For Darcs I have been using darcs hub & mirroring to my server. That said Smederee has slowly but surely been shaping up to be a better replacement (recently got reStructureText support!); once they have obliterate support, I will be tempted to make it primary for real since it covers all the basics.

For Pijul, I can really only use it self-hosted over SSH. Nest is far too feature barren to be usable—especially without the ability to fetch tarballs for instance where you can’t have or use the pijul binary for fetching (which is a bit ironic since the Pijul binary has an archive to create tarballs, Nest just doesn’t expose it). Pijul is faster & the key concept of separating your commit ID from details (such as Darcs or Git using Name <[email protected]> as the identifier) is much nicer not just for privacy if wanted but changing these details for whatever your reasons maybe (imagine changing your name after marriage or sex change & trying to convince all projects you’ve committed to to rewrite their history with your new info to not be confused or dead-named—most maintainers would ignore you). Someone should write a decent, lightweight forge so Pijul can be usable.

I use Darcs/Pijul since Patch Theory is a better model than snapshot-based version control as seen in Git/Mercurial & others. Since neither have many hosting or forge options, there are not many choices (answering the “why?”).

If using Git, an inferior VCS IMO, things are now going hosted on Codeberg. In the past, I had paid for SourceHut & while it was a generally nice, lightweight experience I was disappointed with the features & progress to the point I didn’t feel I was getting good value (also no Darcs or Pijul support, just Git & Mercurial). Since I don’t write any of my own code using Git anymore, I don’t really bother self-hosting cgit, Ayllu, or something. That said, Forgejo is a pretty disappointing in its direction as they choose to clone more features from MS GitHub than even Gitea which basically leaves you with MS GitHub but FOSS without addressing some core issues (PR workflow is not good, YAML-based CI is not good, & so on); a better sell IMO would be fundamental improvements on these old models/workflows that would inspire leaving for technical reasons instead of social/political/philosophical reasons.