alt Hacker NewsWhy developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I co-maintain a popular Linux launcher, Fuzzel, on Codeberg. We have no shortage of contributors despite not being on Github and the quality of contributors there is fairly high. In the past there were performance problems, but it's worked well enough lately.
My personal repos are on Gitlab. The UI is cluttered, but it works well enough.
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.
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.
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.
Anyone else used it and have thoughts on it?
+ predatory pricing hikes for AI
+ not honouring yearly commitments plans
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.
Anyone has suggestions for hosting open source hobby projects managed with Mercurial.
Loved Bitbucket's Mercurial offering. Looking for a replacement.
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.
We ditched GitHub for self-hosted Forgejo and could not be happier. The experience is smoother, faster and distraction-free.
Today GitHub blocked me until I turned Apple private relay off. I wasn’t logged in
It's pretty much broken by AI. Not only your private repos are not private, but also the LLM will leak them.
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
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.
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
Extreme generalization, most devs aren't ditching GitHub yet.
I have been self hosting my repositories on my own VPS using nothing but Git itself (you don't need to install anything else). Sharing write access is a bit of a pain, but I tend to work on things alone anyway.
Github getting bloated!? after MS?
No mention yet of Radicle? I'm curious if anyone's tried it for a real-world project.
Im just glad the wider world has finally snapped out of their GitHub mono culture trance.
The recent abrupt removal of the ability to see who has starred a project isn't a good move. Things like this certainly erode trust.
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 see a lot of self hosting based a whatever solution but I don’t see any nice GitHub proxies to avoid rate limits while just simple reusing actions.
I use zot within my ci for containers and an apt proxy but I’m missing a solution for github api calls for my ci runners
> 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.
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?
Wouldn't it be nice to have a repo which AI couldn't access?
Is there a bsky or mastodon extension for serving git repos and commits? Would be interesting to see this.
Anyone tried tangle as a replacement? Verdict?
So sad to see that no articles about this even mention Mercurial. This is a golden opportunity for Hg providers to shine.
I'm hosting my own Forgejo instance and it's great. Coolify as well :) It's fun!
People are going to copy GitHub the way people copied Facebook… how is "Threads" doing again?
self-hosted gitea/forgejo is still better
I left because Github became too LLM obsessed and I find that to not align with my personal ideals. Its not really deeper than that. The programming community will continue to splinter more into those that care about the craft and those that only care about outcomes.
“Verifying you are human”
I’m gone.
Any site that does that. I’m gone. I’m not waiting around for your bullshit.
It’s so scammy and dumb looking anyway.
Cloudflare ruined half the web.
Codeberg might be cool? I’ll never know because they use Cloudflare.
Cloudflare makes me leave websites every day and never return to them.
Dumbest technology ever implemented. It’s joke anyway - DDoS is easily handled far more elegantly.
Switching from one centralized git repository to another that also injects political messaging into URLs without consents.
Yeah over on Mastodon, there's a few really nasty threads about Codeberg requesting voting for approved folks to ban ALL "AI".
Of course, it aint going well.
No affiliation, but http://code.storage gets my vote.
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 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.
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I tried codeberg, used it a year, then early this year in all their wisdom codeberg decided to show adverserial random text instead of my repo, reporteldly to mess up llm training to user agents they weren't sure were human.
Codeberg had one job, serve my repo, it didn't do that, when brought up, I was told it was a feature not a bug, they could maybe whitelist me but that wasn't my problem, it was that random people got totally blocked or from accessing the repo. I moved back to github.