Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives

135

GGedxx about 2 hours ago 91 commentsRead Article on howtogeek.com

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Discussion Sentiment

61% Positive

Analyzed from 2559 words in the discussion.

Discussion (91 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

intunderflow•2 minutes ago

FYI that Codeberg is currently holding a vote to broadly ban vibe-coded projects, so its probably not a neutral space like GitHub: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912

jorisw•about 2 hours ago

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

stymaar•17 minutes ago

> 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.

jorisw•15 minutes ago

Except the article doesn't prove any trend

ablob•11 minutes ago

The existence and growth of the codeberg project does, however.

karel-3d•1 minute ago

howtogeek is low-effort content mill, it's just upvoted here because of the headline, there is 0 actual effort in the article

juanibiapina•34 minutes ago

Agreed. But if I comment on this, I'm promoting the article. What do I do?

pjc50•about 1 hour ago

You can just insert the word "some" as required.

jorisw•about 1 hour ago

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.

close04•about 1 hour ago

> 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.

esperent•43 minutes ago

> 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.

conartist6•20 minutes ago

The early adopters are leaving. These are the people that will blaze a trail that others follow.

p-e-w•44 minutes ago

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.

inkysigma•6 minutes ago

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.

hambos22•about 1 hour ago

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

permalac•about 1 hour ago

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.

Jnr•13 minutes ago

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.

wseqyrku•11 minutes ago

> Now I use Github only as backup by mirroring my self hosted repos.

That'll do it for GH, for whatever reason you "ditched" it.

BrandoElFollito•14 minutes ago

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

onesandofgrain•about 1 hour ago

You use github as a backup, why bother self-hosting then?

hambos22•about 1 hour ago

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.

stanac•about 1 hour ago

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).

wseqyrku•2 minutes ago

> This way github is a "dumb backup"

Eh? What GH department do you work in anyways? Training Data Sustainability?

walrus01•about 1 hour ago

Because the existence and continued normal operation of the primary is not dependent upon the capricious whims or instability of GitHub.

close04•about 1 hour ago

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.

benthecarman•about 2 hours ago

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.

My_Name•15 minutes ago

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.

qweqwe14•25 minutes ago

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.

inigyou•18 minutes ago

What makes GitLab "industry-standard" and Forgejo not?

ncphillips•7 minutes ago

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)

Hendrikto•4 minutes ago

Popularity.

TekMol•about 1 hour ago

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.

littlecranky67•about 1 hour ago

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.

frabcus•37 minutes ago

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?

notpushkin•30 minutes ago

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!

Scaled•about 1 hour ago

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.

kgeist•about 1 hour ago

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.

ncphillips•7 minutes ago

Do you self host chat?

rmnull•about 1 hour ago

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.

thyristan•38 minutes ago

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.

greenavocado•12 minutes ago

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.

thyristan•1 minute ago

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.

notpushkin•26 minutes ago

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.

5701652400•about 2 hours ago

+ predatory pricing hikes for AI

+ not honouring yearly commitments plans

klaussilveira•about 1 hour ago

We ditched GitHub for self-hosted Forgejo and could not be happier. The experience is smoother, faster and distraction-free.

ciefa•27 minutes ago

I'm hosting my own Forgejo instance and it's great. Coolify as well :) It's fun!

feverzsj•about 1 hour ago

It's pretty much broken by AI. Not only your private repos are not private, but also the LLM will leak them.

ezoe•about 2 hours ago

I guess three nines availability is important.

onion2k•about 2 hours ago

Not even hitting 1 nine at the moment - https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

jopsen•about 2 hours ago

I object!

The dashboard clearly says 89.15% uptime!

Who says nines need to be leading?

etdznots•about 1 hour ago

With enough precision in the time metric there are infinitely many nines!

srean•about 1 hour ago

Anyone has suggestions for hosting open source hobby projects managed with Mercurial.

Loved Bitbucket's Mercurial offering. Looking for a replacement.

notpushkin•24 minutes ago

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

srean•19 minutes ago

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.

fmind-dev•about 1 hour ago

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.

ahmedehab_01•about 1 hour ago

Extreme generalization, most devs aren't ditching GitHub yet.

VimEscapeArtist•23 minutes ago

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 :)

Havoc•about 1 hour ago

Im just glad the wider world has finally snapped out of their GitHub mono culture trance.

latexr•about 2 hours ago

> 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.

rob•about 2 hours ago

People are going to copy GitHub the way people copied Facebook… how is "Threads" doing again?

etdznots•about 1 hour ago

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

DonHopkins•about 1 hour ago

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.

Cider9986•about 2 hours ago

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/

braggerxyz•4 minutes ago

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.

GoblinSlayer•about 1 hour ago

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.

duskdozer•about 2 hours ago

Acquiring github users may not be their highest priority.

kelvinjps10•about 1 hour ago

Inst gitea doing this?

tjpnz•about 1 hour ago

>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.

jorisw•about 1 hour ago

> copy the UI

Good luck. The amount of features and screens on GitHub are vast aside from just those code / issues / PRs tabs.

allarm•about 2 hours ago

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?

iamwil•about 1 hour ago

Anyone tried tangle as a replacement? Verdict?

fragmede•about 1 hour ago

No affiliation, but http://code.storage gets my vote.

onesandofgrain•about 1 hour ago

self-hosted gitea/forgejo is still better

BrenBarn•about 2 hours ago

So sad to see that no articles about this even mention Mercurial. This is a golden opportunity for Hg providers to shine.

srean•about 1 hour ago

I miss Bitbucket's Mercurial offering.

DonHopkins•43 minutes ago

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?

srean•33 minutes ago

Was very happy to find that Hginit.com has been given a new life here

https://hginit.github.io/

signa11•about 1 hour ago

this not a `git` failure per se...

BrenBarn•about 1 hour ago

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.

navigate8310•about 1 hour ago

I understand what you convey, however, users are tired of the git GUI, not git itself.

Madmallard•about 1 hour ago

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.

cryo32•about 2 hours ago

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.

sneak•about 2 hours ago

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.

youre-wrong3•about 2 hours ago

Can’t go a day without propaganda on HN.

inigyou•16 minutes ago

Everything is propaganda, including your comment and this one.

DonHopkins•6 minutes ago

Then stop posting artisnal human generated ai slop! The LLMs can't get a word in edgewise. ;)

graemep•about 2 hours ago

> Anyone still doing ongoing business with them in 2026 is, imho, a fool.

So that would be almost everyone.

DonHopkins•37 minutes ago

[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.