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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.

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

> 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 very valuable thing, and Github has destroyed a stellar one in a few month, this is newsworthy.

Agree with the headline part, but the second part not so much.

As someone mentioned it's about the trend.

I have heard from people at multiple major open source projects that what is keeping them at Github at this point are free GH Action credits that they get and they couldn't really afford CI/CD if they left. Meaning numbers would be bigger if GH wasn't "paying" projects to stay.

If I didn't know any better, I would think this is a thinly veiled marketing piece by "Codeberg", a company that I never heard of until this headline.

https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

It’s just a PR article to promote alternative

You can just insert the word "some" as required.

> 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?

Agreed. But if I comment on this, I'm promoting the article. What do I do?

howtogeek is low-effort content mill, it's just upvoted here because of the headline, there is 0 actual effort in the article

> a handful of remotely meaningful repos

If there's a trend to leave a platform it won't start with the most entrenched users (largest repos).

They acknowledge your concern in the article and their analysis does apply to those few who are leaving. But to be fair the title can be interpreted either way and the most reasonable read for anyone is "some of them are leaving". I'd find it clickbaity if they said "why developers are leaving en-masse" and then point out to the regular turnover. There's clearly a trend, what's not clear is if it gains momentum.

A better alternative might be along the lines of “why developers ditch GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives”. That way it doesn’t commit to a trend or exaggerate the situation in your mind, instead making it clear it’s a report on “those X who do Y do it for these reasons”.

I’ve seen titles like “Why top scientists are leaving the United States” where the article itself talked about A SINGLE RESEARCHER relocating to France.

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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.

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.

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

You use github as a backup, why bother self-hosting then?

Microsoft is a mafia that sometimes produces code (poorly).

Microsoft's human rights stain will take decades to wear off (just like Meta, Google, and Amazon).

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.

how switching to an alternative like codeberg would prevent it? ti can be scraped as well

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.)

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.

Do you self host chat?

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.

What makes GitLab "industry-standard" and Forgejo not?

It's also easy without Docker. apt install gitlab-ee

I'm still paying $4 a month for GitHub since I keep some repos private, which was down from the $8 a month or whatever before Microsoft acquired GitHub, are you saying there's a price hike for AI services or something else?

I really do not like that Drew (the owner and developer) is extremely dogmatic and political, and likes to get involved in what is and is jot allowed to be hosted on “his” forge.

Imo, service providers should be neutral and get involved only as far as required by law.

I would not trust Sourcehut. If Drew decides one day that he does not like you, your politics, or your industry, he will just cut you off. That is no foundation to build on.

I use it as my main forge and could not be happier. It also seems to be the only forge that allows its web frontend to work with JS disabled. (That I am aware of)

I really really love it but I just can’t get myself to embrace the email workflow. Maybe I’ll make a “pull requests for git.sr.ht” app one day!

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.

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.

Sourcehut has Mercurial support: https://hg.sr.ht/

Heptapod is a GitLab fork that adds Mercurial support: https://heptapod.net/, free for open source projects: https://foss.heptapod.net/heptapod/foss.heptapod.net

I like GitHub and I'm not going to ditch anything, but I have to admit it's currently one of the few MS products that still holds up. Curious what it'll look like in a few years. Just in case, I've already reserved my username on Codeberg :)

So basically Codeberg is threatening to shut down, or at least become about as relevant as Savannah.

I've been on Codeberg for my projects since September but will pull them if this happens. I see no definition of what "mostly using AI" means and refuse to be "punished" for the choice of tooling I use. The tone and content of the thread on Mastodon is absolutely toxic.

I'd rather self-host than deal with the ambiguity and threats. Invariably from people who don't even make anything.

I have plenty of concerns around "AI" and project governance and IP law. My projects are copyleft, I'm in favour of free software, bleah bleah bleah.

But this just looks like pitchforks and mob behaviour.

Well, that's a good thing. Being "neutral" _is_ taking a side. It means you're taking an amoral stance even in big questions.

Every organization has a stance. We're just become used to companies that take a stance of "as long as we get paid".

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Not even hitting 1 nine at the moment - https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

Lately, 9 out of 10 times i click on a github link to access the repo for $random_project_hosted_on_github I get a page saying that I've been rate limited. Even if it's my first click on a github link for the week.

I guess THAT page has the three nines availability.

Codeberg doesn't use Cloudflare.

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.

Gitea did a lot of work over the last view releases (since 1.21 onwards) and are really GitHub-like nowadays UI-wise. Plus it is no SPA anymore and mostly SSR with Go templates + Htmx, its site performance lets GitHub cry by the wayside. Best descision ever to leave GitHub and selfhost Gitea with some runners in our own datacenter.

I think they have the same interface. Pull requests are renamed to merge requests, that's all the difference I see. Wait for github to reshuffle the ui in a redesign churn.

Acquiring github users may not be their highest priority.

Inst gitea doing this?

>it's intuitive

Until you have to work with stale GHAS tool configurations, remember whether a project uses rulesets or branch settings or find that comment you wrote on a PR (and then learn that the new PR "experience" fucking hides them above a certain threshold). Those are just the issues I encounter in a typical week.

> copy the UI

Good luck. The amount of features and screens on GitHub are vast aside from just those code / issues / PRs tabs.

I’m not disputing how intuitive the GitHub interface is, but seriously, why is it so hard for technical professionals to set aside 10–20 minutes of their time to learn a new interface? Why has this even become an issue worth discussing?

Not good but that’s unsurprising since Thread’s value proposition is indistinguishable from twitter’s. Mastadon and bluesky seem to have healthy userbases though

this not a `git` failure per se...

I miss Bitbucket's Mercurial offering.

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

I used to love browsing GitHub Explore Trending but in the last two years it is almost exclusively AI apps that are slight improvement on the previous trending page of AI apps.

GitHub explore could be way more interesting with a simple filter algorithm.

Can’t go a day without propaganda on HN.

> Anyone still doing ongoing business with them in 2026 is, imho, a fool.

So that would be almost everyone.

I mean, I poisoned and then deleted my GH account the day Microsoft acquisition was confirmed, because it was obvious where it's heading.

[Slow clap... building to thunderous applause. Standing ovation.]

I say! Well done! Bravo! Bravo! Encore! Encore!

Now do a foaming-at-the-mouth diatribe about how predatory, unethical libertarian crypto-scamming shills such as yourself and Trump are crashing the economy while violently tearing society apart into a tiny oligarchy and widespread poverty. Extra points for plugging your latest sociopathic crypto scam as the final solution.