Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people • Hacker News Board

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#121

Post by ronsor » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 4:17 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #115

ronsor wrote: post #112

The truth is that I publish OSS projects on GitHub because that's where the community is, and the issues/pull requests/discussions are a bonus. If I just want to host my code, I can self host or use an SSH/SFTP server as a git remote, and that's usually what I do.

> I publish OSS projects on GitHub because that's where the community is And so we go, forever in circles, until enough of us move to other platforms regardless of where the existing community is. Just like how GitHub found its community in the early days, when most people (afaik) was using SourceForge, if anything. "The community" will always remain on GitHub, if everyone just upload code to where "the community" al…

> "The community" will always remain on GitHub, if everyone just upload code to where "the community" already is. If enough of us stop using GitHub by default, and instead use something else, eventually "the community" will be there too, but it is somewhat of a chicken-and-egg problem, I admit.

SourceForge was abandoned due to UX issues and the adware debacle; at the same time, GitHub started making changes which made it more viable to use the platform to distribute binary releases.

The deficiencies of GitHub are not critical enough for me to care, and if it ever gets that bad, pushing somewhere else and putting a few "WE HAVE MOVED" links isn't a big deal.

And "the community" isn't moving to Codeberg because Codeberg can't support "the community" without a massive scale up.

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#122

Post by dspillett » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 4:19 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #17

INTPenis wrote: post #5

Lazy has nothing to do with it, codeberg simply doesn't work. Most of my friends who use codeberg are staunch cloudflare-opponents, but cloudflare is what keeps Gitlab alive. Fact of life is that they're being attacked non-stop, and need some sort of DDoS filter. Codeberg has that anubis thing now I guess? But they still have downtime, and the worst thing ever for me as a developer is having the urge to code and not…

I've had the same experience. Philosophically I think it's terrible that Cloudflare has become a middleman in a huge and important swath of the internet. As a user, it largely makes my life much worse. It limits my browser, my ability to protect myself via VPNs, etc, and I am just browsing normally, not attacking anything. Pragmatically though, as a webmaster/admin/whatever you want to call it nowadays, Cloudflare is…

> and use robots.txt as a guide of what to crawl rather than what not to crawl

Mental note, make sure my robots.txt files contain a few references to slowly returning pages full of almost nonsense that link back to each other endlessly…

Not complete nonsense, that would be reasonably easy to detect and ignore. Perhaps repeats of your other content with every 5th word swapped with a random one from elsewhere in the content, every 4th word randomly misspelt, every seventh word reversed, every seventh sentence reversed, add a random sprinkling of famous names (Sir John Major, Arc de Triomphe, Sarah Jane Smith, Viltvodle VI) that make little sense in context, etc. Not enough change that automatic crap detection sees it as an obvious trap, but more than enough that ingesting data from your site into any model has enough detrimental effect to token weightings to at least undo any beneficial effect it might have had otherwise.

And when setting traps like this, make sure the response is slow enough that it won't use much bandwidth, and the serving process is very lightweight, and just in case that isn't enough make sure it aborts and errors out if any load metric goes above a given level.

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#123

Post by dwedge » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 4:21 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #86

pferde wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was shaking my head in disbelief when reading that part too. I mean, git's whole raison d'etre, back when it was introduced, was that you do not need online access to the repo server most of the time.

> git's whole raison d'etre […] was that you do not need online access to the repo server most of the time Not really. The point of git was to make Linus' job of collating, reviewing, and merging, work from a disparate team of teams much less arduous. It just happens that many of the patterns needed for that also mean making remote temporarily disconnected remote repositories work well.

The whole point of git was tm be a replacement for BitKeeper after the Linux developers got banned from it for "hacking" after Andrew Tridgell connected to the server over telnet and typed "HELP"

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#124

Post by dwedge » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #17

INTPenis wrote: post #5

Lazy has nothing to do with it, codeberg simply doesn't work. Most of my friends who use codeberg are staunch cloudflare-opponents, but cloudflare is what keeps Gitlab alive. Fact of life is that they're being attacked non-stop, and need some sort of DDoS filter. Codeberg has that anubis thing now I guess? But they still have downtime, and the worst thing ever for me as a developer is having the urge to code and not…

I've had the same experience. Philosophically I think it's terrible that Cloudflare has become a middleman in a huge and important swath of the internet. As a user, it largely makes my life much worse. It limits my browser, my ability to protect myself via VPNs, etc, and I am just browsing normally, not attacking anything. Pragmatically though, as a webmaster/admin/whatever you want to call it nowadays, Cloudflare is…

While I sympathise, I disagree with your stance. Cloudflare handle a large % of the Internet now because of people putting sites that, as you admitted, don't need to be behind it there.

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#125

Post by fareesh » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 4:24 PM UTC

never had a problem with github, i must be using it during the 90% of the time that it works

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#126

Post by LinXitoW » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

ronsor wrote: post #112

The truth is that I publish OSS projects on GitHub because that's where the community is, and the issues/pull requests/discussions are a bonus. If I just want to host my code, I can self host or use an SSH/SFTP server as a git remote, and that's usually what I do.

Considering that "the community" is now filled with vibe coding slop pull requesters, and non-coders bitching in issues, the filter that not-github provides becomes better and better.

Of course, that mostly goes for projects big enough to already have an indepedent community.

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#127

Post by shimman » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

noirscape wrote: post #59

real_joschi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They also don't want to host your homepage, so if GitHub Pages is why you used GitHub, they are not a replacement. https://docs.codeberg.org/codeberg-pages/

From their FAQ: > If you do not contribute to free/libre software (or if it is limited to your personal homepage) , and we feel like you only abuse Codeberg for storing your commercial projects or media backups, we might get unhappy about that. Emphasis mine. This isn't about if it's technically possible (it certainly is), it's whether or not it's allowed by their platform policies. Their page publishing feature seem…

Seems fair to me, they're a nonprofit that exists in our lived reality and not an abusive monopolist that can literally throw a billion dollars to subsidize loss leaders.

All it shows the world is why there needs to be a VAT like tax against US digital services to help drive a public option for developers.

There's no reason why the people can't make our own solutions rather than be confined to abusive private US tech platforms.

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#128

Post by IshKebab » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

usrbinenv wrote: post #44

woodruffw wrote: post #11

I think evaluating alternatives to GitHub is going to become increasingly important over the coming years. At the same time, I think these kinds of migrations discount how much GitHub has changed the table stakes/raised the bar for what makes a valuable source forge: it's simply no longer reasonable to BYO CI or accept one that can't natively build for a common set of end-user architectures. This on its own makes me…

I don't understand the hype around CI and that it's supposedly impossible to run something like that without Git, let alone Github. Like sure, a nice interface is fine, but I can do with a simpler one. I don't need a million features, because what is CI (in practice today, not in theory)? It's just a set of commands that run on a remote machine and then the output of those commands is displayed in the browser and it…

The big deal is that GitHub provides it for free. Plus it integrated properly into the PR workflow.

Good luck implementing merge queues yourself. As far as I know there are no maintained open source implementations of merge queues. It's definitely not as trivial as you claim.

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#129

Post by Tharre » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #64

kjuulh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own git server has been hit severely by scrapers. They're scraping everything . Commits, comparisons between commits, api calls for files, everything. And pretty much all of them, ByteDance, OpenAI, AWS, Claude, various I couldn't recognize. I basically just had to block all of them to get reasonable performance for a server running on a mini-pc. I was going to move to codeberg at some point, but they had downtime…

Anyone actually scraping git repos would probably just do a 'git clone'. Crawling git hosts is extremely expensive, as git servers have always been inadvertent crawler traps. They generate a URL for every version of every file on every commit and every branch and tag, and if that wasn't enough, n(n+1)/2 git diffs for every file on every commit it has exited on. Even a relatively small git repo with a few hundred file…

And yet, it's exactly what all the AI companies are doing. However much it costs them in server costs and good will seems to be worth less to them then the engineering time to special case the major git web UIs.

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#130

Post by erdaniels » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

I just migrated our entire company off of github to gitlab self-hosted. So far so good. It's entirely behind tailscale so we don't have any SSO tax from gitlab and all of our CI runners are on EKS + an on-prem cluster with GPUs. If anyone needs help or motivation accomplishing the same, just reach out!