I found it confusing, too. In the detailed changelog it seems that some PRs for following remote users have been merged, but I assume it's not complete/usable, yet. So from what I understand, no new "usable" federation features made it to the v13 release. Please correct me, if I'm wrong.
I have been using forgejo for a very small sideproject of mine and so far I have enjoyed it, but admittedly I use probably like 10% of the features. But sometimes that is all you need, and forgejo is quite nice and simple to configure and run so that works out. My impression is that it is much more lightweight (and faster) than gitlab, although I haven't done actual comparisons.
I noticed I was on 8 today. Running in Docker. In case this helps anyone else: Upgrade from 8 to 9 worked fine (just by switching the Docker label), then from 9 to 11 worked, and since 11 is LTS I'll stay on that for a while.
If you're running a public Forgejo instance and upgrading to v13, please take note of the post-release recommendation to run the `avatar-strip-exif` command to enhance user privacy.
Was literally thinking about setting this up this weekend. If I can get renovate working to auto update dependencies, I can move off of github. To me, dependabot is github's killer feature
Rant incoming... This is the least intuitive and least useful versioning system as a user and sysadmin that I have seen in a long time. Calendar releases ought to follow calendar naming conventions (eg. 25.3 or 20251017 etc.) and non-semantic versioning should try to be obvious. From what I can tell: "multiples of 'four minus one' are LTS" is the numbering scheme (but the software is only good for a year so... why not just call it Forgejo v2025 for its March release?)
The significance of Forgejo 13.0 is basically zero. A two-year cadence Debian release is newsworthy. Even if this were an LTS this is still not that interesting (unless there is some other context or significance that I'm not aware of).
If you go to their release page, you will see two versions listed. The current stable release (13.0) and the explicitlly marked LTS version (11), both with clearly visible end of support dates. Not sure how much simpler it can get :)
But I've since learned that they are in fact using SemVer which means it was my expectations of what the project was trying to do that was mismatched. I didn't expect Major updates to mirror a quarterly cadence.
Their project, their rules. I don't know why you would think that your ideologies automatically translate into something that's convenient or better for them.
