, and find out whether Forgejo suits the way you work before you pay for anything.

#Get started

1. Create a Fjord Account at fjord.sh.
2. Verify your email. Commons, like the rest of the platform, stays locked until you confirm the address. See Your Fjord Account.
3. Join Commons from fjord.sh/commons. Joining reserves your namespace on the shared forge and is reversible.

You can then work against Commons the way you would any Forgejo host: the web UI, git over HTTPS or SSH, the fj CLI, the mobile app, and the standard /api/v1 API.

#What a free account gets

#Free, not a trial

Commons has no clock on it. There is no expiry date, no trial period, and no point at which it stops working unless you start paying. It is free because it is shared, and it stays free.

You are never asked for a credit card. Creating a Fjord Account and joining Commons collects no payment method, and there is nothing on file to forget about. Payment details enter the picture only when you provision a dedicated instance.

#How CI works on Commons

Commons runs Forgejo Actions, with three limits worth knowing before you plan around it:

• Public repositories only. A workflow in a private repository on Commons does not run. The runners are shared with everyone else using Commons, and we are not putting private source on them.
• The minutes are a pool, not an allowance. 2,000 minutes a month covers all of Commons together, not 2,000 each. A heavy month for one project is a slower queue for everyone else. We would rather say so than let you discover it.
• One job at a time. Jobs queue rather than run in parallel, a job is capped at 20 minutes, and scheduled (on: schedule) workflows do not run at all.

If CI is the reason you are here, that is the wall you will hit first, and it is the clearest signal that you have outgrown the shared forge.

#When the pool is exhausted

New jobs stop being admitted until the pool resets at the start of the next month. Nothing else is affected: repositories stay up, git keeps working, issues and pull requests keep working, and no bill appears.

There is no way to buy extra minutes on Commons today. If your CI has to run every month regardless of what the rest of Commons is doing, that is exactly what a dedicated instance with its own runners is for.

#Private repositories

Private repositories work on Commons and count against the same 25-repository limit. What they do not get is CI, per the rule above.

Be clear-eyed about what “private on a shared forge” means: your repositories sit alongside everyone else’s, on hardware nobody has to themselves, under administrators who are not you. Commons is the right place to try Forgejo and a poor place for anything you would not put on a machine you share. A Fjord instance is private as a whole, not repository by repository.

Commons imposes no requirement about what you host. There is no rule that your code carry an open-source licence, and a closed-source side project is welcome on it.

#Where Commons runs, and how it is backed up

Commons is a single server hosted by Hetzner in Nuremberg, Germany, in our EU Central region, fronted by Cloudflare. That is the same provider, and one of the same regions, we run dedicated instances in. The difference is that a dedicated instance is a box of your own and you pick its region at provisioning time.

The Commons box is backed up nightly to encrypted off-site storage on a 90-day retention window, the same schedule a Pro instance gets. Read that for what it is: it is how we bring Commons back if the server is lost, not a service that restores one person’s repository on request.

#Getting your data out

Nothing on Commons is locked in, and you never have to ask us for it:

• Every repository is an ordinary git repository. git clone is the export.
• Forgejo’s own export covers issues, pull requests, wikis, and releases.
• The /api/v1 API and the fj CLI work against Commons exactly as they do against any other Forgejo host.

Moving in works the same way, through Forgejo’s migration tool. See Migrate to Fjord. There is no proprietary format anywhere in this, which is most of the reason we build on Forgejo.

#Fair use

Commons is one machine shared by everybody on it, so the limits above are the policy and this section is the backstop. We can suspend or remove a Commons account for unlawful or infringing content, malware, mining cryptocurrency or scraping third parties on the runners, and anything aimed at degrading the box for everyone else. Notice is given where that is practicable and skipped where harm is immediate. The full text is in the Terms.

Ordinary heavy use is not abuse. It means you have outgrown a shared forge, and we would rather sell you an instance than throttle you.

#AI training

We do not use anything you store on Fjord, Commons included, to train or improve any machine-learning model, and we do not sell it or pass it to anyone who does. We do not read the contents of your repositories or CI jobs except where running, securing, or supporting the service requires it.

Public repositories on Commons are public to the internet, so third-party crawlers can reach them the same way they reach any public git host. That is a property of publishing, not something we do with your code.

#When to move to your own instance

Commons is where you find out whether Forgejo fits. A Fjord instance is what you buy when the answer is yes:

• Ownership and isolation. A dedicated, single-tenant forge, private by default, on hardware serving nobody else.
• Capacity. Your own runners and storage, CI on private repositories, and no shared queue.
• Operations and support. Backups, updates, and restores handled, with a response target rather than community goodwill.
• Identity and control. Your own domain, SSO, and administration of a forge that answers to you.

Moving is a normal Forgejo migration, not an export-and-pray: see Migrate to Fjord.

The short version of the difference: Commons is one server shared by everybody on it, and a Fjord instance is a server that is yours. Same Forgejo either way. What you are buying is the isolation and the operations.

#How Commons differs from Codeberg

Both are Forgejo, and the comparison comes up often enough to answer plainly.

Codeberg is run by Codeberg e.V., a registered non-profit association in Berlin funded by donations and membership fees. Its terms of use require public repository content to carry a licence granting everyone the right to use and redistribute it: free software is the point of the place, not a side effect.

Commons is run by a company, funded by the people who buy dedicated instances, and asks nothing about your licence. It also has somewhere to go when you outgrow it, which a non-profit deliberately does not.

If what you want is a community-governed home for a free-software project, Codeberg is a good answer and we are not going to pretend otherwise. If you want to try Forgejo with the option of moving onto infrastructure of your own, Commons is built for that.

#Leaving, in both directions

Cancelling a Fjord instance does not touch your Commons account. You land back where you started rather than locked out, and your repositories on Commons stay where they are. See Leaving Fjord for what happens to an instance you cancel.

Commons membership can be revoked for abuse, which is the ordinary condition of shared infrastructure; see the Terms.