Due to spam on GitHub, what platforms can I move my projects?

Due to spam on GitHub, what platforms can I move my projects?

60 pointsby ciwolex62 comments

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  • For read-only code sharing, I would say use cgit and a VPS.

    If you need a forge with all the bells, grab a copy of Forgejo and modify it to your liking.

    Either way, consider using a VPS or a machine you own with Tailscale/VPN. It can be as simple as you'd like it to be.

  • You can disable PRs and Issues on GitHub. Though still good to migrate away for reliability considerations.
  • Related question, is there a web-based self-hosted git replacement that's _light-weight_ (i.e. resilient to scraping)? Should have things like file view, file browser, etc but is not taxing on the server.
  • I like Gitea.
  • gitea runs well on a low end server in my experience. self hosting on hetzner and it's somehow the holy trinity of cheap, fast and reliable. I previously (years ago) self hosted gitlab but I remember it being very slow which was the reason I moved on
  • Forgejo. A single tiny golang binary, I think about 200mb. It has 75% of the functionality of gitlab with 5% of the resource requirements. I migrated to it and have never missed gitlab.
    by xrd
  • Set up a GitHub action to auto-close any pull requests from anyone not on an approved list.

    Leave a message in the pull request that if they want to argue their case for a pull request they can send a message through a communication channel of your choice, and say that anyone sending a message with AI generated text, even to help with language and grammar will be banned.

  • Codeberg.org is really great.

    Also I recommend self-hosting Gitea for private projects and backing-up public projects

  • I use forgejo myself but both are great choices. Self hosting has improved dramatically over the last decade. So many things that I would never think we'd have access to, like open source PaaS software on-par with what VC companies offer (dokploy, coolify, or komodo).
  • Git is pretty simple to host yourself. For literally decades I've used git and gitolite to host git for me and a revolving team of developers.

    But if you want it to be public though where anyone can access/fork it then you have to deal with "spam".

  • I'm not familiar with git, but can you post a read-only version publicly so others can still access all the commit history but not be subjected to pull requests?
  • How do you deal with bot traffic and traffic from AI that's trying to get training data from your codebase
  • sourcehut.org would be my choice. Drew is pretty adamant about stuff and his morales. You will dislike somethings (UI and some policies) but will like majority of the things (tech like CI/CD etc). It's OSS and can be self-hosted as well. But I think drew fighting LLM scrappers on our behalf is good for us. It's also cheap and should progressively improve going forward.

    It's my long term plan. And the project and company is setup in a way to be here for the long game. So, I am progressively moving my projects (private and in small numbers, but still...) from gitlab to sourcehut over this year or next.

    Link - https://sourcehut.org/

  • I second this. Ive been using sourcehut for a few years for personal stuff. Worth every penny at twice the price.
  • > Drew is pretty adamant about stuff and his morales.

    Which is, by all accounts, a double-edged sword. Cuts both ways.

  • New repository settings for configuring pull request access [feb13-2026]

    https://github.blog/changelog/2026-02-13-new-repository-sett...

  • Limiting the number if PRs per person also just launched.

    https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-17-limit-open-pull-req...

  • I think one important factor would be still being able to interact with a community of people who care for software and would like to put genuine thoughts. Whether it be for submitting bug reports, issues, PRs or security reports. Of course other platforms are not diverse as GitHub, it would be nice to see which other platforms are attracting such people. This in turn has a higher chance of interacting with such people.
  • Anywhere you accept unvouched pull requests will end up being spammed. You might find some respite at other sites, but whether you stay or go: you’re better off disabling pull requests on your projects for everyone but you, and then using discussions (like ghostty) where people petition to work on a feature; if they can convince you it’s a feature that’s valuable to you, then you can pull from their branch (like Linus) and merge them yourself when ready. That will halt the PRs and give you a much reduced pool of noise, as most fly-by-night sloppers won’t be interested in spending the extra tokens on both code and discussion. (You’ll still get entitled human beings who demand you add and maintain their solution to their needs, but that’s much easier to sift out and discard once people have to discuss their needs in written words rather than code.)
  • Really surprised that this is not the first thing everyone does on their repositories.

    I am not a celebrity on github and not even agents bother with my repositories, however, even before the bot pull requests/issues, I always made sure to enable only the things I felt I would want to use and provide a way for someone to reach out in case I was expecting collaboration/feedback.

    I realized that anyone can create a PR to upstream, when I accidentally did so using the github web UI on mobile. Felt embarrassed and immediately closed it. But, then it made sense that why people were frustrated with this sort of thing happening to big repositories.

  • It depends on what you are looking to get out of the next platform.

    For me, I'm not interested in the social aspect of coding anymore, so I have a Synology NAS running a git server accessible via ssh and I push my code there.

    I use klaus (https://github.com/jonashaag/klaus) as a read only git web ui. My NAS is connected to my tailscale network so it's easy to view things on the go. It's a simple setup and works great.

  • This is evidently not a popular opinion, but git repositories don’t need to be hosted on any platform. Your local repo is a complete copy and can be pulled and pushed from and to. If you really want a backup or “source of truth” copy, you can clone it anywhere you have shell access. We make so many simple things hard unnecessarily.
  • Obligatory reminder that you can clone a git repo around your local filesystem and so on too. Same goes for other git operations as well.

    https://thehorrors.org.uk/snippets/git-local-filesystem-remo...

  • That only works if you are only using Github as a place to store your code. I'm not the OP, and maybe their situation is different, but I want to continue getting sincere human PRs and issue reports on my projects, but want to reduce or eliminate the amount of AI produced spam.
  • If this was a viable option, OP would just private his GitHub repos, but it's pretty obvious that he wants to make them available publicly.