I have recently switched away from GitHub as my codeforge to Codeberg which includes the hosting of this blog. In this brief post, I will cover my reasons for switching and briefly describe the process.
I have been using GitHub at least since 2016 (possibly earlier, I was using a different account at the time, so and cannot see exactly when I joined). Back then, I wanted to host some code I was working on, and GitHub was (and still is) the most popular choice for doing so. Since then however, many things have changed, notably the acquisition by Microsoft, the increasing social-media-lisation, and now: The AI [1].
Firstly, let me talk about the acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft. At the time – in 2018 – I didn’t care much about this change. I was still using Microsoft products occasionally for university, and I believe I still had a Google account at the time as well. Since then, I have increasingly switched away from big-tech, but GitHub’s Microsoft ownership was seemingly stored in a bit of a blind-spot in my brain, even though migrating away from it would have been much easier than many of the products I *did* switch away from (Such as Windows, Office, GDrive, GooglePlay, etcetera).
Then there is the fact that GitHub is increasingly becoming more of a social media platform. At first, many of these features were nice. Stars give you a good idea of how popular a project is, and following people can be a nice way to discover new projects. However, too many *behaviours* carried over from social media as well, such as follow-back and like-farming. Besides, at the end of the day, I do not want GitHub to be my social media, I want it to host my code and allow me to work with others. When I have to star a project before my PR will be considered,,, we have lost the path.
Lastly, there is the AI. Now, I do not refer just to AI in the sense which it has recently taken (ie: LLMs). Rather I mean both GitHub bots and the Copilot LLM. Popular GitHub bots such as stale-issue bots completely mess up issue threads. They encourage a behaviour where people periodically ‘bump’ an issue to keep it active. The aforementioned star-farming is made possible with a bot. Once again, these are *behaviours* which frustrate me, but they are *enabled* by GitHub’s features. It also doesn’t help that GitHub – as the most popular codeforge -- has the lowest-common-denominator of users. When GitHub recently introduced a LLM service which would write issues for you, I decided it was about time to leave. I can already see the future wherein this feature enables bad issue etiquette, and I don’t want to be here for it[2].
So I switched. I archived all my repositories which are not using GitHub actions, and migrated active repositories to my Codeberg account. I have used Codeberg for some time already to comment on projects that I used[3] and I really like the interface and featureset (I cannot say the same for GitLab or Sourcehut respectively). The migration process was mostly painless, with the biggest time-sink being the archiving on the GitHub-side.
I hope to stick around on Codeberg for a while, and perhaps to also keep it more professional than by GitHub portfolio (interests, standards, and personalities tend to change over the course of a decade). In fact, this transition has occurred at roughly the same time as my learning of the ‘go’ programming language which I will write about shortly and I hope to write some larger projects in which are not convenient to write in shell or python.
[1]: I should also mention that GitHub being a US-based company also makes me less than thrilled given the current state of things.
[2]: In fact, this is not really a ‘future’ at all, it has already been happening for some time. The difference is that the process is now more streamlined and sanctioned by Microsoft.
[3]: Notably the excellent ‘foot’ terminal emulator
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