Don’t use Gitea, use Forgejo - it’s a hard fork of Gitea after Gitea became a for-profit venture (and started gating their features behind a paywall).

Codeberg has switched to Forgejo as well.

Also, there’s some promising progress being made towards ActivityPub federation in Forgejo! Imagine a world where you can comment on issues and send/receive pull requests on other people’s projects, all from the comfort of a small homeserver.