Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by bigfishrunning » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 12:50 PM UTC

HumblyTossed wrote: post #145

sverhagen wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, like how developers were en-masse ditching GitHub to go to GitLab when Microsoft acquired GitHub.

It's so weird the herd behavior of developers.

I would expect that's true in any field that moves as fast as software development.

Developer A makes a move, perceives some benefit, tells developer B, who does the same thing and then tells developer C.

Some of the people consider the move, weigh costs, and make an intelligent decision. Many just think "smart people are doing this, I'll do it too". I really doubt this behavior is unique to developers.

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

#162

Post by bigfishrunning » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 12:51 PM UTC

sverhagen wrote: post #126

stymaar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yeah, like how developers were en-masse ditching GitHub to go to GitLab when Microsoft acquired GitHub.

Maybe those people weren't wrong to do that...

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

#163

Post by bigfishrunning » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 12:52 PM UTC

subarctic wrote: post #152

woodruffw wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an effective argument, given that these smaller services are uniformly retrograde in functionality.

Agreed, if there was something actually better to switch to then I'd be interested. But seems unlikely for that to happen now - it's easier than ever to build a new github, at least the app itself but i doubt someone's gonna bother with the business effort needed to actually build it up as a reliable, trustworthy option that you know will be around for a while, which is a process that takes years when you know you're…

If only Github was reliable and trustworthy, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

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

#164

Post by nativeit » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 12:52 PM UTC

Cider9986 wrote: post #8

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/

Forgejo is pretty close. Its runners are largely compatible with GH’s, and its issues, labels, tags, releases, wikis, packages, branch protection, secrets/envs, signing keys, repo permissions, etc. are all largely identical. I maintain a lot of mirrors and while none of my repos are particularly complex, I haven’t ever lost anything in a migration from GitHub to Forgejo.

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

#165

Post by badsectoracula » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 12:53 PM UTC

qweqwe14 wrote: post #73

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.

Spinning up a docker image with GitLab is easy indeed, but the installation is huge and you can feel it doing weird stuff (and it keeps doing "stuff" all the time even if nobody does anything - before you even bother to create extra users or repositories or whatever). The whole setup seems to be designed to be opaque.

Forgejo is a single self-contained ~110MB binary (it contains all assets) you can drop anywhere and it'll just work - depending on your needs you most likely wont even need to bother with a DB server as it can use SQLite (my local install is doing that).

Also FWIW personally i find Forgejo's UX much better compared to GitLab.

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

#166

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 12:55 PM UTC

stanac wrote: post #112

wseqyrku wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This way github is a "dumb backup" Eh? What GH department do you work in anyways? Training Data Sustainability?

I don't understand your question. If I was working for GH would I be selfhosting forgejo? edit: If you think I sound like an LLM, I guess that is what happens when most of your interactions in English language are with LLMs.

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by groundzeros2015 » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 12:56 PM UTC

jorisw wrote: post #15

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 o…

It’s just a PR article to promote alternative

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

#168

Post by RedCinnabar » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 12:58 PM UTC

akimbostrawman wrote: post #143

Switching from one centralized git repository to another that also injects political messaging into URLs without consents.

What do you mean by that? Are you referring to Codeberg? Out the frying pan straight to the fire...

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

#169

Post by ryan_n » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

usrbinbash wrote: post #131

jorisw wrote: post #15

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 o…

> Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos I'm pretty sure, shortly after the motorized vehicle was made commercialy available, there were only a "handful of remotely meaningful" people and companies who stopped using horses. Do tell: How many horses are around on todays streets?

What exactly is the car equivalent in this analogy? Codeberg is not a car if you're saying GitHub is the horse. Just doesn't really make sense to compare the two like that...

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

#170

Post by MintsJohn » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

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.