"Why X are doing Y" articles like these pretend that the premise of "X are doing Y" is true, conveniently skipping to the "Why" before proving that the premise is even accurate in any meaningful way.
This is why I never buy headlines that start out with "Why".
> developers are ditching
Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos against the hundreds of thousands on there
> Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos against the hundreds of thousands on there
The trend is what's interesting here. Github has never been threatened by anyone, because their service was too good to bother for everyone but the most ideologically motivated.
Now their service has become so bad there's a github joke at work every time something is down or slower than it should.
Reputation is a very valuable thing, and Github has destroyed a stellar one in a few month, this is newsworthy.
The existence of Telegram doesn't negate the fact that WhatsApp is the world's most popular instant messaging platform, and the others aren't even close.
And Telegram is a lot more developed and has a much larger percentage of the global instant messenger marketshare, compared to Github vs CodeBerg.
> Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos
I'm pretty sure, shortly after the motorized vehicle was made commercialy available, there were only a "handful of remotely meaningful" people and companies who stopped using horses.
Do tell: How many horses are around on todays streets?
You could drop the verb clause? This would make the headline accurate while keeping it punchy.
> why Americans switch to soy
And
> why developers switch to codeberg
But the cynic in me thinks that the form of the headline that drastically overstates the the phenomenon in question by implication is something that has been workshopped and is commonly used because it turns something kind of boring into a spectacle.
A better alternative might be along the lines of “why developers ditch GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives”. That way it doesn’t commit to a trend or exaggerate the situation in your mind, instead making it clear it’s a report on “those X who do Y do it for these reasons”.
I don’t know if it’s because of the weasel words in the article or the extensive use of passive voice in the article, but this article feels in part like it’s AI generated.
I am exhausted with having to figure out whether someone wrote something or let AI generate it for them.
Reading articles like this has become less pleasurable since the advent of generative AI. There’s no feeling or heart in the article, and it’s one of those cases where I can read the headline, read the article, and wonder why I spent my time reading it.
I’ve seen titles like “Why top scientists are leaving the United States” where the article itself talked about A SINGLE RESEARCHER relocating to France.
If you're talking about the article featured on HN just day(s) ago, that was about a funding effort to get more researchers to move to France from the US, while they interviewed one specific individual. I think maybe you skipped the contents of that article (as it was in French) and instead just read the HN comments which misunderstood the article :)
Are you perhaps talking about "Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands" then that was also on the HN frontpage just days ago?
There been so many articles, surveys and papers about how scientists and researchers are leaving the US for the last 1-2 years, that it's hard to keep track. Still, I'm curious to understand what you actually read.
If there's a trend to leave a platform it won't start with the most entrenched users (largest repos).
They acknowledge your concern in the article and their analysis does apply to those few who are leaving. But to be fair the title can be interpreted either way and the most reasonable read for anyone is "some of them are leaving". I'd find it clickbaity if they said "why developers are leaving en-masse" and then point out to the regular turnover. There's clearly a trend, what's not clear is if it gains momentum.
That's the point being made. Is there a trend? How do we know?
There's always some repos moving between hosting providers for all kinds of reasons. The burden of proof is on the author here to show there's been an increase and they don't do that.
Which early adopters exactly? The most prominent example they gave is ghostty which has existed for just a couple of years, notwithstanding the fact that the owner published a spiel about how he's personally been using it for longer.
An early adopter is someone who is first in line to try something new, usually because they're willing to part of the new thing with their own hands. Just look at what projects are on any of the third-party forges, those are the early adopters of post-github tech.
I would also be one of them, but I'm not actually off Github yet. That's because I haven't quiite finished building the thing I'm going to move to.
Rolling your car off a cliff isn't the same thing. This would be more like you want to drive your Tesla into the jungle so you build a road as you go.
The key problem is not losing the cars but losing the road builders who are now no longer building roads that lead to you, but rather roads that lead away
Currently I self-host Gitea [0], use its registry for Docker, NPM etc and act runners [1] for github actions alternative, everything secured under tailnet.
I'm extremely satisfied with that setup. It is batteries included & fire and forget.
Now I use Github only as backup by mirroring my self hosted repos.
Similar with forgejo.
I mirrored all gh then flipped the ones I was using the most.
The biggest win was on running apple runners in my mac, so the free gh actions can do other stuff.
Getting better, more reliable and faster CI was such an underappreciated gain (from me at least) when moving to a self-hosted git platform. What used to take ~40 minutes end-to-end (from pushing commit to having release binary ready for three platforms) now takes less than 10 minutes, and seemingly that whole slowdown was causing me more headache that I think I was willing to admit at the time.
I similarly have been using Gitea for some years. I use it as my main forge and mirror to Github for discoverability and community reports and contributions.
For public projects I have workflows that can publish and push containers to both Gitea and Github.
Github is an extra layer of backup, among normal backups.
[edit]
Notable reasons:
- Github runners went oftenly out of space & they were slow. With self hosted runners I don't have these issues anymore because I control the hardware.
Previously I was paying Docker Build Cloud/Depot for performance + Github Pro for extra minutes. Now it's zero cost, superb performance and unlimited minutes.
- I have a centralized registry with private packages and images.
- It's secure, I don't worry if I accidentally make a repo public or leak secrets. I control the access to it in network level.
- I own everything, in case something goes nuts (eg lose access to GH) I'm safe.
Not GP. Probably less dependencies on github, e.g. actions which sometimes don't work. This way github is a "dumb backup".
I selfhost forgejo (gitea fork) on home sever (nuc), similar setup with tailscale. I was planning to setup git mirror on a remote VM for backup, but since I am the only one using it and have everything on dev laptop and remote backups of nuc server I didn't bother to do that (I know I still should).
The self hosting will still be there and working as expected no matter what GH does (fails... again, DMCAs the repo, bans the account, etc.). Self hosting isn't only about being the only one with the data, it's also for the independence aspect. GH as a backup doesn't hinder the independence. Network effects are strong and make a lot of developers still have a GH presence as a secondary platform.
The evolution is when one can finally fully disconnect from GH, the main self hosted platform will continue to operate as if nothing happened.
A migration can have a period of parallel running.
Our CI for our entire org at https://github.com/lightningdevkit was turned off for 3 weeks because an outside contributor who was wrongfully banned made a PR. After multiple appeals we received no explanation and was told it was a permanent ban until we made a stir on twitter. They sadly are no longer a good place to work.
As a developer who ditched Github and decided to self-host, there is only one reason. It's not technical difficulties, politics, nor AI. It's Microsoft. Like Apple, Facebook etc, I have a deep loathing for Microsoft and I want to remove as much of it from my life as I am able.
I now run Git on a pi using Gitea and Forgejo. I can now upload files of a size unheard of in GitHub, Claude can make a PR by itself that I can diff, edit, then merge, and even with the mighty power of a single pi 3b+, it feels more responsive.
But on GitHub, you agree explicitly that MS can use it. I would assume codeberg has any-scraping measures (not saying they are perfect, but better than knowing Microsoft can train with private repos).
Quite a few commentors here mentioned using gitea or one of it's forks on a private tailnet. That would mean it isn't publicly available and can't be scraped.
The appeal of GitHub for me is not only in the git hosting, but also in codespaces. It gives me:
1: An easy way to start a VM
2: A one-click solution to access it via private https access
So for development, I dont need to dabble with spawning my own Hetzner VM or something. And I also do not have to dabble with getting a temporary domain and DNS so I can set up my own letsencrypt certs and point the domain to that VM.
I can just write an index.html, execute "sudo python -m http.server 80", click the link that then opens to something.app.github.dev and test my new web application.
This is why codespaces make starting a new product idea a thing of like 1 minute instead of 1 hour for me.
For private code, it just feels safer to self host that -- ideally behind wireguard for an extra layer of security.
For public code hosting, GitHub have banned too many people/projects for comfort. From security researchers to 18+ game devs, too many have been wrongfully banned.
Given more code hosting services, I wonder if we'll also see a corresponding increase in the number of alternative VCS or if git is legitimately very entrenched as a tool. I am just being a bit grouchy but I do wish there was more development of alternative VCSs. pijul at least looks cool even if I don't know if it scales well. Git LFS can be somewhat finicky to work with so maybe we'll see perforce like systems. It's obviously not the most practical thing to have a variety of very different VCS's and definitely a PITA to learn multiple tools but git does seem somewhat suboptimal given the number of anecdotes about people just re-cloning the repo. I was recently trying jj and it seemed to work well (excluding the lack of LFS support) so here's hoping.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to self-host GitLab with Docker Compose, GitLab has an official "Omnibus" Docker image. No need to handicap yourself with Gitea/Forgejo/whatever, you can just use an industry-standard platform without much effort.
Hardware requirements are nowhere close to high either.
I don’t know if Gitlab is an industry standard, but I’ve never heard of Forgejo. I worked for a headless CMS company and the only three providers we ever had requests for were GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab. Gitlab is big enough to be generally adopted by governments. I think it’s fair to say it’s at least a lot closer to being an industry standard then Forgejo.
(Aside: I would likely never use Gitlab by choice, and would consider looking into Forgejo)
Probably because those are service providers and Forgejo is software. Same reason people ask for Microsoft account and Google account integration, but nobody ever asks for Linux account integration in your cloud software.
We've been self-hosting GitLab for about a year now, and I don't remember it ever going down or being unavailable. We self-host almost everything else too (except for online meetings), and it's all been pretty stable as well. Some of the tools we self-host do go down occasionally, but it's usually just a matter of restarting the VM or adding more storage.
I'm trying sourcehut at the moment https://sourcehut.org/ and it seems really good - very simple and fast. And does seem to be free for hosting open source projects.
I use it as my main forge and could not be happier. It also seems to be the only forge that allows its web frontend to work with JS disabled. (That I am aware of)
I really do not like that Drew (the owner and developer) is extremely dogmatic and political, and likes to get involved in what is and is jot allowed to be hosted on “his” forge.
Imo, service providers should be neutral and get involved only as far as required by law.
I would not trust Sourcehut. If Drew decides one day that he does not like you, your politics, or your industry, he will just cut you off. That is no foundation to build on.
Genuinely curious here for someone who has tried self hosting git and has found it a pita to maintain...i want to know what is it that devs are flocking to other platforms and how are we sure that they won't pull all the red card signals that github is said to pull off.
Have been self-hosting GitLab for my org a few years by now, with quite a few users (>800 atm). Updates are automatic via the GitLab Omnibus package repos. Once or twice per year some update requires intervention. Otherwise, nothing bad happens. Very happy so far.
Biggest problem at the moment is that AI scrapers (curse them and their owners, pox be upon their houses!) sometimes bring things to a crawl. But nothing that a few firewall rules and anoubis won't solve.
If you are running an org you should be putting all your private services behind netbird or tailscale at minimum. Zero public infra exposure beyond them.
The service isn't supposed to be private, some repos are intentionally public. And including all external collaborators in some VPN scheme is not possible at that scale.
Forgejo is fairly simple to run – way lighter and simpler than GitLab even. (GitLab is quite okay, too!)
If you want a hosted service, go for Codeberg. It’s run by a German non-profit (so it’ll be hard to bite and switch OpenAI-style). Only free/open source projects are accepted, though.
I like GitHub and I'm not going to ditch anything, but I have to admit it's currently one of the few MS products that still holds up. Curious what it'll look like in a few years. Just in case, I've already reserved my username on Codeberg :)
Lately, 9 out of 10 times i click on a github link to access the repo for $random_project_hosted_on_github I get a page saying that I've been rate limited. Even if it's my first click on a github link for the week.
I guess THAT page has the three nines availability.
No, being "neutral" is not "taking a side", that's the definition of the word. If you pre-moderate you open a whole can of worms. What will they ban next? This makes me not want to use Codeberg ever because it's not plannable.
It reminds me of the time where I deployed Gitea for self-hosting my git projects. In the end, nobody wanted to use it beyond myself. I would love to have a true federation protocol for Git, to decentralize the solution further.
Do they? Or is it that a new account is opened every second? Because I’ve been seeing so many spammers and scammers that those numbers have to be skewed.
Not good but that’s unsurprising since Thread’s value proposition is indistinguishable from twitter’s. Mastadon and bluesky seem to have healthy userbases though
Now if only the leader of Github would make Nazi salutes in public, regularly piss his pants due to frequent ketamine abuse, and cancel foreign aid causing 14 million brown children and other undesirable riff-raff to die by 2030, then maybe people would be as compelled to cancel Github as Twitter.
Why don't open source alternatives just copy the UI to make it easier to switch? Everyone knows the GitHub UI and it's intuitive. I'm happy to get more privacy and freedom, you don't have to make a worse design just to be different.
Fluxer figured this out and they're the best discord replacement imo.
Gitea did a lot of work over the last view releases (since 1.21 onwards) and are really GitHub-like nowadays UI-wise. Plus it is no SPA anymore and mostly SSR with Go templates + Htmx, its site performance lets GitHub cry by the wayside.
Best descision ever to leave GitHub and selfhost Gitea with some runners in our own datacenter.
I think they have the same interface. Pull requests are renamed to merge requests, that's all the difference I see. Wait for github to reshuffle the ui in a redesign churn.
Until you have to work with stale GHAS tool configurations, remember whether a project uses rulesets or branch settings or find that comment you wrote on a PR (and then learn that the new PR "experience" fucking hides them above a certain threshold). Those are just the issues I encounter in a typical week.
I’m not disputing how intuitive the GitHub interface is, but seriously, why is it so hard for technical professionals to set aside 10–20 minutes of their time to learn a new interface? Why has this even become an issue worth discussing?
Github for open source was always my favourite part of it.
Github for private repos has long had security issues, every time a serious issue announced it makes me wonder how long it's quietly existed and been exploited, and how many other holes are currently exploited that aren't well known.
Before github, people hosted their own repos all the time. Learning about alternatives, even if they aren't for you in all cases, is still worth it.
Has anyone had any issues with codeberg or other alternatives?
Yes, but the thing is just that if people are looking around for new providers it's an opportunity for alternative systems to attract attention and users.
But Github is already fully volatile, capricious, fickle, erratic, unpredictable, variable, inconsistent, changeable, unstable, whimsical, protean, fluid, and a polluting poisonous room temperature liquid heavy metal, so why would you also need mercurial?
For those who moved away from GitHub: do you miss the social/discovery side of it?
I mean things like comments on issues/PRs, stars, followers, finding existing repos, seeing which projects are popular, and getting drive-by contributions.
Or does that matter less than I imagine once you self-host and mirror public repos back to GitHub/Codeberg?
I used to love browsing GitHub Explore Trending but in the last two years it is almost exclusively AI apps that are slight improvement on the previous trending page of AI apps.
GitHub explore could be way more interesting with a simple filter algorithm.
I think and hope we see a lot more of this before the adversarial imperative returns from the company side.
People using Claude Fable to just make replacements for disgustingly enshittified software. We desperately need browser extensions to help make websites less scummy across the board as well.
I've ditched Github for all personal stuff. I just keep my repositories offline. I have a reliable backup process so what's the point in pushing it there? I don't give a shit about public profile, stars or any of that gamified crap and I certainly don't trust them.
Did we all forget that GitHub’s military-industrial complex owners over at Microsoft made sure to send the “business as usual” signal to the USG when they refused to stop helping ICE violate human rights en masse?
This was during the kidnap-and-rape-kids-in-cages days and before they started a general policy of kidnapping and/or summarily executing law-abiding citizens in the street. There are more reasons now to disassociate with collaborators with the US federal government than ever. I guess I could say I dropped GitHub before it was cool?
Microsoft is a morally bankrupt and despicable organization, just like Meta, Amazon, and modern Google and Apple. Anyone still doing ongoing business with them in 2026 is, imho, a fool.
[Slow clap... building to thunderous applause. Standing ovation.]
I say! Well done! Bravo! Bravo! Encore! Encore!
Now do a foaming-at-the-mouth diatribe about how predatory, unethical libertarian crypto-scamming shills such as yourself and Trump are crashing the economy while violently tearing society apart into a tiny oligarchy and widespread poverty. Extra points for plugging your latest sociopathic crypto scam as the final solution.
Sentiment for/against GitHub aside...
"Why X are doing Y" articles like these pretend that the premise of "X are doing Y" is true, conveniently skipping to the "Why" before proving that the premise is even accurate in any meaningful way.
This is why I never buy headlines that start out with "Why".
> developers are ditching
Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos against the hundreds of thousands on there
> Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos against the hundreds of thousands on there
The trend is what's interesting here. Github has never been threatened by anyone, because their service was too good to bother for everyone but the most ideologically motivated.
Now their service has become so bad there's a github joke at work every time something is down or slower than it should.
Reputation is a very valuable thing, and Github has destroyed a stellar one in a few month, this is newsworthy.
Yeah, like how developers were en-masse ditching GitHub to go to GitLab when Microsoft acquired GitHub.
It's so weird the herd behavior of developers.
Except the article doesn't prove any trend
Here you have (albeit small) proof of some sort of trend: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=codeberg%2Cforgejo%2Cgit...
Still, doesn't come close to popularity of GitHub itself today (https://trends.google.com/explore?q=codeberg%2Cforgejo%2Cgit...), but I think the trend of moving away from GitHub is clear both in data and sentiment, both qualitative and quantitative.
If only the article used any of that. And if it did, I still don't think the headline was warranted.
Also Google search trends are no evidence of adoption or migration. High chance of correlation, sure.
Stackoverflow usage didn't fall overnight either. But it has gone the way of MySpace and Oracle.
The existence and growth of the codeberg project does, however.
The existence of Telegram doesn't negate the fact that WhatsApp is the world's most popular instant messaging platform, and the others aren't even close.
And Telegram is a lot more developed and has a much larger percentage of the global instant messenger marketshare, compared to Github vs CodeBerg.
And what level of 'growth' constitutes a trend that warrants "developers are ditching GitHub" without providing any numbers at all?
> Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos
I'm pretty sure, shortly after the motorized vehicle was made commercialy available, there were only a "handful of remotely meaningful" people and companies who stopped using horses.
Do tell: How many horses are around on todays streets?
This is not an effective argument, given that these smaller services are uniformly retrograde in functionality.
You can just insert the word "some" as required.
Agreed, but the headline wouldn't travel nearly as well, if at all.
> Why some Americans are switching to soy
Would be more accurate than
> Why Americans are switching to soy
But wouldn't garner nearly the same amount of clicks.
There is conscious exaggeration in omitting 'some' - a fluff-blog click-farm trope I don't enjoy seeing in the developer space.
You could drop the verb clause? This would make the headline accurate while keeping it punchy.
> why Americans switch to soy
And
> why developers switch to codeberg
But the cynic in me thinks that the form of the headline that drastically overstates the the phenomenon in question by implication is something that has been workshopped and is commonly used because it turns something kind of boring into a spectacle.
Agreed. But if I comment on this, I'm promoting the article. What do I do?
A better alternative might be along the lines of “why developers ditch GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives”. That way it doesn’t commit to a trend or exaggerate the situation in your mind, instead making it clear it’s a report on “those X who do Y do it for these reasons”.
howtogeek is low-effort content mill, it's just upvoted here because of the headline, there is 0 actual effort in the article
I don’t know if it’s because of the weasel words in the article or the extensive use of passive voice in the article, but this article feels in part like it’s AI generated.
I am exhausted with having to figure out whether someone wrote something or let AI generate it for them.
Reading articles like this has become less pleasurable since the advent of generative AI. There’s no feeling or heart in the article, and it’s one of those cases where I can read the headline, read the article, and wonder why I spent my time reading it.
I’ve seen titles like “Why top scientists are leaving the United States” where the article itself talked about A SINGLE RESEARCHER relocating to France.
If you're talking about the article featured on HN just day(s) ago, that was about a funding effort to get more researchers to move to France from the US, while they interviewed one specific individual. I think maybe you skipped the contents of that article (as it was in French) and instead just read the HN comments which misunderstood the article :)
> If you're talking about the article featured on HN just day(s) ago
I’m not.
Engaging :)
Are you perhaps talking about "Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands" then that was also on the HN frontpage just days ago?
There been so many articles, surveys and papers about how scientists and researchers are leaving the US for the last 1-2 years, that it's hard to keep track. Still, I'm curious to understand what you actually read.
> a handful of remotely meaningful repos
If there's a trend to leave a platform it won't start with the most entrenched users (largest repos).
They acknowledge your concern in the article and their analysis does apply to those few who are leaving. But to be fair the title can be interpreted either way and the most reasonable read for anyone is "some of them are leaving". I'd find it clickbaity if they said "why developers are leaving en-masse" and then point out to the regular turnover. There's clearly a trend, what's not clear is if it gains momentum.
> If there's a trend
That's the point being made. Is there a trend? How do we know?
There's always some repos moving between hosting providers for all kinds of reasons. The burden of proof is on the author here to show there's been an increase and they don't do that.
The early adopters are leaving. These are the people that will blaze a trail that others follow.
Which early adopters exactly? The most prominent example they gave is ghostty which has existed for just a couple of years, notwithstanding the fact that the owner published a spiel about how he's personally been using it for longer.
An early adopter is someone who is first in line to try something new, usually because they're willing to part of the new thing with their own hands. Just look at what projects are on any of the third-party forges, those are the early adopters of post-github tech.
I would also be one of them, but I'm not actually off Github yet. That's because I haven't quiite finished building the thing I'm going to move to.
You could say that any time two distant psychos roll their Teslas off a rocky cliff and then exclaim "Why Tesla drivers are dumping their cars".
And not provide any other meaningful data
Rolling your car off a cliff isn't the same thing. This would be more like you want to drive your Tesla into the jungle so you build a road as you go.
The key problem is not losing the cars but losing the road builders who are now no longer building roads that lead to you, but rather roads that lead away
It's been 9 months since I ditched Github.
Currently I self-host Gitea [0], use its registry for Docker, NPM etc and act runners [1] for github actions alternative, everything secured under tailnet.
I'm extremely satisfied with that setup. It is batteries included & fire and forget.
Now I use Github only as backup by mirroring my self hosted repos.
[0] https://gitea.com
[1] https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/act-runner
Similar with forgejo. I mirrored all gh then flipped the ones I was using the most. The biggest win was on running apple runners in my mac, so the free gh actions can do other stuff.
Getting better, more reliable and faster CI was such an underappreciated gain (from me at least) when moving to a self-hosted git platform. What used to take ~40 minutes end-to-end (from pushing commit to having release binary ready for three platforms) now takes less than 10 minutes, and seemingly that whole slowdown was causing me more headache that I think I was willing to admit at the time.
I similarly have been using Gitea for some years. I use it as my main forge and mirror to Github for discoverability and community reports and contributions.
For public projects I have workflows that can publish and push containers to both Gitea and Github.
I self host gitea for my personal-personal projects, the ones nobody will ever see.
For the personal-opensource ones, I am on Github because this is where everyone is when I want to share/collaborate etc
You use github as a backup, why bother self-hosting then?
Github is an extra layer of backup, among normal backups.
[edit]
Notable reasons:
- Github runners went oftenly out of space & they were slow. With self hosted runners I don't have these issues anymore because I control the hardware.
Previously I was paying Docker Build Cloud/Depot for performance + Github Pro for extra minutes. Now it's zero cost, superb performance and unlimited minutes.
- I have a centralized registry with private packages and images.
- It's secure, I don't worry if I accidentally make a repo public or leak secrets. I control the access to it in network level.
- I own everything, in case something goes nuts (eg lose access to GH) I'm safe.
Not GP. Probably less dependencies on github, e.g. actions which sometimes don't work. This way github is a "dumb backup".
I selfhost forgejo (gitea fork) on home sever (nuc), similar setup with tailscale. I was planning to setup git mirror on a remote VM for backup, but since I am the only one using it and have everything on dev laptop and remote backups of nuc server I didn't bother to do that (I know I still should).
> This way github is a "dumb backup"
Eh? What GH department do you work in anyways? Training Data Sustainability?
I don't understand your question. If I was working for GH would I be selfhosting forgejo?
edit: If you think I sound like an LLM, I guess that is what happens when most of your interactions in English language are with LLMs.
> If I was working for GH would I be selfhosting forgejo?
Why not. But you are saying github as a dumb backup makes sense when you do self-hosting. I don't think you really believe that.
Given the state of it, you might well ...
I missed the opportunity to add "you are absolutely right".
Because the existence and continued normal operation of the primary is not dependent upon the capricious whims or instability of GitHub.
The self hosting will still be there and working as expected no matter what GH does (fails... again, DMCAs the repo, bans the account, etc.). Self hosting isn't only about being the only one with the data, it's also for the independence aspect. GH as a backup doesn't hinder the independence. Network effects are strong and make a lot of developers still have a GH presence as a secondary platform.
The evolution is when one can finally fully disconnect from GH, the main self hosted platform will continue to operate as if nothing happened.
A migration can have a period of parallel running.
Our CI for our entire org at https://github.com/lightningdevkit was turned off for 3 weeks because an outside contributor who was wrongfully banned made a PR. After multiple appeals we received no explanation and was told it was a permanent ban until we made a stir on twitter. They sadly are no longer a good place to work.
As a developer who ditched Github and decided to self-host, there is only one reason. It's not technical difficulties, politics, nor AI. It's Microsoft. Like Apple, Facebook etc, I have a deep loathing for Microsoft and I want to remove as much of it from my life as I am able.
I now run Git on a pi using Gitea and Forgejo. I can now upload files of a size unheard of in GitHub, Claude can make a PR by itself that I can diff, edit, then merge, and even with the mighty power of a single pi 3b+, it feels more responsive.
Microsoft's human rights stain will take decades to wear off (just like Meta, Google, and Amazon).
Mostly because developers (me included) don't like to be told we are being laid off due to AI that was trained on our free open-source hobby projects.
how switching to an alternative like codeberg would prevent it? ti can be scraped as well
But on GitHub, you agree explicitly that MS can use it. I would assume codeberg has any-scraping measures (not saying they are perfect, but better than knowing Microsoft can train with private repos).
Quite a few commentors here mentioned using gitea or one of it's forks on a private tailnet. That would mean it isn't publicly available and can't be scraped.
The appeal of GitHub for me is not only in the git hosting, but also in codespaces. It gives me:
So for development, I dont need to dabble with spawning my own Hetzner VM or something. And I also do not have to dabble with getting a temporary domain and DNS so I can set up my own letsencrypt certs and point the domain to that VM.I can just write an index.html, execute "sudo python -m http.server 80", click the link that then opens to something.app.github.dev and test my new web application.
This is why codespaces make starting a new product idea a thing of like 1 minute instead of 1 hour for me.
+ predatory pricing hikes for AI
+ not honouring yearly commitments plans
For private code, it just feels safer to self host that -- ideally behind wireguard for an extra layer of security.
For public code hosting, GitHub have banned too many people/projects for comfort. From security researchers to 18+ game devs, too many have been wrongfully banned.
Today GitHub blocked me until I turned Apple private relay off. I wasn’t logged in
Given more code hosting services, I wonder if we'll also see a corresponding increase in the number of alternative VCS or if git is legitimately very entrenched as a tool. I am just being a bit grouchy but I do wish there was more development of alternative VCSs. pijul at least looks cool even if I don't know if it scales well. Git LFS can be somewhat finicky to work with so maybe we'll see perforce like systems. It's obviously not the most practical thing to have a variety of very different VCS's and definitely a PITA to learn multiple tools but git does seem somewhat suboptimal given the number of anecdotes about people just re-cloning the repo. I was recently trying jj and it seemed to work well (excluding the lack of LFS support) so here's hoping.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to self-host GitLab with Docker Compose, GitLab has an official "Omnibus" Docker image. No need to handicap yourself with Gitea/Forgejo/whatever, you can just use an industry-standard platform without much effort.
Hardware requirements are nowhere close to high either.
What makes GitLab "industry-standard" and Forgejo not?
I don’t know if Gitlab is an industry standard, but I’ve never heard of Forgejo. I worked for a headless CMS company and the only three providers we ever had requests for were GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab. Gitlab is big enough to be generally adopted by governments. I think it’s fair to say it’s at least a lot closer to being an industry standard then Forgejo.
(Aside: I would likely never use Gitlab by choice, and would consider looking into Forgejo)
Probably because those are service providers and Forgejo is software. Same reason people ask for Microsoft account and Google account integration, but nobody ever asks for Linux account integration in your cloud software.
one reason (among others) — compliance.
a corporate/b2b saas environment without stuff like this is often a non starter.
- SOC2
- ISO/IEC 27001:2022
- ISO/IEC 27017:2015
- ISO/IEC 27018:2019
- VPAT 508
https://about.gitlab.com/security/
no mention of these on the forejo site, so i can’t put “our internal software is all SOC2/ISO NUMBER compliant” as a bullet point on a slide deck.
it is theatre. but it’s industry theatre.
Popularity.
It's also easy without Docker. apt install gitlab-ee
We've been self-hosting GitLab for about a year now, and I don't remember it ever going down or being unavailable. We self-host almost everything else too (except for online meetings), and it's all been pretty stable as well. Some of the tools we self-host do go down occasionally, but it's usually just a matter of restarting the VM or adding more storage.
Do you self host chat?
Yes, Rocket.Chat
Do you serve the instance on the public internet or on a VPN?
I've been thinking about self-hosting myself, but for my purposes (open source), I'm worries about scrapers and other sources of DOS-like traffic.
VPN, accessible only from inside the corporate network
I'm trying sourcehut at the moment https://sourcehut.org/ and it seems really good - very simple and fast. And does seem to be free for hosting open source projects.
Anyone else used it and have thoughts on it?
I use it as my main forge and could not be happier. It also seems to be the only forge that allows its web frontend to work with JS disabled. (That I am aware of)
I really do not like that Drew (the owner and developer) is extremely dogmatic and political, and likes to get involved in what is and is jot allowed to be hosted on “his” forge.
Imo, service providers should be neutral and get involved only as far as required by law.
I would not trust Sourcehut. If Drew decides one day that he does not like you, your politics, or your industry, he will just cut you off. That is no foundation to build on.
I really really love it but I just can’t get myself to embrace the email workflow. Maybe I’ll make a “pull requests for git.sr.ht” app one day!
Anyone has suggestions for hosting open source hobby projects managed with Mercurial.
Loved Bitbucket's Mercurial offering. Looking for a replacement.
Sourcehut has Mercurial support: https://hg.sr.ht/
Heptapod is a GitLab fork that adds Mercurial support: https://heptapod.net/, free for open source projects: https://foss.heptapod.net/heptapod/foss.heptapod.net
Just in time. I was about to edit my own comment to mention
https://hg.sr.ht/ that I learned of from a comment by frabcus on this post.
Thanks for links.
Genuinely curious here for someone who has tried self hosting git and has found it a pita to maintain...i want to know what is it that devs are flocking to other platforms and how are we sure that they won't pull all the red card signals that github is said to pull off.
Have been self-hosting GitLab for my org a few years by now, with quite a few users (>800 atm). Updates are automatic via the GitLab Omnibus package repos. Once or twice per year some update requires intervention. Otherwise, nothing bad happens. Very happy so far.
Biggest problem at the moment is that AI scrapers (curse them and their owners, pox be upon their houses!) sometimes bring things to a crawl. But nothing that a few firewall rules and anoubis won't solve.
If you are running an org you should be putting all your private services behind netbird or tailscale at minimum. Zero public infra exposure beyond them.
The service isn't supposed to be private, some repos are intentionally public. And including all external collaborators in some VPN scheme is not possible at that scale.
Sorry, I assumed you were running a typical corp
Forgejo is fairly simple to run – way lighter and simpler than GitLab even. (GitLab is quite okay, too!)
If you want a hosted service, go for Codeberg. It’s run by a German non-profit (so it’ll be hard to bite and switch OpenAI-style). Only free/open source projects are accepted, though.
Extreme generalization, most devs aren't ditching GitHub yet.
I like GitHub and I'm not going to ditch anything, but I have to admit it's currently one of the few MS products that still holds up. Curious what it'll look like in a few years. Just in case, I've already reserved my username on Codeberg :)
I guess three nines availability is important.
Not even hitting 1 nine at the moment - https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
I object!
The dashboard clearly says 89.15% uptime!
Who says nines need to be leading?
With enough precision in the time metric there are infinitely many nines!
Somewhere in 3.14159...% uptime there are as many nines as you like!
... assuming time is infinitely divisible. (Not a physicist, is that open?)
Lately, 9 out of 10 times i click on a github link to access the repo for $random_project_hosted_on_github I get a page saying that I've been rate limited. Even if it's my first click on a github link for the week.
I guess THAT page has the three nines availability.
We ditched GitHub for self-hosted Forgejo and could not be happier. The experience is smoother, faster and distraction-free.
It's pretty much broken by AI. Not only your private repos are not private, but also the LLM will leak them.
FYI that Codeberg is currently holding a vote to broadly ban projects written mostly using AI, so its not a neutral space for hosting your projects like GitHub: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253 https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912
Well, that's a good thing. Being "neutral" _is_ taking a side. It means you're taking an amoral stance even in big questions.
Every organization has a stance. We're just become used to companies that take a stance of "as long as we get paid".
No, being "neutral" is not "taking a side", that's the definition of the word. If you pre-moderate you open a whole can of worms. What will they ban next? This makes me not want to use Codeberg ever because it's not plannable.
It reminds me of the time where I deployed Gitea for self-hosting my git projects. In the end, nobody wanted to use it beyond myself. I would love to have a true federation protocol for Git, to decentralize the solution further.
Im just glad the wider world has finally snapped out of their GitHub mono culture trance.
I'm hosting my own Forgejo instance and it's great. Coolify as well :) It's fun!
> One new user joins every second
Do they? Or is it that a new account is opened every second? Because I’ve been seeing so many spammers and scammers that those numbers have to be skewed.
Switching from one centralized git repository to another that also injects political messaging into URLs without consents.
People are going to copy GitHub the way people copied Facebook… how is "Threads" doing again?
Not good but that’s unsurprising since Thread’s value proposition is indistinguishable from twitter’s. Mastadon and bluesky seem to have healthy userbases though
Now if only the leader of Github would make Nazi salutes in public, regularly piss his pants due to frequent ketamine abuse, and cancel foreign aid causing 14 million brown children and other undesirable riff-raff to die by 2030, then maybe people would be as compelled to cancel Github as Twitter.
Why don't open source alternatives just copy the UI to make it easier to switch? Everyone knows the GitHub UI and it's intuitive. I'm happy to get more privacy and freedom, you don't have to make a worse design just to be different.
Fluxer figured this out and they're the best discord replacement imo.
https://fluxer.app/
Gitea did a lot of work over the last view releases (since 1.21 onwards) and are really GitHub-like nowadays UI-wise. Plus it is no SPA anymore and mostly SSR with Go templates + Htmx, its site performance lets GitHub cry by the wayside. Best descision ever to leave GitHub and selfhost Gitea with some runners in our own datacenter.
I think they have the same interface. Pull requests are renamed to merge requests, that's all the difference I see. Wait for github to reshuffle the ui in a redesign churn.
Acquiring github users may not be their highest priority.
Inst gitea doing this?
>it's intuitive
Until you have to work with stale GHAS tool configurations, remember whether a project uses rulesets or branch settings or find that comment you wrote on a PR (and then learn that the new PR "experience" fucking hides them above a certain threshold). Those are just the issues I encounter in a typical week.
> copy the UI
Good luck. The amount of features and screens on GitHub are vast aside from just those code / issues / PRs tabs.
I’m not disputing how intuitive the GitHub interface is, but seriously, why is it so hard for technical professionals to set aside 10–20 minutes of their time to learn a new interface? Why has this even become an issue worth discussing?
Github for open source was always my favourite part of it.
Github for private repos has long had security issues, every time a serious issue announced it makes me wonder how long it's quietly existed and been exploited, and how many other holes are currently exploited that aren't well known.
Before github, people hosted their own repos all the time. Learning about alternatives, even if they aren't for you in all cases, is still worth it.
Has anyone had any issues with codeberg or other alternatives?
Anyone tried tangle as a replacement? Verdict?
self-hosted gitea/forgejo is still better
No affiliation, but http://code.storage gets my vote.
So sad to see that no articles about this even mention Mercurial. This is a golden opportunity for Hg providers to shine.
this not a `git` failure per se...
Yes, but the thing is just that if people are looking around for new providers it's an opportunity for alternative systems to attract attention and users.
I understand what you convey, however, users are tired of the git GUI, not git itself.
I miss Bitbucket's Mercurial offering.
But Github is already fully volatile, capricious, fickle, erratic, unpredictable, variable, inconsistent, changeable, unstable, whimsical, protean, fluid, and a polluting poisonous room temperature liquid heavy metal, so why would you also need mercurial?
:)
Was very happy to find that Hginit.com has been given a new life here
https://hginit.github.io/
For those who moved away from GitHub: do you miss the social/discovery side of it?
I mean things like comments on issues/PRs, stars, followers, finding existing repos, seeing which projects are popular, and getting drive-by contributions.
Or does that matter less than I imagine once you self-host and mirror public repos back to GitHub/Codeberg?
I used to love browsing GitHub Explore Trending but in the last two years it is almost exclusively AI apps that are slight improvement on the previous trending page of AI apps.
GitHub explore could be way more interesting with a simple filter algorithm.
I think and hope we see a lot more of this before the adversarial imperative returns from the company side.
People using Claude Fable to just make replacements for disgustingly enshittified software. We desperately need browser extensions to help make websites less scummy across the board as well.
I've ditched Github for all personal stuff. I just keep my repositories offline. I have a reliable backup process so what's the point in pushing it there? I don't give a shit about public profile, stars or any of that gamified crap and I certainly don't trust them.
Did we all forget that GitHub’s military-industrial complex owners over at Microsoft made sure to send the “business as usual” signal to the USG when they refused to stop helping ICE violate human rights en masse?
This was during the kidnap-and-rape-kids-in-cages days and before they started a general policy of kidnapping and/or summarily executing law-abiding citizens in the street. There are more reasons now to disassociate with collaborators with the US federal government than ever. I guess I could say I dropped GitHub before it was cool?
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-and-us...
https://github.com/sneak
Microsoft is a morally bankrupt and despicable organization, just like Meta, Amazon, and modern Google and Apple. Anyone still doing ongoing business with them in 2026 is, imho, a fool.
Can’t go a day without propaganda on HN.
Everything is propaganda, including your comment and this one.
Then stop posting artisnal human generated ai slop! The LLMs can't get a word in edgewise. ;)
> Anyone still doing ongoing business with them in 2026 is, imho, a fool.
So that would be almost everyone.
I mean, I poisoned and then deleted my GH account the day Microsoft acquisition was confirmed, because it was obvious where it's heading.
[Slow clap... building to thunderous applause. Standing ovation.]
I say! Well done! Bravo! Bravo! Encore! Encore!
Now do a foaming-at-the-mouth diatribe about how predatory, unethical libertarian crypto-scamming shills such as yourself and Trump are crashing the economy while violently tearing society apart into a tiny oligarchy and widespread poverty. Extra points for plugging your latest sociopathic crypto scam as the final solution.