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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

+ predatory pricing hikes for AI

+ not honouring yearly commitments plans

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

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

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

I guess three nines availability is important.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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/

Anyone tried tangle as a replacement? Verdict?

> 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.

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

self-hosted gitea/forgejo is still better

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

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.