Soft serve is lighter still.
for anything even just sharing with friends or whatnot i won't recommend it though, people do love their web-UI and having to explicitly give someone access can turn off people already.
The lack of anonymous public access is often a deal-breaker though.
But gitolite is so easy to setup & maintain, it's not a big difference and for r/w-access management within teams, it's priceless.
I guess one could even hack anonymous access with "PermitEmptyPasswords yes" and "AuthenticationMethods none"
Or maybe you can write a shell that runs a gitolite-shell command is its arguments are not already gitolite-shell?
Problem with this is that it’s likely very unfamiliar with most folks. At least with gitea or gl-ce, there’s a familiar interface 99% of developers can use to browse and search code.
Like if I want to share a quick nixOS config, I doubt most people would even be willing to pull the code and only browse via web interface.