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

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• Hacker News
• We've been self-hosting GitLab for about a year now, and I don't remember it ever going down or being unavailable. We self-host almost everything else too (except for online meetings), and it's all been pretty stable as well. Some of the tools we self-host do go down occasionally, but it's usually just a matter of restarting the VM or adding more storage.
  by kgeist
• Do you self host chat?
  by ncphillips
• Recently on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48833116 (Chatto went open source) so you might be able to self-host your online meetings pretty easily too if you wanted to. (They're not the only option in that space, either, although they are one of the easiest to spin up an instance of that I've seen thus far.)
  by blooalien
• Do you serve the instance on the public internet or on a VPN?

  I've been thinking about self-hosting myself, but for my purposes (open source), I'm worries about scrapers and other sources of DOS-like traffic.

  by tovej
• Genuinely curious here for someone who has tried self hosting git and has found it a pita to maintain...i want to know what is it that devs are flocking to other platforms and how are we sure that they won't pull all the red card signals that github is said to pull off.
  by rmnull
• Forgejo is fairly simple to run – way lighter and simpler than GitLab even. (GitLab is quite okay, too!)

  If you want a hosted service, go for Codeberg. It’s run by a German non-profit (so it’ll be hard to bite and switch OpenAI-style). Only free/open source projects are accepted, though.

  by notpushkin
• Have been self-hosting GitLab for my org a few years by now, with quite a few users (>800 atm). Updates are automatic via the GitLab Omnibus package repos. Once or twice per year some update requires intervention. Otherwise, nothing bad happens. Very happy so far.

  Biggest problem at the moment is that AI scrapers (curse them and their owners, pox be upon their houses!) sometimes bring things to a crawl. But nothing that a few firewall rules and anoubis won't solve.

  by thyristan
• Given more code hosting services, I wonder if we'll also see a corresponding increase in the number of alternative VCS or if git is legitimately very entrenched as a tool. I am just being a bit grouchy but I do wish there was more development of alternative VCSs. pijul at least looks cool even if I don't know if it scales well. Git LFS can be somewhat finicky to work with so maybe we'll see perforce like systems. It's obviously not the most practical thing to have a variety of very different VCS's and definitely a PITA to learn multiple tools but git does seem somewhat suboptimal given the number of anecdotes about people just re-cloning the repo. I was recently trying jj and it seemed to work well (excluding the lack of LFS support) so here's hoping.
  by inkysigma
• I do think git serves a lot of people's needs very well. I see a lot of people being quite happy with direct github alternatives. Self hosting may become more popular too, I hadn't heard too many self hosting stories until recently. If LFS is your pain (I cannot stand to use git lfs) I have to mention oxen, which is open source and self hostable, but also has a hosted option. It handles large files right out of the gate and doing so faster than everyone else is one of its core missions. Still using github for distribution though, lol, see https://github.com/Oxen-AI/Oxen. I am also curious about where jj will go, its philosophy is really interesing, and sounds promising.
  by erlau
• Github for open source was always my favourite part of it.

  Github for private repos has long had security issues, every time a serious issue announced it makes me wonder how long it's quietly existed and been exploited, and how many other holes are currently exploited that aren't well known.

  Before github, people hosted their own repos all the time. Learning about alternatives, even if they aren't for you in all cases, is still worth it.

  Has anyone had any issues with codeberg or other alternatives?

  by j45
• > 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.

  by latexr
• 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.

  by Scaled
• 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.
  by littlecranky67
• how switching to an alternative like codeberg would prevent it? ti can be scraped as well
  by litver
• It sucks, but that ship has sailed. I'm not sure how they'll handle the issue of most new repos being AI generated, if they continue using new code for training. If the world accepts LLMs as a valid method for license washing, I don't see how I can fight it.
  by xpct
• 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.

  by My_Name
• Why Gitea _and_ Forgejo, rather than just one or the other?
  by MrDrMcCoy
• Microsoft's human rights stain will take decades to wear off (just like Meta, Google, and Amazon).
  by pbiggar
• Microsoft is a mafia that sometimes produces code (poorly).
  by franktankbank
• 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.
  by benthecarman
• 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.

  [0] https://gitea.com

  [1] https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/act-runner

  by hambos22
• You use github as a backup, why bother self-hosting then?
  by onesandofgrain
• I similarly have been using Gitea for some years. I use it as my main forge and mirror to Github for discoverability and community reports and contributions.

  For public projects I have workflows that can publish and push containers to both Gitea and Github.

  by Jnr
• I self host gitea for my personal-personal projects, the ones nobody will ever see.

  For the personal-opensource ones, I am on Github because this is where everyone is when I want to share/collaborate etc

  by BrandoElFollito
• Similar with forgejo. I mirrored all gh then flipped the ones I was using the most. The biggest win was on running apple runners in my mac, so the free gh actions can do other stuff.
  by permalac
• 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.

  by MintsJohn
• That's the reason I left as well. I complained, was told I need to drop the attitude, or leave.

  so I left.

  must be harder than I think running a src forge

  by grayhatter
• codeberg's one job gets interfered with by freeloaders hammering expensive views (like git blame) inconsiderately.
  by pluto_modadic
• Sounds like a feature. I didn't think Codeberg would have the balls to do something like it. I think I'm sold.
  by ShinyLeftPad
• Is your complaint about Anubis? I see the "checking if you are human" kind of text too when going to codeberg, but it is usually only a second or two. It is because I run a bit of obfuscation and resistance to browser finger printing.

  But you find seeing the text for a couple of seconds too annoying to use codeberg? Maybe it is more than 2 seconds for you?

  Everyone has their views on what is acceptable in the world and what they will put up with. Just, to my point of view, I think codeberg is trying to fight the good fight in keeping llms from crawling their website.

  by hackthemack