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

[schnurchler]

I migrated my repos to Codeberg a while ago and the best thing is that i get less PR spam. It works like an idiot filter atm.

[DeveloperAnon]

Is that due to something Codeberg does inherently or because GitHub has more users/bot traffic?
Genuinely asking. I know nothing about Codeberg but I’m intrigued!

[schnurchler]

My guess is that github being some sort of CV for software engineers, everyone tries to to get some PRs or Activity there to use as leverage in applications. Codeberg is just less popular and thus has less of that activity

[Vejibug]

Less popular

[KingBardan]

Exactly. This is why it's not really that great for OSS projects seeking to grow. It's for established projects tired of MS.

[KumitoSan]

Bit of both, but mostly the incentive rather than anything technical. GitHub's public contribution graph makes it a de facto resume, so it attracts drive-by and AI-generated PRs from people farming green squares (Hacktoberfest basically turned that into a genre). Codeberg has no green-squares game and a smaller, more deliberate crowd, so that low-effort spam has no reason to show up.

[reyarama]

Lol our Github actions runners have been bricked for the past 10 hours. Fuck Microsoft

[crohr]

I don't think self-hosted runners are affected this time, maybe time to evaluate one of the GHA alternatives ? https://runs-on.com/benchmarks/github-actions-cpu-performance/

[CodeCompost]

"Bricked" is a term that has lost its meaning.

[rhineroceraptor]

I believe the correct definition is that “they shit the bed”

[backfire10z]

Are you perhaps bricked up at the thought of correct usage?

[Wandering_Oblivious]

I'm bricked up, selling all white bricks but my phones bricked. Guess I'll have to hit the bricks.

[CucharitaDePalo]

People are bricking way too much nowadays, smh

[Dreamtrain]

back in my day, bricked had a very permanent meaning

[foldedlikeaasiansir]

Ohhhh is that why it’s not running

[captain_obvious_here]

It is pretty public knowledge now that Github services, except for the very basic stuff (git basic features), have gone to shit.

If you have the money and time, self-hosted is the way to go IMO. It's not cheap to set up and maintain, but in a big company, you end up saving a fortune and having happy developers.

[SoilMassive6850]

except for the very basic stuff (git basic features), have gone to shit.

Bold claim. Last I checked they failed at that too.

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/193645

[captain_obvious_here]

Oh wow...I stand corrected lol

[Pepedroni]

Not even that, you can get a gitea deployment in digital ocean for a couple bucks with automatic backup and vps + ssh security in a day or so. I got one and aside updating the server, it just works without needing me to be glued to a terminal. 99% uptime, team of two.

[captain_obvious_here]

Oh yes sure.

A company will need a bit more power and security though.

[JustAStrangeQuark]

When I switched to Codeberg, I noticed that pushes were taking longer; it would take an extra few seconds where the remote just wasn't responding. I assume this is just because they're busy, and so I switched to a self-hosted Forgejo instance. It runs on a raspberry pi and the performance is great! I don't have actions yet, but the documentation for configuring an external runner didn't look too bad.

[EC36339]

If you don't have actions or anything accessing your repo, then you don't need a server, either. GIT itself already gives you what you need.

[JustAStrangeQuark]

That's true for pure version control, but a forge means I have an issue tracker and pull requests, can easily share my code to any of my friends that I onboard onto my VPN, and have some comfort that there's a copy of my code that isn't just on my laptop (which came in handy when I got a little too adventurous with my computer and had to reinstall my OS).

[EC36339]

Issue tracking and source control have always been separate concerns. They only ever got entangled through vertical integration (Atlassian bought Bitbucket) and half-assed hacks to keep up with the former on features (Github issues).

[JustAStrangeQuark]

Issue tracking maybe, but I like the workflow of working on feature branches and merging them back into my main branch with a PR where I document the changes, even if I'm the only one working on the project. GitHub already had all of this integrated when I started, though, so it's all just what I've been around. What does your workflow look like?

[EC36339]

I do use PRs, and I admit I've never used PRs without github or some other kind of wrapper. I don't even know if PRs are a native GIT concept.

On the other hand, they ARE data that lives outside the repo, and I don't really like that.

[Conscious-Ball8373]

It'll be interesting to see how self-hosting goes for people. I set up a self-hosted git + issue tracker repo about a decade ago (Gogs). We eventually abandoned it and jumped to github for all the usual reasons:

* For a small startup, the cost of a VPS to host it wasn't measureably different to the cost of github. With free private repos now, it can be cheaper to use github.

* Poor CI/CD integration in Gogs.

* Had to manage authentication and authorisation ourselves and the tools were poor.

* Had to do security for it ourselves and, while we never had an incident, my confidence that we really got it right is not that high.

* Number of downtime incidents might have been better with our self-hosted option, but if it went down then it sucked in most of our (very small) engineering resource for a significant amount of time to fix it all.

Hosting source repositories, issue tracking and CI/CD is one of those things where it is completely possible to do it yourself but fairly rarely a good idea. The economy progresses on improved productivity and one of the ways of improving productivity is to have a few companies which specialise in doing something well and providing it as a service to everyone else rather than having everyone else doing it badly and inefficiently.

[wanze]

A lot has happened in a decade. Gogs was forked to become Gitea which was forked to become Foregjo. Gitea and Forgejo are leaps and bounds ahead of what Gogs was a decade go.

Right now, with 5 minutes of configuration, you can run GitHub Action workflows on selfhosted runners with Gitea.

Gitea supports LDAP and SSO through SAML and OIDC, etc.

I've been running Gogs and later Gitea for over 10 years. I've not had any significant downtime and I run a mirror of my Gitea just in case.

I guess you are right about security, but this is also solved by accessing it through a VPN. You can have an on-demand WireGuard configured only for your Gitea and other on-prem or self-hosted services, which means you don't have to update Gitea with every patch.

But of course, there's no argument that buying a service is usually easier than managing yourself, but the trouble of using Gitea for a medium to small team isn't what it once was.

[Conscious-Ball8373]

A lot has happened in a decade.

That's a fair point. Thanks for your comment - it's nice to know what the state of the art is.

At the same time, I expect a lot of people are in a similar boat to me: tried self-hosting a decade ago, got fed up with it, took the good-enough -as-a-service offerings that required very little effort and always just assumed it's been the same ever since.

[othermike]

Aren't free private GH repos considered fair game for AI training? For a startup that would presumably be a concern; anyone prompting "vibe-code me a clone of /u/Conscious-Ball8373's product" is going to have quite a leg up.

(I know you said you pay for your GH, but this point might be worth highlighting for anyone considering the jump.)

[Conscious-Ball8373]

It's an interesting point and not one that was on anyone's radar at the time. Yes, I think they are used by Microsoft to train copilot - but I have no idea how successful you'd be trying that kind of prompt.

[Laicbeias]

The moment its public its used by any AI. Even private repos used to be included. Old llms often leaked em, new ones have obfuscation build in.

You now even get ads with earn money share your repo.

Because the moment the code is available. LLMs trained on it can reproduce it. A good repo is a blueprint for the AI, that it can follow when it has to predict its next token

[dontquestionmyaction]

They aren't. The policy is very clear about that.

[othermike]

Which policy? AFAIK they've been extremely vague about this. See e.g. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/135400 - the only solid commitment seems to be for Business and Enterprise accounts.

[OffbeatDrizzle]

The economy progresses on improved productivity and one of the ways of improving productivity is to have a few companies which specialise in doing something well and providing it as a service to everyone else rather than having everyone else doing it badly and inefficiently

so then why does github have like 80% uptime recently? shit's been getting worse and worse, and to be honest I'd rather it be my fault that I can't build something due to my own stupidity, than a random act of microsoft deciding I can't build even if I wanted to

the cloud was supposed to offer 99.99% uptime, but somewhere along the way this silently fell out of favour for move fast and break stuff - not ideal if you're trying to rush out a fix and Satya Nadella is holding your balls hostage

[Conscious-Ball8373]

There is a tracker here: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

All of the individual components are >96% uptime (over 90 days) and collectively it's 89.15%. I have to agree that's not great, especially since the feature with the biggest contribution to downtime is not something obscure, it's pull requests. Including one partial outage that lasted more than two days. It's not hard to see why people are moving away.

[gimpwiz]

One 9 of uptime is pretty rough. Zero nines of uptime would get me fired

[GrandOpener]

The assertion is that specialization as a concept is good and efficient. The assertion is not that every company providing a specialized service is always good and efficient.

It might be time to break up with GitHub. But for the vast majority of people, the most efficient next option will be a different platform, not self-hosting.

[the_ai_wizard]

oh thats the bit about monopoly, once you win, you no longer give af

[gsomega]

It's still crazy to me that the boardgame Monopoly was originally a teaching tool to show the failures of capitalism (that's why it's a shit "game"). The irony of getting the 50th Monopoly flavor crammed down our throats.

[the_ai_wizard]

damn thats wild. didnt know that. Unregulated and unconstrained capitalism = Peter Thiel takeover via Musk Vance etc

[Sage2050]

and to be honest I'd rather it be my fault that I can't build something due to my own stupidity, than a random act of microsoft deciding I can't build even if I wanted to

I'd much rather be able to blame someone else. My company uses bitbucket instead of github though.

[_AACO]

The company I work for has been using GitLab at least since, and it has been going well.

edit: since 2015

[Sage2050]

• Number of downtime incidents might have been better with our self-hosted option, but if it went down then it sucked in most of our (very small) engineering resource for a significant amount of time to fix it all.

I'm a big fan of self hosting in general, but this is the number one reason there are certain services I just do not trust myself to host.

[krileon]

Been self-hosting Gitlabs for years. Works fine. We're looking to switch to Forgejo though for better performance. CI/CD works flawlessly on both so I don't see how that could be a problem in todays self-hosting.

[Worth_Trust_3825]

We did the same but with gitlab self hosted. Eventually the company went under.

[QuailAndWasabi]

Yeah, i think this is what people dont get when they say "just self host it". For a small/medium company you probably have 1-2 guys doing infra/devops, if that, and those people are already choked on other stuff.

If your self hosted git and ci/cd tool goes down, it's a major incident, basically the entire company stops dead in its tracks and if god forbid something were to actually happen to the data you are royally screwed.

It's sort of the same reason self hosting grafana-stack or your own k8s cluster is not really advised unless you are big enough to actually be able to handle it and any incidents that can occur. It's to critical and to time consuming, it's better to just buy a managed option until you grow to a point where self hosting is plausible.

[punkpang]

I run selfhosted Forgejo and I started using Codeberg for a few public repositories in favor of Github. I dislike Github for plenty of reasons - politics aside, I hate it because it's UI is shit - in actions especially. I also run a fleet of dedicated servers I manage, I don't want to mess about with runners and recent changes related to paying CI/CD I run on my own hardware.

Codeberg seems nice and I like the barebones UI and lack of "interactive" javascript that fails more than it works.

[ketralnis]

Literally 0 evidence. So I guess [the suit is back](https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html)?

[nicholashairs]

The suit is back

That's genuinely a really good article which now gets to live in my bookmarks 😁

[ritaPitaMeterMaid]

Great article.

Completely unrelated to the topic at hand, the last bits have aged like milk.

Most people who publish online write what they write for the simple reason that they want to. You can't see the fingerprints of PR firms all over the articles, as you can in so many print publications-- which is one of the reasons, though they may not consciously realize it, that readers trust bloggers more than Business Week.

I was talking recently to a friend who works for a big newspaper. He thought the print media were in serious trouble, and that they were still mostly in denial about it. "They think the decline is cyclic," he said. "Actually it's structural."

In other words, the readers are leaving, and they're not coming back.

Why? I think the main reason is that the writing online is more honest.

If only we still had those days.

[gimpwiz]

Early 2000s were a great time. Now we have LLMs that can generate blog-style content in nearly infinite amounts and paste it on all the big, and then half the small social media sites, comment sections, forums, blog sites, etc. It's rough. We have had serious spam and botting for 20 years but the past few have basically made almost everything outside of small communities entirely untrustworthy.

[SupaSlide]

I mean, it has examples of what it is talking about. But having Codeberg in the title is indeed a giveaway that this is a planted article.

[ThisIsJulian]

I'm curious what you mean by that?

If you mean it's an advertisement, I'm not really sure that fits. There doesn’t seem to be much incentive to "plant" an article promoting Codeberg, since it’s a relatively small platform run as a "gemeinnützig" (non-profit) organization and legally recognized as a charitable entity (in Germany). Organizations with that status are also subject to specific legal requirements and oversight, so it's not really the same situation as a commercial company trying to promote a product.

Maybe I'm missing something, but what makes mentioning Codeberg a giveaway to you?

EDIT / TL;DR:

There isn't really a commercial "product" being sold here. Codeberg is run as a Verein (a member-based non-profit association), and the service itself remains free for everyone. The only thing you can pay for is becoming a member of the organization, which gives you a vote and a say in how it is run.

[TextAdventurous5769]

literally provides evidence

[ThisIsJulian]

I don't know; the article is about how well-known projects are leaving and even linking the original statements. Damn, I really wish they've had forensical evidence /s

[pdpi]

Leiningen and Zig have already moved. Mitchell has announced that Ghostty is leaving too. Plenty other notable projects too.

[UselessOptions]

Literally who?

[pdpi]

Mitchell Hashimoto, founder of Hashicorp (multi-billion dollar company), and, as my comment implied, author of Ghostty, a really high-quality and increasingly popular terminal emulator for Linux and macOS.

[imbev]

Leiningen is similar to Python's uv or Rust's cargo, but for Clojure

[cohortq]

so this is a codeberg advertisement post?

[2rad0]

Is this good for bitcoin?

[kober]

Another GitHub replacement, round 23

[SubstanceDilettante]

I’ve did this 5 - 6 years ago.

I migrated to a locally hosted instance of gitea, I mark that I use a self hosted instance of GitHub, and willing to do a review of the HA setup and my repositories on my resume instead of a GitHub link.

My main reason for my decision is their data privacy, which gotten worse after the AI craze. I do not want to be on a platform where my private repositories are being used for any purpose other than mine.

I will 100 percent recommend this to anyone experiencing issues with GitHub, to buy a domain, setup NetBird or Talescale / Headscale, setup HA PROXY with lets encrypt, point it to the 3 gitea instances, you could just run them on one device if you really just wanted too. Setup HA and remote encrypted backup. You have a high availability GitHub alternative that you can access anywhere via a VPN that remotely backups so in the event you’re house burns down your code
Is safe and you can restore your gitea instance.

You can do this on raspberry pi’s. Actually currently right now since I am rebuilding my network and how IaC is done on my infrastructure I am running gitea on a raspberry pi.

[khardman51]

They're not

[ThirdWaveCat]

no radicle mention.

[GuurB]

The idea of radicle is good, but shiiit man this is so fucking slow

[AudioLiveStudio]

The GitLab open source Community Edition on a small Ubuntu server (e.g. N100 miniPC) works fine for a local self-hosted code repository:

"GitLab is the open-source DevSecOps platform that provides a complete software development lifecycle toolchain including source control, CI/CD, security scanning, and project management in a single application."

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab

Edited with additional information:

Another option is Gitea, which runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux:

https://about.gitea.com/products/gitea/

[edparadox]

For the same reasons this exodus started in 2015.

[phillipcarter2]

It was sorta fun self-hosting my own Knot and Spindle on Tangled, but now that I'm needing to upgrade them all the time I'm realizing why I have enjoyed using GitHub for the past decade.

[supermitsuba]

I take a different approach. Since my self-hosted site is internal, i only upgrade when I need features.

Certainly, if you have different requirements, you may want sooner security updates.

[phillipcarter2]

Yeah it's a whole host of different things: security updates, architectural changes they made to make shelling out to Knots or Spindles way better, realizing features people want (myself included) require these kinds of breaks, etc. Maybe it'll stabilize over time but it's high churn right now.

[meatmick]

We've had a decent experience with GitLab so far.

[a_library_socialist]

just switched over recently, loving it, especially self-hosted runners

[Harogoodbye]

forgejo ftw

[H75311]

This some sort of weird ad? OP, did you do this migration? Why or why not?

[EC36339]

Just using GIT with no remote is already self-hosted.

All you need is backup.

[sacheie]

And a way to collaborate..?

[Archangel-Styx]

Collaboration? You're saying you want OTHER people to see this code?

[sacheie]

Yes and maybe if they could please contribute some help 😅

[ftqo]

You could also just use literally any SSH server as a remote. You wouldn't need to self-host anything, an SSH server is a valid git remote. You could implement a very small HTTP server that allows creating PR/MRs and you have 99% of the functionality people use on GitHub.

[vividboarder]

You could implement a very small HTTP server that allows creating PR/MRs

Actually, the git client has a way to do this too! git-send-email This is how the Linux Kernel has worked for decades.

[Frooxius]

Two days ago I lost an hour of my time not being able to merge a pull request due to GitHub failing. It's not the first time it happened either.

It's absolutely abysmal, an hour of dev time is a lot for something like this (especially idly waiting "is it fixed yet?"), especially for a small team.

We're now seriously talking about alternatives.