While I'm not forgetting the spirit of what Git is, I'm also remembering how GitHub used "all open repositories" to train their first Copilot without telling anyone.

So, no thanks. I'll not be committing any personal code there anymore.

And no, I don't care for the social aspects either. Discoverability, stars, and AI bot powered issue bombardment.

I'm fine like this.

Also, remember, "Open Source is not about You".

Yes, but GitHub is more than just git. The most important aspect of the platform that everybody seems to forget is the social component and how easy it made to create a persistent, off-site repository and collaborate across repos.

Forgejo is doing a lot of work to make the tooling decentralized, too. They are using open protocols and standards to link self hosted forges together.

Not everybody uses git because they're infatuated with "the spirit of git". Only a tiny minority have ever even used it with the patches-by-email model it's intended for, and I would guess the vast majority of the rest have no interest in learning. People use git basically because it's what github uses, or slightly more generously because it works well when paired with a centralized host like github. The model of developing code locally and dicussion issues and patches via a web portal is the model people are taken with. Only a small portion of that is provided by git proper.

I agree with this. Moving the git repo is easy, moving the whole project surface is the hard part.

Issues, releases, CI, docs, security advisories, search and discoverability all tend to get coupled to GitHub over time.

For open-source projects, I like the idea of self-hosted as the source of truth, but still keeping a read-only GitHub mirror so people can actually find it.

This was the original model of launchpad.net, it was supposed to be a hub of Foss that pulled in from the decentralised VCS's, and provide them all via bzr.

But bzr lost the battle, Canonical was slow to adopt Git, lack of investment in the platform, so it was another lunch that got taken from them.

GitHub centralizes 2 things: Authentication, as well as Repository Hosting.

Does the code really need to be hosted in a central location like this? (Clearly not, which is why people are leaving GitHub in the first place)

But the one part GitHub provides that's genuinely valuable is the social aspect, and when you get a PR from a user named torvalds you can trust that this is in fact Linus. This isn't the case with more distributed systems.

That's why I'd really like to see some entity handle just the auth/identity providing. Forgejo/ Gitea/ Gitlab instances can then choose to use that. Then, for example if you want to take on another contributor and they have their own forgejo instances, you can invite them through this provider, when they fork your repo it ends up in their own forgejo, and they can easily create PR's into your repo.

Something nobody's really calling out: Forgejo is genuinely hackable. I just added a "showcase" mode to my instance: private repos can show their README and root file listing publicly (so I can advertise that a project exists and what it does), but viewing actual code, cloning, issues, PRs are all locked behind group membership.

About an hour of work, small and frankly trivial diff: https://peoplesgrocers.com/code/forks/forgejo/pulls/1

I didn't have to fight the architecture at all, the seams were right where I needed them. Added migration adding a boolean column to the repo config table, a few tweaks in permission middleware, and voila, it just worked. Really excellent decoupling in the Forgejo codebase [1]

You can't do anything like this with GitHub. That's the actual freedom! Separate from the where-do-I-host-my-git question. There is a big difference between software that "sure technically I can change it since I have access to the source" vs software that's been constructed specifically to be customized and changed.

[1] Permission checks live in obvious places, the template system let me modify UI without touching unrelated code. Someone (many someones) clearly cared a lot about keeping this codebase modifiable by outsiders, and it shows. That's hard to do and should be more celebrated.

Nobody’s forgetting anything. People want tooling around git bare repos. GitHub was cool because of forks and instant forked repos. That’s how they’ve established their moat.

> Git is decentralized, GitHub is just another place you can host your code in, but you can push your code to multiple remote servers.

That's precisely what I have been doing for years, I still get to keep one foot in the GitHub ecosystem. I still get most contributions on GitHub, and that's fine by me. When a PR comes it I check it out locally, review it, and when it's done I merge locally to master, push to origin, and then origin pushes to GitHub which then automatically closes the PR and gives the author attribution. I never actually have to interact with GitHub after the initial pull.

Is the tooling really centralized around Github? I use TortoiseGit, and that doesn't seem to care which service you are using. Although it does seem to have special authentication features specifically made to help you log in to Github.

Everyone knows git is decentralized. What people are searching for is a space for the social component of development such as issue tracking. Being able to reference lines of codes in issues is a killer feature of github. Gitea and gitlab do it too but not as well.

Also "just use multiple remotes" doesn't solve the problem. If you don't trust GitHub you shouldn't be pushing code there to begin with. So the ideal platform for hosting an equivalent platform as Github needs to be a trusted one as well.

I do not mean for this to come across as a nit, but think it's worth stating explicitly:

> Everyone seems to be leaving GitHub

A small minority is leaving Github; this group is more likely to write articles about the choice than those who still use Github.

While that is true, the real power of git being decentralized is that you have a local repo and a remote repo. Typically, you’ll have a dozen local repositories from developers cloning the project

I think you're forgetting issue tracking and CI.

I don't think anyone is forgetting that, but most people don't care that much about the decentralized part. They care about it being user friendly, free and for companies if it has all the enterprise features / SSO etc. that they need.

A lot of the complains in the blog post would still be there, though, even if GitHub was just a mirror (the AI training stuff, the US jurisdiction concerns).

"Git is decentralized"

Because is a kind of filesystem.

How a TEAM operate IS NOT.

And that is the point of Github.

There is no escape to the coordination problem!

(And if you say mails, patches, and other asynchronous ways: same thing, more complex)

That "everyone" is just a small, vocal community if you look at the total numbers of repos on GitHub (which is still climbing)[1]

Yes, I understand that people are upset about the Copilot issues and maybe even the "frequent" outages (which usually only affect fringe parts of the site not everyone uses daily)

It's good that there are other solutions (forge, sourcehut, whatever) but most projects are still alive and very well on GitHub and my guess is that this will stay for a while.

Also, personally I have no issues with GitHub training AI on my (badly-coded and bug-ridden) code if they really want to :)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1snqyj3/is_there_an...

github's draw is the community and exposure.

> Everyone seems to be leaving GitHub, and forgetting the entire spirit of what git is in my eyes.

And here lies your misconception: services such as GitHub are really not about git. That's a red herring. It's not about tooling either. People use services such as GitHub because of things like issue management, access control, release management, project pages, and CICD integration. You click on a button and you create a repository that's automatically added to your organization, with all access controls sorted out. You click on a button and you grant read access to someone. You click on a button and you onboard a whole team.

Underneath it all, it's completely irrelevant if you are even using Git. Some people even use github's CLI interface instead. Does it matter if it's git or not? Do you even care?

I have personal projects hosted and mirrored across GitHub, Gitlab, and BitBucket. That works, but only as far as backups are concerned. Even in projects that onboarded onto a third party CICD system, git is really not the reason for picking one service over another.

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