[llanowarelves]

Some people rightfully want to see what the engineering effort and roadmap is gonna be before becoming invested in it, since there's always a cost.

Simple aesthetic changes and codes of conduct / political alignment for contributors are not enough for forks to become full things of their own. Even if they can help (branding, community, etc.). Or hurt (Forgejo is harder to pronounce. And CoC have potential downsides, possibly excluding good people, ironically, over banal minutia and hostile environment around being "not hostile" - like you saying he is "hung up" on it...).

Gitea was already a fork of Gogs, so why should contributors use this fork of a fork?

These forks (and direct clones) are like little political secessionary/independence movements, both making lofty statements and splitting would-be contributors. Sometimes it works out very well and they become full independent things of their own (GNU stuff), but it's fair to want to get on to see the actual engineering side of things.

[wirrbel]

Forgejo forked Gitea IIRC because of problems in the Gitea governance of the Gitea trademark, a limited company was founded by some Gitea contributors, without consent of the larger group of Gitea developers.

So I only find it natural that a group of people who split off of Gitea took extra care to set up some kind of governance model.

Those who dislike the idea of a code of conduct can of course also contribute to Gitea or Gogs, or fork Forgejo, etc. This is free software after all.

With 23 open and 1.381 closed PR forgejo seems like an active project, it's in use at codeberg.org which means it isn't a random fork.