this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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The case of free CI/CD, visibility, and network effects are already said. So I wanna offer an anectode: someone I know is a graphic designer, who maintains a project that curate icons. Moving to Codeberg means he has to interact with PRs using the CLI, which he really does not have familiarity with. GitHub OTOH has a simple desktop client that allows natively switching across PRs, approving then in the UI, etc. It's really, really convenient for someone who's not a developer.
I think Forgejo-based platforms will need to work on a very good GUI client, in order to attract less technical contributors.
Why doesn't the web client fit their needs?
The idea is to download the "project" down to a local machine, switch to the contributors' PRs, and have those new files natively show up in their directories. Then they can use local software i.e. Inkscape/Illustrator/etc to edit those SVGs and commit the appropriate changes. This is really not feasible with a forge's web UI.
For some people, they don't actually care about the politics of FOSS; they want a portfolio for employers.
I use both (why not?, they're both free and it's trivial to add a remote) - I find github is a little quicker to respond, a little easier to work with, and much more well known when you ask someone to go there they're not queasy about what they might be connecting to...
It's disappointing yet unsurprising to read the recurring answers, namely :
- cost
- incumbency
precisely because it's absolutely avoidable and a well known strategy. It's so well known that it's precisely why Micro$lop bought Github in the first place. People are there and the free tiers is enough to get the long tail.
Meanwhile since that strategy happened people who consider smart enough should know the genuine cost behind this : it's a TRAP. Plain and simple, you get there and you get STUCK there.
So... yes it takes some sweat and even some money to leave the trap ... but if you care about freedom, as most free software or open-source developers might, then it's aligned with your value.
Why aren't all the reddit users over here yet? Consolidation and ease of use. Big number make brain happy.
Lazyness? Its why Amazon is such a success. Too difficult to do online search. Amazon is convinient.
It's generally not the search, it's the payment and shipping
Your local or regional provider can and will send you books in the same time - perhaps not in 24h, but this may be rarely the case that somebody is in a such dearly need of a book.
I am buying books from my local provider, though more expensive, but I want people to have jobs - considering how many bookstores closed due to Amazon - and the possibility to go there, have a book in my hand and read it a bit.
It's not just books. Amazon offers many more goods, and locks people in with Prime.
I don't like it, but just claiming it as a sign of virtue won't change that.
It's been a while since I've seen Amazon talked about as a book store.
Doubt it, most other online stores with the same coverage do offer similar conditions.
The difference is the wide range of products available on Amazon. I can buy 5 products from widely different areas and only pay shipping once (or maybe twice depending on availability).
If I were to order these 5 products on 5 different stores I'd pay 5 times shipping.
And most Amazon customers have prime, meaning they've prepaid shipping already.
You are mistaken, they all are, what's left is bots talking between them
Free CI/CD
A friend of mine sees using GitHub as microslop paying reparations to open source.
Right, like how Micro$lop :
- blocked repository search without login (while it worked before the acquisition)
- pushed in the most traditional Micro$lop fashion for its own product, e.g. Copilot, with in product ads
- use repositories as ways to feed its own set of products, e.g. Azure for OpenAI, in order to push for code generation while ignoring licenses
and all the other things (please feel free to make this list more comprehensive) as "reparations"?
It's the same old "Embrace, extend, and extinguish " (EEE) scheme they've been (sadly successfully) running for decades now.
Codeberg doesn't offer CI runners* for macOS for free.
It's important if you have cross platform apps
Runners? If MS is providing free dinners I might have to rethink my thoughts on github.
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Momentum and time and effort to migrate.
And there's automated workflows such as GitHub Actions and ci/cd integrations that don't have 1-to-1 replacements, which would mean extra work (for quite strained teams of volunteers)
Additionally, as a developer on a large open source project, the community is already established on GitHub. It would be incredibly risky to move it and hope everyone comes along.
Gentoo moved: https://www.gentoo.org/news/2026/02/16/codeberg.html
Good for them, still, it's risky, they just decided it was worth the risk
Did you download the source code? It's on GitHub. It's literally on GitLab. It's on Bitbucket with ads. It's literally on SourceForge. You can probably find it on Savannah. Dude it's on Azure DevOps. It's a Codeberg project. It's on Gitea. You can download it on Gitea. You can go to Gitea and download it. Log into Gitea right now. Go to Gitea. Dive into Gitea. You can Gitea it. It's on Gitea. Gitea has it for you. Gitea has it for you.
That's kind of the point of git
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Two main reasons: history and network effects.
GitHub was an independent company for a decade that provided a vastly superior service to what it replaced, primarily SourceForge. And it was free for FOSS projects, while charging for closed ones.
The improvements paid for by the closed source customers trickled out to everyone. So, it became the best place for FOSS developers, large and small. And as more people moved to GH, the more reason there was to move to it.
Of course, it was constantly bleeding money and eventually had to do something. That ended up being selling to MS.
There was a lot of trepidation about this, but for the first few years they not only kept their promise about supporting FOSS, but actually made it better by allowing small private repos to get many of the services that were previously gated for open FOSS or paid repos.
And the alternatives were stil not as good, and just as importantly didn’t have the user networking that GH does.
Now, some FOSS people are starting to look elsewhere, Codeberg, self-hosted Forgejo, and others. They have come a long way and are nearing feature parity, particularly for smallish projects. But the network effects of discovery and reputation are strong, and GH still provides a few more useful features.
I’ve moved my private repos to self hosted Forgejo, but my public ones are still on GH as push mirrors. I’m not ready to give up the discoverability and Mac/Windows CI runners that I can get from GH for free. I hope to be able to some day, but not yet.
There was a lot of trepidation about this, but for the first few years they not only kept their promise about supporting FOSS, but actually made it better by allowing small private repos to get many of the services that were previously gated for open FOSS or paid repos.
- They embraced! :D
- They extended! :D
- . . .aw, shit. :/
I've only a basic understanding of using Git myself, but I think I'm gonna learn it with a self-hosted Forgejo for my Godot projects too.
Then for the parts that don't have feature parity, I won't know what I'm missing, and I have no need for "iNdUsTrY sTaNdArD LeAdiNg oPtiMiZeD sYnErGyStiC wOrKfLoWs" or whatever hahaha.
It does definitely present a conundrum if you want people to see your open source software though. Damn network effect. =\
The number one thing to remember about git is that you don't need a full hosting service around it for basic functionality. If it's just you, a single local repo will probably serve you just fine, maybe use a bare repo on your main machine or a Pi-level device if you like as a remote/backup. Just git init or git init --bare and you're good to go. GitHub, Codeberg, Forgejo, and all the others exist to serve multi-contributor and/or public project-level needs.
The number two thing to remember is that it is based around graph theory that almost no one remembers the fine details of.
That's some really helpful advice, thank you! 😃 I actually didn't know you could just make any local folder a repo like that.
Would a Forgejo instance still be helpful if I wanted to have "one point of truth" between multiple machines even if I'm the only dev? I already use Syncthing, but for some reason I feel like there'd be a lot of sync conflicts and stuff.
The other main reason for wanting to learn Git, of course, is because it's otherwise more difficult to try out changes to scripts and experiment, without finding yourself lost in the weeds and forgetting what worked last.
My current "version control" is "copy the entire project folder before you do anything major." 😂
If you just want one point of truth, the minimal version is to create a bare repo somewhere that you have ssh access to or your local machine. Then you can clone/pull/push from it.
A bare repo is a special kind of repo meant for exactly this, but can be a bit confusing at first. A normal repo contains all of your current working files and a special .git directory that holds all the files/blobs/history that git needs to work. A bare repo is just the .git as a top directory with bare=true in its config. So you can use it as a remote, but it never has a working set. They are usually named something like my_repo.git.
Edit:
Here’s a basic example for setting it all up in a fully local way:
mkdir ~/bares
git init —bare ~/bares/my_repo.git
mkdir ~/code
git clone ~/bares/my_repo.git ~/code/my_repo
And then you have remotes as your main source of truth in ~/bares and your working copies in ~/code. If you want to access from another machine that has ssh access to the first, you can do:
mkdir ~/code
git clone user@host:~/bares/my_repo.git ~/code/my_repo
And then use git pull/push to keep it all in sync. Don’t use Syncthing on a git repo, it eventually goes badly.
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GitHub has been around for nearly 2 decades and was largely considered a mostly good thing until maybe the past couple of years. Also important to add that Microsoft seems to mostly have left it alone for the first couple of years (possibly with the exception of Atom, which it left very alone)
In addition to people just generally being slow to change, changing can take quite a bit of effort for some projects for varying reasons. Many of those same projects struggle to keep up with the maintenance workload, so they're not going to jump at the chance to add more work to their plates.
Finally, some people just don't care. For instance, the MIT license being popular is pretty hard evidence that FOSS doesn't necessarily mean anti-corporate, and for many users GitHub still more or less does what it says on the tin.
Though I will say if the service disruptions and ad-injection bullshit continue you'll only see GitHub competitors grow. GitLab seems to be going after their enterprise customers with some success.
For instance, the MIT license being popular is pretty hard evidence that FOSS doesn’t necessarily mean anti-corporate, and for many users GitHub still more or less does what it says on the tin.
I'm pretty sure that MIT license is that popular out of ignorance, instead of an informed decision to allow corporate to steal and make money out of their code.
I've known people IRL who talk about the GPL like it's a virus infecting your code
I remember this confusion a LOT back when main-branch Blender had its own game engine built in.
Forums were full of people saying crap like :
"Don't use that, because since you used Blender which is GPL it means you have to provide the source code to your incredible GOTY contender and then everybody will beat you at life!!!"
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Been on this post before but just noticed you mentioned "Linux project" as if everything open source (or even source available) is Linux. Quite the ignorance...
If you think github is unstable you haven't tried codeberg. It's down multiple times every day.
I have no troubles. Perhaps check your WiFi.
Cope
Open Source projects get lots of free features for being on GitHub. Nobody else is beating that offering at current.
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Arguably the biggest contributor to the Linux ecosystem is Red Hat, a for-profit company that offers its technologies to the Israeli military among other things. The biggest contributor to the Linux kernel is Red Hat, while the second biggest is Meta. The Linux ecosystem is not inherently nonprofit!
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Inertia. And GitHub was actually good, despite MS ownership. Until recently.
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