Why Developers Are Ditching GitHub for Codeberg and Self-Hosting
Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives
Despite GitHub's massive user base, a growing number of developers are migrating to alternatives like Codeberg due to frequent outages, political concerns, and aggressive AI integration. High-profile projects such as Ghostty and Zig have already announced their departures, citing reliability issues and a platform culture that increasingly feels hostile to independent creators. This shift signals a potential exodus driven by a desire for stability and autonomy.
It's not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done.
- jorisw
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
- MintsJohn
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.
- hambos22
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.
- benthecarman
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
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.
- littlecranky67
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.
- Scaled
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.
- latexr
> 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.